Research Policy 29 Ž2000.

279–290
www.elsevier.nlrlocatereconbase

The university–industry–government relations in Latin America

)
Judith Sutz
´
Academic Department of the UniÕersity Research Council, UniÕersidad de la Republica, MonteÕideo, Uruguay

Abstract

This paper analyses the university–industry–government relations in Latin America from two points of view: a
‘‘bottom-up’’ one that starts from concrete experiences of knowledge user–producer relations, and a ‘‘top-down’’ one that
considers the outcomes of the institutionalisation efforts recently developed in the region. The results of the top-down
mechanisms have been well below expectations of policy makers, in the sense that the historical low involvement of industry
in knowledge and innovation activities — the reversal of which is one of the main goals of such mechanisms — has not
substantially improved. The bottom-up experiences, on the other hand, usually exhibit successful results at micro level, but
face great difficulties for broadening the impact of the technical solutions found. Some features of the Latin American
landscape help explaining this outcome. The point at stake is that the weakness observed in university–industry relations
must be challenged under current conditions, the same that are partly responsible for this weakness. A possible way to
proceed is building complementarities between these two types of experiences. Some suggestions are made to tackle this
issue. q 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Latin America; University; Industry; Knowledge; Innovation

1. Introduction This is clearly true for Latin America, and this

One of the characteristic features of the 1990s
appears to be that ‘‘newly industrializing, deindustri-
alizing and reindustrializing nations Ž . . . . despite
their quite different developmental histories Ž . . . .
have formulated innovation strategies based upon the
deliberate elaboration of academia–industry rela-
tions . . . ’’ ŽEtzkowitz and Leydesdorff, 1997; p. 155..
)
Comision´ Sectorial de Investigacion
´ Cientıfica,
´ Minas 1483,
piso 2; Telefax: q598-2-401-27-90; e-mail: jsutz@csic.edu.uy
pattern can be recognised even slightly earlier. In the
last 15 years, this deliberate elaboration has shown
two main expressions: the formalisation of the uni-
versity efforts to promote relationships with industry
and the generalisation of funds provisions, adminis-
trated by the state and devoted to foster innovation at
firm level, which put a prize on joint R & D projects
between firms and academia.
Industry–academia experiences in Latin America
come from even longer ago. They recognise two
principal modalities: one in which public entities
relied on university teams to perform research and to
solve problems and a more recent one that began
once formal contractual agreements between univer-

0048-7333r00r$ - see front matter q 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0 0 4 8 - 7 3 3 3 Ž 9 9 . 0 0 0 6 6 - 9
280 J. Sutz r Research Policy 29 (2000) 279–290
sity researchers and firms were allowed, the precise
time depending on the country and the universities. 1
In the first modality, even if the reliance of public
enterprises on local technical capacities has never
been strong, there are interesting and important rela-
tionship examples all over the region. Brazil pro-
vides a good case. At the beginning of the 1970s,
Brazilian universities were called to participate in
two key technical developments. One was fostered
by the Federal Government and related to the design
of the hardware for the first national minicomputer,
involving the Sao Paulo University. The other in-
volved Telebras, the by then state-owned telecom-
munication company, with Campinas University, also
in Sao Paulo State, to develop optical fibres in its
physics department. More recently, the huge public
firm Petrobras established a whole network with
many universities to develop research on deep sea oil
prospecting, which proved quite successful ŽHelena,
1980; Brisolla and Guedes Pinto, 1995; Garcıa ´ conditions of budgetary restrictions. 3
Guadilla, 1996.. In Uruguay, in the middle of the
1960s, the Institute of Mathematics of the Faculty of
Engineers was charged by the state power company
to study the mathematical model of the Negro River,
when the main hydroelectric barrage of the country
was to be built.
In the second modality, one of the features exhib-
ited by the formal agreements involving industry and
universities has been the weak participation of pri-
vate firms ŽMoreno, 1992; Hein et al., 1996.. 2 This
1
In Venezuela, for instance, one of the first initiatives that
allowed faculty to earn ‘‘extra’’ money coming from formal
agreement with ‘‘outside’’ actors was authorised in 1974, in the
Department of Electrical Engineering of the Universidad Simon
Bolivar. In Uruguay, this kind of authorisation came 10 years
later, but with a broader scope.
