Diffusion and adoption of high technologies in emerging countries.

GRACIELA E GUTMAN; VERÓNICA ROBERT; PABLO LAVARELLO

Montreal

Congreso;  XVI Congress of the International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society; 2016

In emergent countries like Argentina, where technological change refers mostly to adoption and adaptation of preexistent technologies in well-defined trajectories, the discussions about technological policies at local and national levels requires to move beyond the antagonism between top-down and bottom-up perspectives. In this article, we go beyond the local organizational and social proximity requirements analyzing the institutional proximity between incipient S&T poles and clusters and national S&T policies. We argue that top down and bottom up policies and institutions are necessary to boost the technological catching-up process in emerging countries, since organizational and social proximities are key for identifying S&T opportunities and potential areas for local capacity building, while institutional proximity between local institutional learning and national policies assure the national coherence of innovation systems. We look at three cases of technological development based on public-private partnerships in different localizations in Argentina. These cases suggest that policies implemented at national and local levels have helped in generating opportunities to link and shorten the distance between actors. However it is not clear their coordination with national S&T orientation, highlighting the risks of isolating the local technological capacities building from national S&T policies.