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

The institutional structures supporting technological innovation inthese different sectors often were very different. And while for a givensector there were clear family similarities across countries reflecting thenature of the basic technologies used in the sector and the marketsserved, there also were clear cross country intra sector differences. Andthese differences seemed to matter in terms of economic performance.The studies amply confirmed the very considerable and diverse rolesthat government agencies and programs have played in the developmentof many of these industries. As with the national innovation systemswork, these studies strongly induce one to think of governmentpolicies in terms of how they fit into and mold the institutional structuresof a sector or industry, as contrasted with looking at their directaffect on technological and economic progress.Many years ago, scholars came to conclude that the institutionalstructures that are capable of supporting the dominant technologiesof one era may be quite inadequate when the dominant technologieschange. Thus, Landes, among other scholars, has proposed that, whileBritain’s limited education system was sufficient to support the developmentof the technologies that were prominent in the first part ofthe nineteenth century, and which did not require people with highlevelscientific training, that system became quite inadequate whenthe new organic chemical product technologies and the new electricaltechnologies came into place in the last part of the nineteenth century.At that time, Germany’s educational system, which did providea considerable number of people with high-level training in the sciences,began to pay off handsomely, Veblen commented more generallyon how Britain’s nineteenth century institutions, which sufficedin an earlier era, were not appropriate to the new technologies andeconomic requirements more generally of the late nineteenth and twentiethcenturies. More recently, Carlotta Perez and Christopher Freeman,have written on the same broad subject, focusing on the needsfor new kinds of institutions to deal with the new technologies of the«information» age.The industry studies of The Sources of Industrial Leadership show anumber of instances of changing institutional requirements within theRichard Nelson2 7 1Technology, institutions and economic growth