UNESCO SCIENCE REPORT

UNESCO SCIENCE REPORT
The Start-Up Chile programme (2010) takes a different
approach. Its aim is to attract entrepreneurs from around
the world in the hope that their presence in Chile will
help transmit tacit entrepreneurial knowledge to local
entrepreneurs in a way that would be impossible through
traditional training and scholarship programmes (see also
Box 7.1).
Most countries need more researchers
In the past few years, there has been a leap in the number
of full-time equivalent (FTE) researchers in Costa Rica,
Ecuador and Venezuela, whereas other countries have seen
less vigorous growth (Figure 7.5). Latin American countries
generally trail dynamic open economies for the number of
researchers per million inhabitants, although the top two
Box 7.1: Tenaris: a corporate university building industrial skills in-house
Attracting and retaining talented
scientists and engineers remains
a big challenge for the industrial
sector in Latin America. In the past
two decades, top companies have
been investing in the development
of corporate universities around the
world: Motorola, Mastercard, Toyota,
Cisco, etc..
In 2005, Tenaris – a company of
Argentinian origin – created the first
corporate university in Latin America.
Tenaris is a leading manufacturer of
seamless steel pipes for the world’s
oil and gas industry, with facilities
in nine countries that employ over
27 000 people.
Tenaris University has based its global
campus in Campana (2008), Argentina,
and has three other training facilities in
Brazil, Italy and Mexico. The university
offers employees the choice between
450 e-learning and 750 classroom
courses at its Industrial Schools (for
company engineers), Schools of Finance
and Administration, Commercial
Management, Information Technology
and its Schools of Technical Studies.
Internal experts recruited from within
the company serve as the main body
of instructors.
The company has compensated for
the recent drop in global demand
for its products by augmenting the
number of hours employees spend in
training. This way, employees should
return to the factory floor with better
skills once production picks up again.
*Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Italy, Japan,
Mexico, Romania and the USA
Source: compiled by author
Figure 7.5: Researchers (FTE) in Latin America, 1996–2013
150 000
120 000
Brazil 138 653
90 000
60 000
73 875
Argentina
51 685
30 000
10 000
24 804
Mexico
43 592
19 894
1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
Venezuela 8 686
8 000
6 000
5 551
Costa Rica
6 107
Colombia
7 702
Chile
6 803
4 000
2 000
313
0
2 668
983
Nicaragua
54
590
1 159
724
Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics
481
548
388
Bolivia
1 646
Ecuador
2 735
Panama
438
Uruguay
1 803
Paraguay
1 081
Guatemala
411
184