Abstracts Economics

Como as universidades aprendem e diversificam o seu portfólio científico?

by Geziel Fernández

Abstract: Universities are an important source of knowledge creation; however, little is known about how they learn and diversify their research portfolio. This work intends to begin to close this gap, so it has the following objectives: in the first theoretical chapter it is analyzed to what extent the evolutionary theory of the firm could be applied to understand the learning and diversification of university research. The second chapter analyzes the specialization, diversity and similarities of the publication portfolios of Brazilian universities with methods of measuring diversity and networks of similarities. The third chapter analyzes the extent to which internal related capabilities (related variety) determine the behavior of the diversification of publications with logistic regressions. The results show significant differences in the specialization and diversification of the scientific portfolio among 205 Brazilian universities. Furthermore, it is confirmed that universities do not jump randomly to new areas, but have a strong path-dependency on scientific diversification. Finally, the results show the validity of a new university theory to be inspired by the theories of evolutionary economics.