Researchers' perceptions on university-business relations in Brazil

Abstract

The article focuses on university-business partnerships. Data were drawn through electronic questionnaires answered by researchers from eight Brazilian universities (from the South and Southeast regions) and by firms that set up partnerships with academic researchers. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted with a sample of researchers who responded to the questionnaire. Among our findings, we highlight a) changes in researchers’ perceptions on university-business relationships, evaluated as positive, contrary to the predominant views of the past; b) the firms we researched expressed satisfaction and interest in continuing to collaborate with universities researchers. Nonetheless, most of the companies sought out partnership in order to solve immediate problems, which does little to raise technological levels of production. Our main conclusion is that although the institutional context is not an unfavorable one, there are still obstacles that get in the way of more fruitful partnerships, such as the low technological levels of most Brazilian firms, excessive bureaucratization of procedures in public universities and lack of academic incentives to researchers involved in knowledge transfer with the productive sector.