2
It has been argued that formal agreements are not so impor-
tant ŽNelson and Rosemberg, 1994.: the implication that informal
contacts are one of the most significant forms of university–in-
dustry relationships is valid worldwide. The problem is that
enterprises must have skilled interlocutors to enter into informal
relations; when this is not the case, some types of formal mecha-
nisms can be very useful. It is recommended, though, to try to
maintain the flavour of informality: ‘‘Formal linkages are more
likely to be successful if they are allowed to evolve ‘bottom-up’
rather than being imposed ‘top-down’. Trust building, mutual
respect and understanding, and friendly relations — at the bench
as well as corporate levels — are all vital ingredients’’ ŽFaulkner
and Senker, 1995; p. 238..
can be seen as a manifestation of the Latin American
R & D spending structure: it is heavily biased to-
wards governmental participation, and private firms
involvement gives account at the most of 20% of the
total ŽRICYT, 1997.. When the importance of indus-
trial innovation for competitiveness entered force-
fully worldwide into political discourse and policy
action, this meagre 20% of industry involvement
began to be recognised by Latin American govern-
ments as a problem for future development and
economic growth. Policy measures were devised to
provide corrections to that problem and consisted
mainly in getting funds and organising programmes
that could attract firms to get involved into ‘‘knowl-
edge relations’’. Universities, on the other hand,
followed the international pattern towards a strong
purposeful search for external partners, and for the
same reasons than elsewhere: inability to ensure the
continuity of the research function under current
This paper analyses how university–industry rela-
tions turn out nowadays in Latin America, the mis-
matches that occur, the reasons why they occur and
the improvements that could be achieved. Two axes
shall be considered: first, a ‘‘bottom-up’’ approach
that starts from situations in which industry actors
looking for knowledge to solve a problem meet with
academic knowledge producers, and a ‘‘top-down’’
approach that survey some outcomes of the institu-
tionalisation efforts recently developed in the region.
2. The bottom-up approach
This approach is oriented towards identifying rela-
tionships established between certain actors in need
of knowledge to solve a problem and other actors
capable, in the first place, of translating the problem
into knowledge terms and, afterwards, of conducting
research, development or both to find a solution.
3
It is worth noting, though, that within the policy measures
undertaken, one of great importance was missing: the increase of
the proportion of GDP devoted to R&D. Almost all Latin Ameri-
can countries are devoting nowadays less than 1% of their GDP to
R&D activities ŽUNESCO, 1998..
 J. Sutz r Research Policy 29 (2000) 279–290
Although university–industry relationships are not
the only possible result of this identification, the
present analysis concentrates on them.
Some Uruguayan examples will illustrate the idea.
Uruguay is a wool-producing country, occupying a
fairly important place in the world market of washed
and combed wool, or ‘‘tops’’. One of the country’s
‘‘tops’’ industrialists detected a bottleneck limiting
productivity gains: the manual control of the many
variables associated with the operation of the dozens
of sinks into which wool passes during the washing
procedure. To automate the controls was the theoreti-
cal response, but finding an international ready-made
solution proved impossible. 4 The above-mentioned
‘‘tops’’ industrialist decided then to rely on a very
small and young electronic enterprise owned by three
recently graduated engineers. They studied the indus-
trial process in depth and developed and optimised
all the automated controllers to cope with every
aspect of the washing process ŽSnoeck et al., 1992..
The ‘‘tops’’ entrepreneur thus established his first
‘‘knowledge relationships’’ not with an academic
partner but with what can be called a ‘‘technological
tailor’’, that is, a small and highly innovative firm
having as a market niche the design, building and
operation of customised solutions ŽRothwell, 1986.,
in this case, in professional specialised electronics
and software. However, it must be mentioned that
one of the three young founders was teaching at the
University and maintained strong contacts with
‘‘academia’’.
After this first successful relationship, the techno-
logical tailor deepened his knowledge about textiles
and was able to recognise the specific utility of a
generic tool developed in the Electrical Engineering
Institute of the university: a digital image treatment
system that could be used for quality control through
an early detection of the most common failures of
the combing operation. A triangular relationship was
then established between the tops enterprise, the
research group and the technological tailor, to de-
4
The reason was that technical progress in this sector slowed
down notoriously during the 1970s and the 1980s, due to the
delocalisation process towards developing countries fostered by
the high polluting — and also labour intensive — nature of the
‘‘tops’’ industry.
281
velop a specific device for that aim. Interestingly, the
technological tailor acted in this case as a gatekeeper
between the tops enterprise and the university team.
In fact, the former did not want to have direct
relationships with the latter. The reason was related
to information disclosure. To be able to tailor the
generic image treatment system to the specific needs
of the firm, a good deal of knowledge about the
productive process was needed; this meant having
people from the university visiting the firm and
asking questions to managers, technicians and work-
ers. Nothing of the sort was tolerable for the rather
secretive culture of Uruguayan entrepreneurs, even
in this truly modern enterprise, and the triangular
relationship thus took a rather indirect way: it was
established between the university team and the tech-
nology tailor, the latter being in charge of providing
the researchers with the information they needed
and, afterwards, of the feedback from experimenta-
tion at plant level and of the final installation.
