CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

OBJECTIVE: This paper aims to analyze how Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) management and policy strategies are deployed towards achieving a high-scale, sustainable, knowledge intensive, and locally grounded project, through the experience of an Argentinean biotechnology-based nutritional supplement delivered in schools to solve child malnutrition.THE PROBLEM: It is currently sustained by an emerging group of scholars that research, development (R&D) and innovation in knowledge intensive technologies can play an important role in the construction of solutions to the problems of poverty and lack of access to basic goods (clean water, nutrition, sanitary services, healthcare, energy, etc.). At the policy level, international agencies have designed specific programs on what has been called ?innovation for inclusive development (IID)?. Meanwhile, at a national scale, in the last five years Latin American countries like Argentina have implemented several policies to support capacity building on STI as key elements to promote local development dynamics. In this political agenda, biotechnology is considered a strategic area, given an over 30 year trajectory of growing capacities in public R&D units and private and public-private firms. Nevertheless, it is hard to establish a correlation between these efforts, STI investment and the generation of solutions to the country?s major social problems. Despite the official discourses of the last decade, knowledge intensive projects geared towards social inclusion still occupy only a marginal place. SCENARIO: An analysis of current public policies, show that STI programs and resource mobilization go either to basic research and/or remain more oriented to address windows of opportunity and economic competitiveness than towards social development. Funding instruments, international paper-based evaluation systems, and the characteristics of scientific local culture, constitute incentives that hinder researchers from engaging in agendas based on local issues. Meanwhile, an empirical survey conducted within the present research project of over 40 R&D experiences that explicitly attempt to develop biotechnological solutions to social problems, shows that they remain still minimal, scarcely visible, low scaled, count with fewer resources than mainstream agendas, and do not articulate with local social and productive development agendas. At the same time, a review of IID case studies that pursued the implementation of high-scaled knowledge intensive technologies shows a widespread common framing of ?inclusion? as ?access to goods? and ?the poor? as ?consumers?. This vision subordinates local capacities to coping through adaptive strategies in informal settings and precludes empowerment processes that may include broader participation in technology building and decision making. KEY QUESTIONS: In this scenario, STI management and policy making in knowledge intensive technologies for inclusive development present thus several challenges: How to gain scale and, at the same time, empower different groups of actors? How to develop knowledge intensive technologies to solve social problems, and promote user participation in technology development processes? How can social, sanitary and productive policies be articulated with R&D agendas towards social inclusion? ANSWERS FROM CASE STUDY: This work explores these key issues through the case of the ?Yogurito Escolar?, probiotic yoghurt designed to prevent respiratory and gastrointestinal diseases, developed by a public R&D institute of Tucumán province, Argentina. In coordination with provincial and national organizations, and manufactured by a small local firm, the yoghurt became a central feature of a public alimentary social program. Moreover, while addressing nutritional and health deficiencies ?by delivering the ?Yogurito? to children in public primary schools-, the program articulated a strategy for local development through the upgrading of the impoverished small and medium dairy producers. The initiative has been running for over six years within the provincial territory and achieved a process of scaling up, by distributing the probiotic yoghurt to over 200 thousand children. It has also engaged in new projects in order to achieve its sustainability. The present proposal seeks to address within the case of ?Yogurito Escolar? the STI management and policy strategies that were attempted to bridge between scaling-up and sustainability strategies ?to stimulate far-reaching inclusive development dynamics-, and local empowerment strategies ?to assure local adequacy and foster local capacity building-. Through the trajectory of the ?Yogurito?, the paper examines learning and innovation strategies in terms of technological design and institutional arrangements that allowed its scaling-up, the articulation of scientific and locally grounded capacities, user participation and the unfolding of a regional development policy scheme.

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