José Tadeu Arantes | FAPESP Agency – The relationship between universities and companies in Brazil has improved in the last ten years thanks, above all, to multiple legislative initiatives. But there are still a series of obstacles to be overcome, as researchers and businesspeople pointed out at the thematic conference “University-Business Collaboration”, held on March 19 in the FAPESP auditorium. The meeting gathered input for the 5th National Conference on Science, Technology and Innovation (CNCTI), scheduled for June 4th to 6th, in Brasília.
Some companies are already investing heavily in a new university-business partnership model. One of them is Embraer, as its director of technology and advanced projects showed, Cleiton Diniz Pereira da Silva e Silva. “Today we have more than 20 thousand employees, with 1,300 doctors, masters and postgraduate students. One of our training programs, now 23 years old, is the professional master’s degree in aeronautical engineering, a partnership between Embraer and the Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica (ITA). Together, the company and the academy developed a curriculum and a methodology to train professionals capable of meeting current and future demands,” he said.
And he added: “We already have more than 1,600 graduates, who came from 105 universities in 20 states of the federation. There is great diversity in the profile of students. The training is conducted by mentors, Embraer professors and professors from the academy. In the third and final phase of training, students receive a challenge, which comes from the business unit. He is the one who understands the customer’s needs and proposes the requirements that new products must have. With this challenge in hand, students must design: work in a multidisciplinary way, conduct experiments, carry out conceptual projects, technical feasibility studies and financial feasibility studies – all the time accompanied by expert mentors, who, at Embraer, we call our engineers -chiefs, a team guardian of knowledge”.
Cleiton Diniz Pereira da Silva e Silva, director of technology and advanced projects at Embraer (photo: Daniel Antônio/Agência FAPESP)
Silva e Silva considers that traditional training, even at the master’s and doctorate level, organizes knowledge by disciplines. But the reality of the industry presents other types of problems. “An example at Embraer is the KC 390, a multi-mission aircraft capable of landing in semi-prepared sites. A problem like this cannot be solved by one discipline or several non-integrated disciplines. It requires the participation of a multidisciplinary team. For many physical problems raised by this product, even though we had the participation of doctors and masters, there was no consolidated knowledge. We need to formulate hypotheses, conduct experiments, fail and succeed, so that we could arrive, among other things, at an aircraft capable of landing without throwing rocks from the ground, which could destroy the engine”, he explains.
Other companies, such as Granbio, which works to develop green technologies, still face obstacles. Bernardo Gradin, its founder and CEO, pointed out, for example, the difficulty in “translating” the company’s risk vision to academia and the lack of academic bodies that facilitate the conversion of a scientific article or a doctoral thesis into a virtuous idea from an innovation point of view. It is necessary, he suggests, to create a “culture of innovation” that strengthens the university-company relationship.
Gradin recognizes a significant improvement in the innovation environment in the country in recent years. “But the rest of the world has improved much more and more quickly; There innovation is an infinity pool,” he warned.
Granbio, for example, has 400 patents, 375 of which were also filed in the United States. There the registration process took 14 months; here it is seven years. “We need an environment that protects knowledge, that accelerates patent protection,” he said.
Investment in research
For Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruzformer scientific director of FAPESP, what is lacking is business research in Brazil.
“The company needs to be one of the relevant places of research activity employing researchers. You don’t need to be a doctor, but use what you know to improve the company’s competitiveness”, highlighted Brito Cruz, currently senior vice-president of research networks at Elsevier, in Oxford, United Kingdom.
Brito Cruz considered that it is up to universities to produce basic and applied knowledge and prepare researchers to work in companies and government. Governments are responsible for maintaining a network of good universities, a good research infrastructure and a good intellectual property office, and creating an environment that facilitates and encourages companies to develop research. “But companies need to do their part. We need to abandon the idea that the only places for research are universities and government research institutes,” he pointed out. In his assessment, national policies have been frustrated in obtaining an increase in business spending on research.
In evaluating Fernanda De Negri, director of Sector Studies at the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea), business demand for knowledge developed in universities is still very low. She compared numbers of scientists and researchers per million inhabitants in different countries and highlighted that, in this ranking, Brazil occupies a very modest position.
Fernanda De Negri, director of Sector Studies at Ipea (Daniel Antônio/Agência FAPESP)
In the United States, she exemplified, public investments had a good period following the post-war period, reaching a peak in the mid-1960s and then declining, being overtaken by private investments in the late 1970s. “This period of boom of public investment was precisely the moment of consolidation of the large national laboratories, of building an infrastructure that made that country the world technological leader”, he said. After the foundations were laid, public investments were able to decrease and private investment took off.
Smart Districts
On the university side, a future project was presented at the conference by professor Antonio José de Almeida Meirelles, rector of the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), who spoke about the creation of the “International Hub for Sustainable Development” (HIDS), based on a public-private partnership. “Campinas is, today, responsible for 16% of national scientific production. And, around Unicamp, we have some of the main research equipment in the country. The idea is to develop a smart district, a place where innovation is shared between the university and the corporate world, without size restrictions, with an emphasis on training people who can go to companies and generate an innovative process within them. We want people to live in the area, with schools, transport and structure for social life”, he informed.
According to Meirelles, the expectation is that this district will be an example for similar initiatives in other places in the State of São Paulo and Brazil.
Under the umbrella “University-Business Collaboration”, the thematic conference covered an extensive agenda and lasted for more than four hours. In addition to the aforementioned debaters, there were presentations by Paula Helena Ortiz LimaCEO of the Center for Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Technology (Cietec), and Mayra Silvestre Izar, Innovation consultant at the Brazilian Micro and Small Business Support Service (Sebrae).
André Clark, senior vice-president of Siemens Energy for Latin America, and Liedi Legi Bariani Bernucci, director-president of the Technological Research Institute of the State of São Paulo (IPT), participated in the coordination of tables.
The organizing committee was composed of Marco Antonio Zagopresident of the Superior Council of FAPESP, Carlos Américo PachecoCEO of FAPESP, and Pedro Wongtschowskifrom the Superior Council for Innovation and Competitiveness of the Federation of Industries of the State of São Paulo (Fiesp).
Pacheco, who coordinated the conference, closed the meeting by remembering that the change in North American legislation to make the relationship between actors in the innovation process more flexible is something that takes between 25 and 30 years and that, long before that, they had already done other experiments with this objective. “In a sense, things in Brazil have moved forward. Institutions responded to the creation of the Innovation Law by making a patenting effort. The important thing to note is that when the regulatory environment changes, institutions respond to the policy challenge. It is this positive perspective that we want to bring to the 5th National Science, Technology and Innovation Conference,” he said.
The thematic conference: “University-Business Collaboration”, preparatory to the 5th National Conference on Science, Technology and Innovation (CNCTI), can be watched in full at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sLGlz3S5fc&t=4s.
Tags: advances universitybusiness relationship lack business research country experts
--