The above-depicted case is an example of a uni-
versity–industry relationship located at the industrial
stage of the production of wool. A quite different
experience is actually under way in the same produc-
tive sector, but this time located at the raw material
stage. The problem around which the experience is
developing rose from an undesirable characteristic of
Uruguayan wool: its level of black fibres in the
fleece is many times higher than in Australia. Two
actors are involved. One is a private association of
experts, both in agronomic engineering and in econ-
omy, made up and financed by wool producers, with
a long experimenting trajectory on the sector’s pro-
ductive problems. The other is a research group on
evolution — basic science indeed — in the Faculty
of Exact and Natural Sciences.
The experts were aware that the wool black fibres
problem was difficult to tackle with the traditional
phenotypic approach, that is, trying to find sires
without external signs of black fibres to use in the
breeding process, but they did not know if anybody
in Uruguay was capable of developing an alternative
strategy. On the other side, the university research
group needed to use fine genetic analysis technolo-
gies and that in turn required a wide provision of
local animals of known ancestry.
It so happened that the senior scientist came to
know the black fibre problem of the technicians
282 J. Sutz r Research Policy 29 (2000) 279–290
association. Since it was a problem workable through
the technique he was developing, he took the initia-
tive and met with them. Both actors recognised each
other immediately, shared a common language and
established without much difficulties the precise pur-
pose of the association: to produce a biological
instrument to measure the probability of a sire not to
have progeny with black fibres in their fleece and to
assure the correct manipulation of the instrument by
the technicians. As the scientist put it: ‘‘We did not
have to explain the importance of this kind of ances-
try analysis to our interlocutor. He immediately said:
‘there is no need to convince me, as I already know.
Explain me what the technique consists of, just out
of curiosity’. It is really important to relate to a
well-informed interlocutor, who knows about the
existence of the tool and what it is useful for, and
who will know how to apply it to his sheep.’’
ŽMujica et al., 1997.. The technique is now fairly
advanced and the ‘‘knowledge relationship’’ well
established between the partners. Moreover, a new
and unanticipated application is under way, directed
to augmenting the reproductive capacities of the
cattle.
The kind of experiences described above can be
called the ‘‘micro-strengths’’ of the university–in-
dustry relations: they can be found only at the micro
level, and they are usually quite strong, for the weak
or unsuccessful ones do not come to be known. They
form part of the process through which innovative
solutions for strategic problems of specific produc-
tive sectors are generated. They can also give rise to
‘‘innovative circuits’’, that is, webs of innovations,
each built on earlier ones, that broaden the scope of
problems that can be tackled with the new generated
knowledge. 5
The bottom-up experiences, even if they arise
from particular situations, exhibit some common fea-
tures, the most representative of which are the fol-
lowing: Ži. They occur because a well-defined prob-
lem has been clearly identified by some of the
directly involved actors: the academic one, the pro-
ductive one and eventually a ‘‘third’’ player acting
5
Moreover, the experiences described under the bottom-up
approach are fairly understandable in terms of the ‘‘Mode 2’’ of
knowledge production ŽGibbons et al., 1994..
as a bridge builder between them. Žii. The actors
may relate to the problem in different ways. The
‘‘classic’’ one is when the problem has been identi-
fied by the productive actor who looks for an aca-
demic player with the necessary expertise to tackle
with it. But the problem can also be identified by an
academic actor who thinks that he can solve it and
that the solution could be of use to some productive
player. In this case, the latter enters into the scene
after he is convinced that it is worth trying. Actors
can relate to the problem in other ways, but the
central point is that the initiative for the encounter
belongs entirely to them. Žiii. The actors involved
must be able to dialogue in hard technical terms, that
is, they must be able to dialogue about the nature of
the problem and about the nature of the envisaged
technical solution. This does not mean that the pro-
ductive actor must have the knowledge to understand
how the solution is built, but he must understand
why it shall be a solution at all.
Unsatisfactory innovations are frequently the out-
come of unsatisfactory user–producer relationships.
These, on the other hand, are usually the result of
strong asymmetries between users and producers re-
garding the knowledge involved in the innovation:
the ‘‘knowledge plus’’ producers generally enjoy
make them prone to neglect the users expertise and
their definition of what the problem is ŽLundvall,
1985; von Hippel, 1988.. Satisfactory innovations,
that is, technical solutions that fulfil other related
requirements — easiness to put them in practice,
low operation costs, good upgrading perspectives,
modular growth possibilities — are in need of more
egalitarian relationships in terms of the knowledge
involved. ‘‘Common language’’ and trust are repeat-
edly signalled as important ingredients of successful
‘‘knowledge relations’’ ŽFaulkner and Senker, 1995;
Ferraro and Borroi, 1998.. Often, common language
is not a point of departure but a socially constructed
result and the trustful relations between the partners
play a catalytic role in this construction. The other
way around, sharing a common language greatly
facilitates the development of trusting relations.
