The Start-up Process of Knowledge-based Companies in Latin America

Abstract

Latin American economies have important structural weaknesses. First, they are highly specialized in goods that are intensive in natural resources and activities that compete internationally on the basis of labor costs rather than innovation (Mortimore, 1995). Second, productivity gaps between sectors and firms of different sizes are more marked than in industrialized countries (Peres and Stumpo, 2002). Third, many studies show that national innovations systems have a low performance (Alcorta and Peres, 1998). For instance, many countries of the region are below the thirtieth position in the technology ranking, which is consistent with a percentage of research and development personnel in the total population that is less than half of the East Asia region (World Bank, 2002). In fact, most of the Latin American countries have less than 500 researchers per million people.¹