A internacionalização dos indicadores de ciência, tecnologia e inovação

Abstract

There are major political efforts to foster Science, Technology and Innovation (ST&I) globally. These policies are increasingly guided internationally using the same indicators, which are designed to measure business performance as in the case of Research & Development (R&D) or in the generation of patents. Therefore, a strictly technical validity of this expansion is attributed. It is assumed that these indicators measure ST&I internationally, as well as the broad economic and social benefits that would accompany it. Contrary to this belief, interdisciplinary studies in Science, Technology and Society (STS) problematize the one-dimensional perspectives of supposed technical progress. The STS Field understands technology as a sócio-historical phenomenon and subject to human and political peculiarities. Therefore, this work takes as an object of study the internationalization process of indicators in ST&I. The research problem that we aim to solve is summarized at the following question: why do international indicators in ST&I characterizes the business enterprise as the main innovative agent in society? The central hypothesis is that this characteristic found in the indicators is arbitrarily implied by the institutions and the political trajectories of those who disseminated it globally. The methodology employed is located within the framework of historical materialism, where, due to the nature of the object, we opted for a world-system analysis. The analysis, therefore, has two faces: a quantitative one and another qualitative. The first consists of a descriptive statistical analysis focused on the business bias of these indicators, based on correlations between data from 92 countries in comparison with other researchers’ historical series. In this part of the research, the technical limits of indicators in ST&I are explained, such as spending on R&D and patents, in addition to their supposed implications for social indicators, especially those that measure inequality. While the second part of the methodology is defined by bibliographic and historiographical research. Therefore, it is contextualized the formulation of the documents that granted the guidelines for these metrics to be used internationally, such as: Science: The Endless Frontier report (1945), the Frascati Manual (1963) and the Oslo Manual (1990). At the end of this work, we intend to verify the extent of the social and technical factors that corroborated to the association between business and innovation in international ST&I indicators. After the research, it was observed that the different moments of the expansion of capitalism in the world had a direct impact on the development of those indicators in ST&I, above all, in the internationalization process of these and their social emphasis on the figure of the business enterprise.