These micro-strengths are detected because they
produce an innovation: they are by definition techni-
cally successful. Their contribution to the social
accumulation of knowledge must, however, be anal-
ysed case by case. Coming back to the examples just
 J. Sutz r Research Policy 29 (2000) 279–290
given, the innovative process of the washed and
combed wool can be labelled as ‘‘encapsulated’’, for
even if the found solutions could have been easily
expanded to the whole industry, they have not tres-
passed the walls of the firm participating in the
experience. In this particular case as in many others,
the reasons explaining the social weakness of strong
technical successes are related to the inability of the
actors involved to produce expanding virtuous cir-
cles on their own. The black fibre problem experi-
ence is in a too early stage of development to try to
assess its possible impact, but the fact that one of the
participants is not an isolate producer but a technical
service organisation for the cattle owners suggests a
better future performance in terms of social accumu-
lation of knowledge.
It is possible to claim that the bottom-up approach
to research on university–industry relations is a good
way for picking-up cases where people from firms
and academia effectively share a common concern
on problem solving. Criticism may rise that this
approach leads to nothing more than a collection of
scattered anecdotes. The real power of this approach
lies, though, not in its descriptive strength per se, but
in the insight it gives regarding how to design effec-
tive public intervention, with positive outcome both
for the innovation process and for the diffusion and
social accumulation of knowledge. The hypothesis
is, then, that the bottom-up approach helps to figure
out ‘‘tailored’’ features for the emergence of Triple
Helix relationships embedded in national Žor re-
gional, or local. specificity. 6
So much for the research approach; what about
the outcome assessment? As we mentioned before,
the bottom-up university–industry experiences have
low capabilities for self-consolidation, mainly be-
cause they are unable to expand their successes on
6
The need for customised industrial and innovation policies to
cope with specific productive configurations has been forcefully
put forward in many recent analyses, both in developed and
underdeveloped countries ŽBunders et al., 1998; Cooke and Mor-
gan, 1998.. In the case of the bottom-up experiences, one of the
lessons that clearly emerges and appears to be particularly useful
to tailor top-down mechanisms is that a minimum amount of
technical understanding between the partners is necessary for any
sound relationship to occur.
283
their own. They can show good results that could be
of great use to other firms and productive sectors,
but to occur the diffusion process needs a third
partner: without policies directed to facilitate diffu-
sion it will be difficult for the micro-strengths and
the related innovative circuits to expand. Even if the
diffusion process is not the main goal of Triple Helix
policies, these can be of great importance as an
intermediary step, interacting with more innovation
biased agencies to find ways to help the micro-
strength to develop and mature.
On the other hand, the micro-strengths of univer-
sity–industry relations have the potential — if the
diffusion process works properly — for stimulating
a sustainable process of social accumulation of
knowledge. The university researchers involved are
usually deeply interested in the problem under
scrutiny; they are not just accomplishing a contract
to get money to go on doing research. Measures
designed to disseminate this type of experiences may
stand on concrete and successful examples of re-
search, and this is an effective way to overcome
indifference. Such a demonstration effect can have
great impact both on faculty and industry: many
things are not done in developing countries because
people do not know that they can be done. It also
contributes to the public understanding of the role of
endogenous research in solving specific national
problems, collaborating that way to the reversion of
the ‘‘technological self-defeating imaginary’’ that
usually accompanies underdevelopment. This
demonstration effect can go even further and create
demands not necessarily initiated in firms but in
public services like health, housing or education,
contributing in this way to get knowledge production
closer to social needs.
3. The top-down approach
The institutional design of university–industry–
government relations is top-down and centred on the
role of institutions. New agencies designed for the
management of these relations define and offer dif-
ferent types of schemes for university–industry co-
operation, and look for ‘‘customers’’ to use them. In
Latin America that cooperation has been established
284 J. Sutz r Research Policy 29 (2000) 279–290
by some laws at country and regional level, and
developed in different kind of agencies within min-
istries, in some independent bodies financed with
public and international resources and in the now
general trend towards the institutionalisation of the
university’s relations with industry expressed in a
variety of forms.
