Influências dos ecossistemas de inovação sobre incubadoras e empresas incubadas atuantes no estado de Minas Gerais

Abstract

The theories of innovation have been gaining more and more prominence in academia, being a fertile field of studies in social sciences. Thus, the present work intended to understand how innovation ecosystems impact the activities of the business incubators and incubated companies operating in the State of Minas Gerais. For this, a bibliographic review was initially carried out in order to understand how the theme has been approached in the literature as well as to bring the main theoretical elements, which allowed the construction of a framework for the systematization of an interview script. In this way, a total of twelve interviews were applied between the months of June and October 2023, covering five different institutions with relevant roles within the focal environments of study. The present study sought to achieve the following purposes: accessing information about the innovation environments in which incubators and companies operate; understand the factors that influence these innovation ecosystems and how they impact the activities developed by these actors; and finally, to investigate the role of the university, government, other business organizations and civil society in the development of innovations. Therefore, in order to reach the previously defined objectives, the IRAMUTEQ software was used with a view to proceeding with the analysis of the speeches given by the interviewed subjects. In summary, the research findings show that ecosystems contribute to the success of the researched actors' innovation actions when the following factors are present: dissemination of management training to incubated companies and availability of first to third generation services by the incubator; formation of collaborative arrangements between actors with alignment of objectives; entrepreneurial education and appropriate legal incentives. On the other hand, the following elements contribute to the failure of the actors' innovation actions: excessive dependence on public sector funding; divergence of objectives for effective collaboration between the actors; lack of a holistic view regarding the entrepreneurial education process and lack of public sector engagement in the process.