Administration

This research aimed to identify facilitators and restrictive factors on Technological Transfer by comparing case studies of the Brazilian Technology Transfer Offices (TTO). Industry-University (I-U) cooperation processes enable interacting actors to benefit from partners’ knowledge and resources to achieve better results than being in isolation. The approximation between public universities and industries through their TTO represents a source of competitive advantages for firms that increasingly need subsidies to improve their performances and innovations. Designed through multiple case studies (Federal
University of Technology of Parana, Federal University of Parana and State University of Campinas) and supported by the I-U cooperation literature, it was possible to develop a theory based on categories for comparing cases. The three case studies’ results revealed, regarding the restrictive factors, that the federal universities showed an initial cooperation process through their TTO, whereas the state university presented facilitator factors about better-structured cooperative processes and generated returns to the institution. Besides, the
federal universities showed restrictive factors from a legal framework (the legislation limits teaching activities outside the university). Another restrictive factor was the changeable  professors’ profile and personal interests, which are more dedicated to research and lectures in graduate courses than I-U partnerships. It is recommended to legislators and policy makers consider the professors’ action in I-U partnership as a key to a national policy of regional development through technology transfer policies.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the experience of a team of professors implementing a project on entrepreneurship qualification in order to create the basis for local development in a region of extreme poverty. This study is an interpretive, descriptive study case. Data were collected by providing field notes, as well as participant observation and documents, which were analysed in a comprehensively interpretive way. We developed formal generalizations in the form of propositions. The most significant results indicate the need for greater awareness in communities located in areas of extreme poverty towards the opportunity to improve the quality oflife and employment, and generation of income through education and entrepreneurship leading to practical results within medium and long-terms; Regarding the culture of the State of Piaui, low levels of innovation and entrepreneurship were noted; local culture is heavily dependent on assistance programs offered by the federal government.

This research has had as main objective to analyze how the development of DC improve BM innovation, in the context of IT high-techs in an emergent country. We performed multiple case studies with multiple data collection techniques. Main findings revealed that the process of developing DC depends on how knowledge and information are managed and acquired by the high-techs. Results evidenced that the more diverse is the set of elements of BM, the more a company develop their DC. The results corroborate to the literature of microfoundations of DC by influencing on how knowledge is managed by each company. As novelty, this research sheds some lights on the relation of DC development and BM innovation and suggests some highways for future researches.

Purpose
This metasynthesis aims to build a theory on the concept of innovation ecosystem from the state of the art of qualitative case studies available in indexed scientific production using interpretive synthesis (Hoon, 2013).

Design/methodology/approach
This research was conducted by the postulates of the metasynthesis method (Hoon, 2013) to generate theory from qualitative case studies. The authors retrieved 77 research papers from databases, of which 6 were used for synthesis purposes. Each selected research paper reported one or more cases, which were analyzed separately. At the final stage, a data synthesis was structured and the cases were crossed, which allowed the development of a schematic representation and a theoretical construction of the innovation ecosystem concept. The approach used in this research is a metatheoretical assumption from economics and management and ecology to explore the theoretical gap in the concept of innovation ecosystems.

Findings
There is not yet a conceptual consensus on the term, which sometimes leads researchers to address partial or complementary concepts. The analysis identified constitutive elements of an innovation ecosystem that lead to structuring a framework of organic and dynamic interrelationships that a given organization has with various external organizations, allowing the creation of innovative products in a faster way.

Research limitations/implications
This paper helps scholars and researchers consider a new metatheoretical perspective to analyze dynamics, constitutive elements and multilevels of an innovation ecosystem.

Practical implications
For practitioners, this paper sheds lights on the importance of recognizing a systemic consideration of innovation ecosystems that falls in global relationships, industry dynamics and identification of main global–local actors/enablers to produce innovations internally at a given organization.

Originality/value
The novelty of this paper lies in a more delineated definition and a schematic representation of an innovation ecosystem based on a global–local perspective of product creation and manufacturing and interactions that a given company has, regardless of the geographical location of its dispersed strategic partners.