Mexico and Colombia provide two recent exam-
ples of top-down mechanisms developed at the high-
est levels of the state. The National Agreement
Committee for Technological Modernisation is a fo-
rum created in Mexico in 1992, in which the main
representatives of public, academic, entrepreneurial
and financial sectors joined to discuss the main
issues of academia–production relations and to legit-
imate them ŽCasas, 1997.. In Colombia, the estab-
lishment of a network of Centres for Technological
Development — in many different areas and always
including an academic partner as well as an en-
trepreneurial one — is considered the backbone of
the new National Policy for Innovation and Techno-
logical Development. The national scientific and
technology council, COLCIENCIAS, has maintained
since 1996 a Permanent Integration Forum to assure
adequate attention to the problems the Centres are
facing ŽUNCSTD-UNCTAD-COLCIENCIAS, 1996..
There are other recent top-down experiences that
are less generic than the ones mentioned above; for
instance, the Brazilian programme SOFTEX 2000,
intended to foster national capabilities in commercial
software production and exports. This time the initia-
tive came from the academic computer science com-
munity and was channelled through the Science
Council and the S & T Ministry: the programme was
organised through Regional Centres — 18 in the
whole country — in which universities could get
involved in partnerships either with the centres or
directly with firms ŽProchnik, 1998.. 7
Perhaps it is too early to fully evaluate this type
of experiences; nevertheless, in the recent Latin
American specialised literature criticism is stronger
7
To these type of schemes at national or sector level must be
added the many mechanisms devised by universities themselves to
foster university–industry relations.
than praise. In the case of Mexico, for instance,
‘‘when economic data is revisited and industrial
behaviour is analysed without including the
maquiladoras 8 , a technological weakness of great
proportions clearly appears’’ ŽInternational Confer-
ence Technology, 1998.. This occurs in spite of the
construction of complex mechanisms to foster the
joint work of universities, enterprises and govern-
ment. Technological modernisation as well as coop-
eration between research and production seem to be
quite unachieved goals ŽCasas, 1997..
A general assessment of Brasil situation in this
regard is simply not possible, due to the huge num-
ber of different experiences. Some initiatives have
reported good results, as in the case of the Program
Disque Tecnologia ŽCall Technology. of Sao Paulo
University. It is interesting to note that one of the
keys of its success is that it reaches enterprises in
which staff barely know how to describe the prob-
lems they are facing and, even less, how to ask a
technological question. The Program offers an easy
interface between these people and researchers at the
university who have agreed to be contacted and who
work on clearly related problems. The Program has
raised some criticisms in terms of the lack of techno-
logical relevance of the majority of the problems
finally identified; on the other hand, though, achieve-
ments have been made in terms of putting university
know-how into direct use for ‘‘non-glamorous’’ en-
terprises.
Other Brazilian experiences show different types
of unsatisfactory outcomes. For instance, the Depart-
ment of Materials Engineering of the Universidad
Federal de Sao Carlos, which exhibits long-time and
diversified relationships with local enterprises and
local and national government, has observed that the
type of activities its well-trained graduates develop
when hired by local firms is usually below their
technical capabilities. Quite often, firms loose good
8
Maquiladoras are industrial firms that assemble final con-
sumer goods using imported elements, with almost no value
added. These firms can be an important source of low level
employment and also of hard currency since all goods are ex-
ported.
 J. Sutz r Research Policy 29 (2000) 279–290
opportunities because they are unable to make better
use of the capabilities they have at hand ŽRaschid,
1995..
In Colombia, a recent evaluation of the public
policies implemented to articulate production and
research stressed the fact, so common in other Latin
American countries that mechanisms were designed
expecting too much protagonism from the private
actors ŽUNCSTD-UNCTAD-COLCIENCIAS, 1996..
It has also been noted that ‘‘innovative en-
trepreneurs Žin Latin America. became such indepen-
dently of incentives and instruments’’ ŽInternational
Conference Technology, 1998.. The Uruguayan situ-
ation confirms this general remark: in Uruguay as in
many other countries, the institutional design has
been usually made ‘‘by aggregation’’, that is, by
mixing all kind of new agencies with old ones,
without paying enough attention to defining and
articulating their functions. As a result, some ser-
vices are offered by many institutions at the same
time — typically general business information ser-
vices — and others are not provided at all, for
instance, financial tools for start-ups, information
about local scientific and technological capabilities
or technological extensionism programmes. Pre-
cisely, these very specific instruments are those that
potentially innovative entrepreneurs need and usually
do not find ŽSutz, 1999..
