Continuous results-driven innovation management program.
| Autor | Silva, Iara Sibele |
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Introduction
Although there are cases of innovation success in Brazil involving universities, research institutes and companies (e.g. the textile industry of the 1920s and 1930s, Embrapa and Embraer) (Rapini, Chaves, Albuquerque, Silva, Souza, Righi, & Cruz, 2009; Suzigan, & Albuquerque, 2011; Chaves, Carvalho, Silva, Teixeira, & Bernardes, 2012), studies have revealed a scenario where less than 1 percent of Brazilian companies invest in innovation activities (IBGE, 2014, 2016).
Since the Innovation Law (Zuniga, Negri, Dutz, Pilat, & Rauen, 2016), public policies to support innovation, such as the Lei do Bem (Law of Good), Embrapii, Sibratec (Fischer, Schaeffer, & Vonortas, 2019) and Finep-Pro (Arbix, Salerno, Amaral, & Lins, 2017), seek to increase the cases of innovation success involving universities, research institutes and companies (Lee, 2013). In the Finep-Pro scope, Pro-Inova is a public policy that supports innovation (Finep, 2010), which provides financial support for the development and implementation of innovation management programs (IMPs) in companies (Zen, Jaramillo, Dambros, Menezes, & Machado, 2014) as a response to the Business Mobilization for Innovation (BMI) (Mattos, Stoffel, & Teixeira, 2010) aiming to increase the companies' innovation management capacity, and consequently the innovations' success (Zawislak, Alves, Tello-Gamarra, Barbieux, & Reichert, 2013).
The number of researches on IMPs supported by Finep (2010) is small, but this number started to increase after the implementation in 2014 (Zen et al., 2014). Research works such as the Innovation Route (Zen, Machado, Jaramillo Lopez, Borges, & Callegaro-de-Menezes, 2017), NUGIN Methodology (D'Barsoles, Iata, & Lezana, 2017; Feuerschutte, da Cunha Lemos, Hoffmann, & Fernandes, 2017), Pro-Inova Serido Region (Santos, Motta, Luna, Barbosa, Brito, Nunes, & Romero, 2014), Matrix JOIN (Brandao, da Silva Gomes, & Segundo, 2015) and Model of Two Wheels (Bagno, & Faria, 2017) focus on describing the IMPs methodology and benefits.
These research works have an important role in showing the benefits generated by public policies that support innovation (Negri, & Rauen, 2018), especially for the innovative management models literature (Birkinshaw, & Mol, 2006; Birkinshaw, & Ansari, 2015). However, these research works fail in pointing out whether the results generated by these IMPs have met the Pro-Inova goals (Finep, 2010), and fail in pointing out possible improvements to these programs and their respective public policies (Monte Silva, & Guimaraes, 2016).
This paper presents the IMP of the FAZ Program filling a gap with a research that analyzes an IMP's results according to the public policy goals that support it. The analysis of the results from the FAZ Program is important because it gives insights about the expected economic return of the public policies that support it (Fischer et al., 2019). Besides, suggesting improvements is important because it may increase the innovation capacity of Brazilian companies (Saunila, & Ukko, 2014; Rothwell, 1992).
Besides this introduction, in Section 2 we present the environment of public policies that support innovation in Brazil and the private initiatives that shape the IMPs, detailing the FAZ Program's financial support, development (model of two wheels and innovation management system (IMS)) and implementation. In Section 3, we present the methodology. In Section 4, we show the results from the implementation of FAZ Program (completed activities and innovation diagnosis), discussing whether these results met the Pro-Inova goals or not. Finally, in Section 5 we present the research contributions, limitations and suggestions for further research.
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Innovation management programs
Public innovation policies (e.g. Innovation Law 2004) in Brazil have increased the effectiveness of governmental support instruments for innovation in companies (Zuniga et al., 2016). However, these policies were not enough to correct the relative disconnection (compared to other countries) between universities and companies (Lee, 2013) or to correct the mismatch between public efforts for innovation and the results generated by the economy (Monte Silva, & Guimaraes, 2016). To correct these problems, a new institutional framework developed by the government with universities and companies added to the Innovation Law programs regarding tax deductions for companies (Law of Good), subsidy programs for research centers (e.g. Embrapii) and collaboration centers (e.g. Sibratec) (Fischer et al., 2019), economic grant programs for the development of high technological risk projects, and retaining researchers at companies (e.g. Finep-Pro) (Arbix et al., 2017).
