The Emergence of Innovation Policies in Brazil

A Genealogy in the Light of the Debate on Science and Economic Activity

Abstract

This article consists of a genealogy of policies to support technological innovation in Brazil, established between the 1990s and 2000. In particular, I will analyze the Sectorial Funds program, which is, if not the first, certainly one of the most important instruments of these policies, created still in 1999. The notions of genealogy and origin refer to Foucault (2007). Thus, the general objective of this article is to show that, at the origin of the Sectorial Funds and innovation policies in Brazil, we found a debate about the relationship between science and economic activity. More specifically, the question that arose at the time was the need to reconnect or rearticulate these two fields, that is, to make the scientific knowledge produced in the country become an engine for the development, growth and modernization of society. The specific objective is to show that the concept of innovation has emerged in Brazilian public policy as a mediator of the relationship between science and economic activity, in the sense that the Actor-Network Theory attributes to the notion of mediation (Latour, 2012). This implies, among other things, the recognition that, by reconnecting these two fields, the concept of innovation produced (or at least set out to produce) profound transformations in both.