The main mechanism devised to challenge the
scarcity of the Latin American industrial scientific
and technological demand has been the provision of
financial support to firms able to develop innovative
projects. Funds are allocated through competitive
calls and they usually provide better repayment con-
dition if the projects involve collaboration with uni-
versities; in some schemes, there are funds specifi-
cally devoted to joint projects. The most important
source for this type of funds has been the Science
and Technology loans of the Interamerican Develop-
ment Bank. Several Latin American countries have
been receiving these loans during the last two
decades. National resources have scarcely been de-
voted to promote industrial innovation, with the ex-
ception of Brazil. Though external funding has thus
become available to support science and technology
in the region, demand for these funds proved to be
lower than it was previously assessed. It has been
repeatedly reported that available funds were under-
285
utilised, as if firms were in need of something else
than money to recognise the need to interact with
faculty. 9
However, it is important to circumscribe criticism
since all the above-mentioned experiences — and
many more of a similar type — also exhibit some
success cases, that is, cases in which successful
innovative projects jointly undertaken by firms and
university teams were the outcome of the top-down
mechanism put in place. 10 The shortcomings of
these mechanisms seem to relate especially to the
following:
Ži. firms involvement below expectations, both in
quantitative and in qualitative terms;
Žii. lack of ‘‘knowledge relevance’’ of the prob-
lems when industrial demand finally begins to
spread;
Žiii. low impact on the general behaviour of firms
regarding relationships with universities.
Much of the above mentioned can be considered
as ‘‘university–industry mismatches’’, and many of
them may be explained by wrongly designed mecha-
nisms or by the erroneous or insufficient utilisation
of well-designed ones. But there are also more struc-
tural features in the Latin American landscape that
need to be taken into account to fully understand
these outcomes. Section 4 turns to that point.
9
One of the mechanisms under discussion to try to cope with
this problem is the ‘‘softening’’ of the repayment conditions,
allowing more room to plain subsidies. The current situation has
been described as one of ‘‘ritual incentives’’, the aim of which is
‘‘to demonstrate a ‘formal political interest’ without any intention
on the part of governments to make any real spending. In these
cases, it is common that the incentives are not implemented at all
or that firms barely use them, simultaneously with the creation of
a bureaucratic body to take care of their administration.’’ ŽWaisb-
luth, 1998..
10
Softex 2000 seems to be a more consistent success case, that
is, a case in which the program was able to mobilise a fairly high
proportion of the ‘‘target population’’ in addition to obtaining
good results in individual cases. The explanation includes the fact
that the firms involved in the Programme are knowledge intensive
— the lack of comprehension of the economic role of knowledge
is not present — and that the goal of the Programme is a high
state priority — to reach a 1% share of the world software market
by the year 2000.
286 J. Sutz r Research Policy 29 (2000) 279–290
4. How does Latin American context affect uni-
versity–industry–government relations?
Some historical and also recent trends in Latin
American landscape help to explain why the out-
comes of the strategies followed to foster
university–industry relations have not been stronger.
Five of them shall be briefly considered, suggesting
in each case why they undermine these strategies.
Ži. The drastic slimming of the State is one of the
main emphases of the so-called Washington consen-
sus, a name given to the current policy and economic
reforms in Latin America promoted by the interna-
tional financial institutions. Particularly important for
analysing the Triple Helix of university–industry–
government relations is the massive privatisation
process taking place throughout the region. A special
feature of this process is that public enterprises are
sold to foreign private or public firms, because there
are no national private firms capable of buying the
public ones. An illustration of this is the recent
Brazilian Telebras San Pablo Holding purchase per-
formed by the state owned Telefonica de Espana. ˜ of the past.
Telebras is a case in which the doors between uni-
versity, industry and government were kept fairly
open for more than 20 years; 11 the optical fibre
project relating the Physics Department of Campinas
University, Telebras and several private enterprises
is paradigmatic of Triple Helix when it is understood
as a structure of governance for knowledge accumu-
lation ŽBrisolla and Guedes Pinto, 1995.. This pro-
ject owed much of its philosophy to the perception
of local knowledge as a strategic tool; this is not the
type of concern a foreign multinational firm is ex-
pected to have.
In countries with a relatively weak industrial sys-
tem, one of the main mechanisms to convey sophisti-
cated demand towards its scientific and technical
capacities is through the public sector demand. Pub-
lic procurements have been a powerful tool in bring-
ing together universities and industry in the devel-
11
It is worth noting that the relations between public enterprises
and universities were not the outcome of top-down promotion
mechanisms but the result of direct demands for locally produced
knowledge.
