26th International Association for Management of Technology Conference - IAMOT 2017

The global scenario and technological advances make the markets increasingly competitive, increasing the need for companies to have a differential to remain in the market, which can be reached through innovation facilitated by interaction with other institutions such as universities and research institutes. Innovation has been increasingly appreciated as a relevant vector of the economy of a country. For the development of innovations, many enterprises, especially in more developed countries, have sought to establish partnerships with universities and research institutes and governments have created policies to encourage this interaction. The importance of the subject as an object of study at universities is illustrated, for example, by the creation of the Triangle of Sabato, in the 1960’s, the concept of the National Innovation Systems (NIS) in the 1980’s and the Triple Helix Model in the late 1990’s. The NIS constitute a network of institutions in the public and private sectors whose activities and interactions promote the creation and dissemination of new technologies. Their agents are organizations and institutions such as universities and research institutes, the government and enterprises. This study aimed to mark the differences of NIS between two countries. One in a developed country, the United States, and another in an emerging country, Brazil. The secondary purpose was to facilitate the understanding of the innovation environment in the macro context in each country. Based on exploratory and literature research, legal aspects are highlighted such as in the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 in the United States. In Brazil, the Intellectual Property Laws of 1996 and the Innovation Law, in 2004, were studied as indicators related to innovation in countries, such as the Global Competitiveness Index (GCI), which includes evaluation of several variables such as the University-Industry Cooperation (U-I) and the backlog world ranking that shows from patent application until its concession. Research and Development (R&D) in the United States is more oriented to obtaining concrete results than in Brazil, focusing on development and engineering. In the United States, although government participation in R&D investment is decreasing, investments of enterprises, universities and non-governmental organizations have increased to the point of offsetting the reduction of public incentive and improving the importance of scientific discoveries as support in technological innovation. It is expected that the research results allow better understanding of the NIS of both countries and inspire new actions and joint studies such as those that involve cases of U-I technological cooperation of both countries.