As these programs increase the public resources allocation to companies and universities, there is an increased need for better control and evaluation of these resources as a way to improve the public policies that support innovation (Monte Silva, & Guimaraes, 2016). Negri and Rauen (2018) emphasize that the control and evaluation of public policies that support innovation are an important way to give transparency and publicity to public spending. For the authors, it is not enough to know how and where public resources are being used, but what are the benefits generated by those resources. In addition, improvements in public policies that support innovation only occur when there is transparency regarding the direct and indirect impacts of these policies. Arbix, Salerno, Amaral, and Lins (2017) show that proactive stances such as the Business Mobilization for Innovation (BMI) of the National Confederation of Industry, the Competitive Brazil Movement and forums dedicated to connect companies, universities and public agencies are also ways to improve public policies that support innovation.
In 2010, a strong awareness of BMI began among Brazilian companies on the importance of innovation, offering capacity development in innovation management. This capacity was developed through models created by Innovation Management Support Centers (IMSCs) of State Industry Federations (Mattos et al., 2010). This increase in innovation management capacity is a BMI concern because the innovative activity performance of the companies depends as much on operational, commercial and technological aspects as on the innovation management (Zawislak et al., 2013). In this sense, developing capacity in management innovation is a way to produce specific managerial skills to reduce internal frictions between different areas of the company (Birkinshaw, & Mol, 2006). It also facilitates cognitive changes and acquisition of skills needed for organizational learning and to implement innovations (Birkinshaw, & Ansari, 2015).
On the one hand, the development of innovation management models involves risks and uncertain returns like any other innovation. Furthermore, management innovation is more difficult to justify, implement and quantify than technological innovations (Birkinshaw, & Mol, 2006). Best practices of innovation management do not always work in all companies and generate adverse effects during the effort to build capacity for innovation (Bagno, Leiva, & Oliveira, 2016). On the other hand, the authors state that IMS allow a more complete understanding of the gaps between best practices, results achieved by the company and expectations from future gains.
To reduce the risks and difficulty of implementing best practices of innovation management, Finep's Pro-Inova public call offered financial support to Brazilian IMSCs (Mattos et al., 2010) for developing innovative models of innovation management (Birkinshaw, & Mol, 2006; Birkinshaw, & Ansari, 2015). These models should include 11 integrated or isolated topics: strategic planning; organization for innovation; methodologies and tools for evaluating and developing new products and processes; methodologies and tools for evaluating and developing new business; competitive intelligence systems; structuring of learning processes; structuring innovative environments and stimulating creativity (e.g. generation, selection and implementation of innovative ideas and projects); development of information systems for innovation (e.g. public news and innovation funding programs); systems for monitoring and evaluating innovation (e.g. performance indicators); innovative marketing systems; and technology prospecting and intellectual property management actions (Finep, 2010).
In total, 24 IMSCs received financial support from the Pro-Inova public call for developing IMPs (Zen et al., 2014). From these IMSCs, we found five research works about IMPs in the literature. In the state of Rio Grande do Sul, the IMP focuses on the resource-based view, linking the innovation process to a navigation route to meet the needs of micro and small technology-based enterprises (Zen et al., 2017). In the state of Santa Catarina, the IMP focuses on developing innovation management modules and tools to plan and manage innovation projects, identifying technological bottlenecks (D'Barsoles et al., 2017) and on developing a tool for identifying process and cultural patterns to enhance innovation (Feuerschutte et al., 2017). In the state of Rio Grande do Norte, the IMP focuses on the learning and diffusion of organizational innovation, presenting actions aimed at the innovation management culture development (Santos et al., 2014). In the state of Bahia, the IMP focuses on developing a collaborative, dynamic and playful tool to identify the company's innovation maturity level, and to include a systematized innovation management in the business routine (Brandao et al., 2015). In the state of Minas Gerais, the IMP focuses on developing a continuous innovation management model and its implementation in companies by an IMS. Despite the difficulties of interaction (government, university and industry) faced by the IMSCs (Zen et al., 2014), the cited research works only reveal positive...
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