oped countries ŽGregersen, 1988.; the weakening of
this mechanism issued from the ‘‘foreignisation’’ of
public enterprises contributes to the difficulties Latin
America is facing when trying to link locally pro-
duced knowledge to productive improvement. 12
Žii. The Latin American current productive trend
has been summarised by the Economic Commission
for Latin America — ECLA — in the following
way: ‘‘The productive apparatus re-structure process
has shown a generalised tendency in favour of goods
with an intensive use of own natural resources and
against other goods which could have required pro-
portionally a more intensive utilisation of engineer-
ing and technology.’’ ŽECLA, 1996; p. 71.. This
situation has been characterised as a ‘‘neo-periph-
eral’’ regional insertion in the world economy,
stressing the fact that its participation in the world
economy is not ‘‘knowledge based and innovation
driven’’ Žde la Mothe and Paquet, 1996; p. 23., but
based mainly on the exchange of goods and services
with low technological content for others with high
technological content, repeating in this sense patterns
Under import substitution policies that were ac-
tive between 1950 and 1980, productive technologi-
cal upgrading was partly achieved through a pattern
of minor innovations located mainly at the firm level
and without a strong need for interaction with uni-
versities. Under present policies, demand for endoge-
nous knowledge is even weaker, due mainly to the
contraction of the industrial sector that went hand in
hand with the sharp opening of the Latin American
economies. ŽKatz and Bercovich, 1993; Lall, 1995;
12
There are many examples of this type. In Argentina, one of
the consequences of the privatisation of the telecommunication
sector has been the dismantling of a web of small high tech firms
that acted as specialised suppliers and maintained strong links
with academic research in the area. In contrast, the Chilean Žnow.
public copper enterprise, CODELCO, exhibits a trajectory of
growing local technological involvement, not disturbed by any
scenario of privatisation. In words of its General Manager, ‘‘twenty
years ago, our bids would have been written in English; nowadays
we are able to demand our foreign suppliers to associate with
local ones’’ ŽInternational Conference Technology, 1998.. This is
the result of a long-term technological policy that relied on local
entrepreneurial and academic capabilities.
 J. Sutz r Research Policy 29 (2000) 279–290
Cassiolato and Lastres, 1997. Summing up, ‘‘the
collapse of the political consensus underlying the
protectionist policies has affected technology policy
making in two quite discernible ways. One is that the
overriding belief in the merits of the free market in
allocating resources has led to very limited consider-
ations of technical change in the industrial sector.
The other, closely related effect is that the local
supply of technology has been given a much less
central role. Both effects have clear consequences for
the constitution of a new social consensus around
technology policies.’’ ŽBastos and Cooper, 1995.. It
is thus clear that the current productive trend does
not make it any easier to reverse the structural
weakness of the Latin American innovative climate;
the mismatches between university and industry con-
tinue to be difficult to tackle in such a context.
Žiii. Latin American public universities, specially
the Hispanoamerican ones, 13 share a long story of
social unrest ŽArocena, 1998.. Important social mo-
bilisations accompanied the long struggle of students
and faculty to obtain the autonomy of public univer-
sities and the direct participation of students in their
government. Later on, in the 1960s and the 1970s,
engagement with economic and social contest placed
the public universities and the political and economic
establishment ‘‘structurally’’ against each other.
ŽLuna, 1997.
Things changed afterwards: dictatorships were
followed by democratic governments in the 1980s,
and the intense period of social struggle gave way to
less confrontational social and political relations in
the 1980s and the 1990s. Public university–govern-
ment relations turned to more peaceful moods and
formal and informal public university–industry rela-
tions began to expand. Under the surface, though,
the tradition of the UniÕersidad de la Reforma still
exists, permeating with mistrust and unwillingness
the relations between public universities and both
government and entrepreneurs. It is not easy to give
an accurate account of these feelings, for they are
rarely stated explicitly in any public manifestation. A
13
The pattern of development of Brazilian universities has been
fairly different than the Hispanoamerican ones ŽSchwartzman,
1979; Arocena, 1998..
287
consistent trend that points in that direction is, for
instance, the steady increase of private universities in
Latin America, partly as a reaction against public
ones: 14 of the total number of universities in 1995,
61% were private, and more than 85% of them were
created between 1960 and 1995. Various small coun-
tries reported university–enterprise relations but with
´ Guadilla, 1996., mainly
private universities ŽGarcıa
centred in new teaching schemes with strong empha-
sis on management. The point at issue is not the
private nature of these universities but the fact that,
in the region, research capacity is overwhelmingly
concentrated in the public universities, a trend that is
not diminishing nowadays. So, the enterprises rela-
tive reluctance to enter into closer relations with the
latter jeopardise the mechanisms put in place to
bring near production and knowledge.
