ABSTRACT
Can all types of businesses afford to innovate? Do they need to? How does the process of innovation happen? What are the necessary characteristics to innovate? Do the industry sector and the technological level influence innovation? To answer these questions, one must consider innovation not as the simple creation of something new, but rather as an initiative to change in order to fill some market and knowledge gaps, and, therefore, to present results to companies. It is known that all companies have a technological base (a product and its process) as the object of its businesses (knowledge, internal management, and external transactions). And, therefore, companies will always consist of four basic functions, in a greater or lesser degree - development, operations, management and marketing. Innovation, therefore, emerges from one of these functions and, for each function, there is a correspondent innovation capability. Thus, the objective of this article is to identify the innovation capabilities of manufacturing Brazilian companies, and, with this, to present their innovation trajectories. To achieve the proposed objective, we used a database of a research project sample of 1326 manufacturing companies from Rio Grande do Sul. The project was developed in three phases: 1. development of a theoretical model of the firm’s innovation capability; 2. exploratory phase and; 3. data collection (survey) within companies of different manufacturing sectors in Rio Grande do Sul. Considering the sample main characteristics, we present a typical Brazilian firm: it is merely provider of industrial services, with low potential for innovation. Whether by branch of activity, in majority low or medium-low technological intensity, whether by its family management model focused in reducing costs and its innovation trajectory being restricted to maintaining quality control and to maximizingproduction.
KEYWORDS
Innovation; Innovation capabilities; Industry sectors; Innovation trajectories; Brazilian industry
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