Rede de invenção no Brasil: características e determinantes dos tipos de inventores

Abstract

This thesis encompasses three articles which use data from co-patenting of inventive activities in Brazil to investigate the characteristics of Brazilian inventors and gatekeepers such as their inventive performance determinants. The first article, “Types of interaction and characteristics of groups of inventors in the invention network in Brazil”, explores the relationship between the individual characteristics of the inventor and the type of interaction that s/he exercises with other inventors in the network. The second paper, “Identification of gatekeepers applied to the Brazilian invention network”, proposes to identify by different metrics and investigates their characteristics. The last article, "Determinants of the technological performance of inventors and gatekeepers of the Brazilian co-invention network", investigates the determinants of the Brazilian co-inventors’ inventive performance considering the possibility of multi-scale effects. The thesis allows a better understanding of the Brazilians inventors’ characteristics, highlighting the gatekeepers’ relevance. The main results suggest that coinventors have a high educational level and knowledge in high technology, which inferres that co-invention networks allow more exchanges of complex knowledge. The possible gatekeepers, inventors with internal and external links, have postgraduate degrees, higher knowledge absortion capacity and they are technologically more specialized. Nevertheless, there is an under or overestimation of the classification of inventors as gatekeepers depending on the measure used. Therefore, it is important to apply more than one gatekeeper identification measure in order to obtain consistent results. The most of gatekeepers are concentrated in the regions of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Campinas, and they used to belong to the institutions that generate the most inventive activities in these regions. Gatekeepers more focused on obtaining external links tend to be located in non-metropolitan regions, which can be a means of filling in for the lack of local knowledge. Finally, the results also show that the co-inventors’ and gatekeepers’ inventive performance are principally impacted by their individual characteristics such as their diversified knowledge degree and in high technology knowledge, their insertion in the industry and higher wages. In addition, the inventors who act as gatekeepers or are relational closer them in the network have positive affects in their inventive performance. The characteristics of the Brazilian region in which the inventor is located and the neighboring region also explain, to a lesser extent, their inventive performance.