The analysis seeks to explore analytical and methodological issues associated to the study of learning, innovation and competence building in Brazilian software industry. Contrasting with a strictly sectoral focus, our hypothesis is that the territorial proximity plays an important role to the improvement of learning and to the strengthening of firms' competitiveness and innovativeness. The analysis uses the concept of "local productive systems" in order to capture the importance of local and institutional conditions to the improvement of learning and to the strengthening of innovativeness and competitiveness. The paper is organized as follow. The first section presents some structural characteristics of the software industry, as well as the analytical framework of the analysis. The second section presents some figures about the Brazilian software market, its industrial structure and the strategies adopted by software firms. The third section tries to discuss some characteristics of the spatial distribution of software activities in the Brazilian economy. The fourth section develops an exploratory analysis about the territorial heterogeneity of the industry. This analysis is articulated to a discussion about learning, innovation and competence building processes in local software productive systems. Specifically, the analysis explores the empirical evidences emerging from a survey of four case studies of local productive systems in the industry. These evidences are manipulated through multivariate techniques in order to identify different clusters of firms with similar characteristics of the learning, innovation and competence building processes. Finally, the last section presents some conclusive remarks of the analysis.
Software industry; Innovation and cooperation; Industrial clusters; Local productive systems; cross-sector analysis