Živ. Socio-economic inequality is very high in
Latin America and recent figures provided by ECLA
show that global inequality was worse in 1994 than
in the eight previous years. Moreover, the shares of
population in poverty conditions and in complete
indigence are now about the highest in history
ŽECLA, 1997.. One way in which this issue enters
the scene is through the well-known fact that in-
equality hampers the improvement of the techno-pro-
ductive capacities unless there is a thorough transfor-
mation of the productive sector into a more knowl-
edge and technology intensive one. In a scenery
where this does not occur, inequality facilitates soft
options like spurious competitiveness based on low
salaries and natural resources depletion, low concern
about workers commitment, low attention paid to
workers training and education, short-term profit
maximising strategies. When the overall majority of
firms can survive and even grow this way, that is,
avoiding the challenges of a more structural competi-
14
The Mexican case, clearly presented by Matilde Luna, pro-
vides a good example. During what she calls ‘‘the entrepreneur’s
satanization of the public realm’’, there was a strong push towards
an active policy of private university creation. The fact is that the
Mexican national budget for public universities suffered a strong
downfall between 1982 and 1986. In 1989, after a slight recovery,
the budget level was yet below the 1978 one. On the other hand,
more than 100 private institutions of higher education were cre-
ated over the 1980s, against only 39 public ones ŽLuna, 1997..
288 J. Sutz r Research Policy 29 (2000) 279–290
tiveness based on knowledge and learning, it is hard
for the universities to be recognised as potential
partners in the processes of economic growth and of
development.
Žv. The National System of Innovation System
ŽNSI. concept relates to the institutional fabric built
on a national landscape to foster innovation. It in-
cludes also the evolutionary patterns, coming from
historical and cultural trends that influence the de-
sign of policy mechanisms ŽLundvall, 1992; Nelson,
1993; Edquist, 1997.. Latin American’s NSI are
weak, to say the least, due mainly to the historical
neglect of technical innovation. The most striking
outcomes of this long-term trend are the ‘‘holes’’ in
the institutional fabric — absence of a rich, diversi-
fied and specific institutional setting directed to sup-
port innovation at all levels — and the disconnection
of the existing organisations that often exhibit an
‘‘autistic-like’’ behaviour. University-enterprise rela-
tions need, ex-ante, a growing social awareness of
the positive role of knowledge for the economic
performance of firms; they need also, ex-post, a
network of supporting organisations able to concre-
tise and to diffuse the successful results obtained
thanks to these relations. This is what a NSI is
supposed to provide and when it is not the case, as in
Latin America, the mechanisms to foster
university–industry relations are bound to face both
lack of demand and of scope.
These features give account of the difficulties that
the formalised mechanisms recently put in place in
Latin America to foster university–industry relations
have undergone. The problem is that Triple Helix
policies must cope with the main characteristics of
the landscape in which they are intended to operate,
for it is not sensible to wait until a sound NSI
consolidates or a more trusting relationship between
actors is built to design and put them in practice.
Moreover, besides all the difficulties, top-down
mechanisms are important because they are poten-
tially open to the whole productive sector, thus
allowing a priori unknown possibilities for joint pro-
jects between university teams and firms to emerge
and to be supported. Part of the challenge of building
successful Triple Helix in Latin America has to do,
then, with the improvement of the top-down policies
in order to counterbalance some of the undermining
effects of the current situation. A way of learning
how to do that is to look into the micro-strengths of
university–industry relations.
5. Conclusion: policy considerations
Ideally, the top-down and the bottom-up experi-
ences should be truly complementary. The fact of
having developed a ‘‘knowledge relationship’’ makes
both firms and faculty more aware of the set of
instruments at their disposal to undertake further
relations; on the other hand, top-down mechanisms
support the establishment of relations which might
start a growing spiral of mutual involvement. In
reality, things do not seem to happen completely in
that way: the first assumption is fairly accurate, but
the second one is not quite so. The problem is that
top-down schemes cannot cope with opportunism.
Opportunist behaviour is exhibited by entrepreneurs
who contact faculty only to be able to apply to some
programme funds, but once the incentive is over do
not continue any kind of relationship with the uni-
versity. The same can be said of faculty teams that
try to establish relationships with firms with the only
aim of getting the available funds, even if they are
not really prepared to tackle the problems that need
to be solved.
To help complementary to occur, three things
seem necessary. The first relates to information:
much more information is needed concerning univer-
sity capabilities for problem solving and also con-
cerning ‘‘knowledge needs’’ on the part of firms or
group of firms. 15 Providing universities and enter-
prises with tools to become mutually familiar through
a better knowledge of what they need and what they
are able to do in common is important indeed, but it
is only part of the solution. The other part is to
effectively put them into contact. A suggestion in
this regard is to design top-down schemes with a sort
of ‘‘niche’’ strategy, that is, to focus on some type
15
The critical importance of information dissemination to foster
‘‘knowledge interactions’’ has been put forward since long ago
ŽMowery and Rosemberg, 1979.; the strategy of such information
dissemination should be characterised ‘‘ . . . as a ‘dating agency’
approach rather than a ‘marriage brokerage’’’ ŽFaulkner and
Senker, 1995; p. 238..
 J. Sutz r Research Policy 29 (2000) 279–290 289

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