KIBS, inovação e aprendizado: uma análise a partir do APL de TI da Região Metropolitana de Salvador e Feira de Santana

Abstract

The present inquiry had as goal to analyze the contributions Knowledge-Intensive Business Services KIBS have on the innovation, the learning process and the diffusion of innovation in Local Productive Arrangements. The local productive arrangements are agglomerations of clients, suppliers, promotion agencies, research centers and other organizations in a determined territory in which the interactions and relations create narrow vincula and an environment favorable to the occurrence of the innovation process, learning process and diffusion of innovation. As for the KIBS, they are highly specialized services that contribute to these processes recombining their technical knowledge with the knowledge of clients, generating new types of knowledge. As theoretical reference, the inquiry used the neo-Schumpeterian approach that conceives the processes of innovation and learning as social processes depending on the relation between people and economic agents. So to achieve the general goal of this work, the IT companies located in the metropolitan areas of Salvador and Feira de Santana that seek to form local productive arrangements, were analyzed. The study distinguishes itself as a case study and uses as territorial outline the companies located in Feira de Santana using as data collection technique two questionnaires built from the theoretical reference; being one for the companies that supply technical information services (KIBS) and the other one for the companies that make use of these services. The questionnaires were sent to the board of the aforesaid companies without the presence of the researcher as well as the necessity of their identification, which did not harm the research Out of a total of seven (7) KIBS companies that were contacted, four (4) answered the questionnaires and as far as the clients are concerned out of a total of fifteen (15), twelve (12) answered the questionnaires. The research shows that KIBS are of great importance in the assistance given to the innovation process of the companies that offer services mainly in innovations of the enlargement type. Nevertheless, the agglomeration of IT does not constitute, according to the economic literature, in a local productive arrangement due to the fact that there are no major interactions and relations among the agglomerated companies and among those with institutions of superior education, research centers, suppliers and associations. There exist few formal or informal vincula in the build up of the arrangement and the fact of the non existence of these vincula contributes negatively to the occurrence of overflow in these types of productive agglomerations.