Innovative Capabilities in Argentine Manufacturing Firms: linking static and dynamic advantages?

ANABEL MARIN; MARTIN BELL

Technology, Innovation and the Enterprise in Less Developed Economies

Oxford University Press

Año: 2012; p. 482 - 526

This chapter examines the experience of Argentine manufacturing firms in accumulating innovative capabilities over the last two decades. It concentrates first on the patterns of innovative activity in manufacturing in the decade or so between the early 1990s and the early 2000s, and then explores more selective aspects of experience in subsequent years. That timing in the context of both changes in economic policy and instability in the economy inevitably places the main focus on issues about disruption, discontinuity and transition. This is unusual for studies of innovative capability building in developing and emerging economies. These have much more often examined long periods of cumulative continuity running over two, three or more decades. This has been especially so in the case of the large body of firm-level studies in Asian contexts ? for example: Amsden (1989) on firms in Korea between the 1960s and 1980s; Kim (1997) again on firms in Korea and tracking out cumulative paths over over a longer period until the 1990s; Hobday (1995) covering electronics firms in Singapore, Taiwan and Korea over a 20 to 30-year period from the 1970s; or Mathews and Cho (2000) reviewing the development of the semiconductor industry in those countries. Latin American experience has been very different. After a substantial period of cumulative, firm-level capability building in the context of relatively stable policy and institutional regimes during the period of import substituting industrialisation (ISI) between the 1950s and 1970s (for example Katz, 2001), disruption and instability in firms? environments became the norm. We place that disruption at the centre of our story about Argentina. We briefly review the experience of the preceding period and then concentrate on what has happened subsequently. Many other studies have already told that story, both for Latin America as a whole and for Argentina in particular (Katz and Bercovich, 1993; Katz, 2001, 2007; Cimoli and Katz, 2003; Chudnovsky et al., 2006). However, we tell the story in a somewhat different way. In most previous work, estimates of the damage to innovation capabilities arising from the disruption of the economic reforms have varied a little, [1] but they have all been substantially negative ? though somewhat less so in the case of Chudnovsky et al., 2006).   For sure, positive technology-related developments have been noted. However, the gerenral picture has been in general one of destruction.  We wonder whether that remains the case. We have the advantage of being able to draw on data that, in comparison with the observations in many of these previous studies, cover a period in which more time has elapsed since the main phase of reforms. We therefore ask again whether new innovative capabilities are emerging? If so, how is this taking place? What is the sectoral ecology of the regeneration process? In particular, are innovative capabilities emerging in firms undertaking economic activities that are the same or different from those where they were previously concentrated? What kinds of firm are involved and what kinds of innovation-related interaction between them? Finally, can we discern anything about how the new patterns of innovative activity might further evolve? [1]     In part this variation stems from different perspectives on the historical counterfactuals about what would have happened without the reforms (or with different kinds of reform). Would the path of deepening innovative capability accumulation in the ISI period have continued, or were there inherent limits on where those paths were going? We by-pass the discussion of such ?might have beens?.