Sociedade, Tecnologia e Inovação Empresarial - Presidente da ...

As my remarks above indicate, while the early work on institutionsand technological change tended to focus on firms, increasingly theperspective has broadened to consider other kinds of institutions. Forexample, there is now a considerable literature on the role of universitiesin technological advance, and how this role differs by industryand technology, and by country, and how it has changed over time.Over the last decade, there has been a considerable amount ofresearch and writing on «national innovation systems», which hasexplored broad country differences in the institutional structures supportingtechnological advance. Much of this research has been directedtoward exploring how national policies have shaped the institutionalstructures, and as a result of this work I think it fair to say that nowadaysnational policies are looked at as much in terms of how theyshape institutions, as in terms of the direct effect they might have ontechnological advance.The national innovation systems studies persuasively documentedsignificant differences across nations in the institutional structures supportingtechnological innovation, differences that seemed to matter interms of economic performance. These studies also made it clear that,in some ways, the national economy was too broad and too diversifiedto enable analysis at any fine grain of detail. Within nations, therewere major differences across economic sectors. In many nations therewere relatively separate sets of institutions and policies bearing on agricultureand medicine. National security tended to have its own system.This set of observations soon led to a set of studies focussed on«sectoral» innovation systems.The conclusions of one such study, guided by David Mowery andmyself, have recently been published as a volume entitled The Sourcesof Industrial Leadership. That study considered seven high-tech industries,and followed the course of the technologies and the locus ofleadership in these industries over a considerable period of time. Allof the industry studies considered developments and the structuressupporting those developments in the United States, the various countriesof Western Europe, and Japan, and some of the studies developmentsin newly industrializing countries.Debates2 7 0Sociedade, Tecnologia e Inovação Empresarial