Features of academy-industry interactions in Latin America from the perspective of researchers and firms

ARZA, VALERIA & DUTRÉNIT, GABRIELA

Sussex, United Kingdom

Conferencia; Technical Change: History, Economics and Policy. A Conference in Honour of Nick von Tunzelmann; 2010

SPRU, University of Sussex

The paper assesses the relative effectiveness of channels of interactions between theacademia and the industry in driving specific types of benefits for researchers and firms. Itpresents a comparative analysis based on the results of four country‐studies (Argentina,Brazil, Costa Rica and Mexico) developed in the context of the project ‘Interactions betweenuniversities and firms: searching for paths to support the changing role of universities inthe South’ supported by IDRC, under the umbrella of the catching‐up project. All studiesused micro‐datasets developed by the project with common questionnaires. Channels ofinteractions were classified in four groups (Traditional, Service, Bi‐directional andCommercial) while benefits were classified in two groups for firms and for researchers(briefly, short‐term and long‐term). It is found that all channels but the commercial drivelong‐term benefits for researchers. The commercial channel, instead, seems be negativelyrelated to those benefits. For firms, the traditional and especially the bi‐directionalchannels drive long‐term benefits