Políticas públicas de apoio ao empreendedorismo no Brasil: uma análise da implementação do PRIME pelo Parque Tecnológico da Paraíba.

Abstract

The object of study in this thesis is PRIME (Programa Primeira Empresa Inovadora, i.e., First Innovative Enterprise Program), a public policy aimed at supporting entrepreneur-ship that has been launched by the Brazilian federal government and operationalized by institutions previously accredited in order to select and follow innovative business pro-jects. This research sought to analyze discourses intended to promote and support the above mentioned program, the procedures and practices carried out during its imple-mentation and the paths followed by the entrepreneurs that it has benefitted. In addition to economic subvention, the main mechanism for supporting the chosen entrepreneurs, PRIME has mobilized institutions and consulting firms that have been directly engaged in the effort to create economic opportunities in the market of innovative products and services. In spite of that, the central hypothesis of this research was that governments’ financial commitment to entrepreneurship represents a risky bet on an alternative of public policies aiming at producing wealth whose logic and dynamic are of a level of complexity that denies simplifications found in public and private agents’ discourses. In view of that, the methodological procedures of observation, documental study as well as of interviews with participants in the PRIME program were adopted so as to verify its implementation within the scope of the coordination activity carried out by Paraíba Technology Park, an institution located in the city of Campina Grande, in the Brazilian northeastern state of Paraíba. The results showed that, in spite of discourses intensely mobilized to legitimate PRIME, the implementation of the program has been marked by tensions, conflicts, incongruities and strictness, in a regional context of little economic and business dynamism, thus compromising the efficiency of the institutional arrange-ment designed to support startup companies. The conclusion in this thesis also includes in the set of factors responsible for the failure of the vast majority of planned enterprises the weaknesses of the business projects as well as the inefficiency of the mechanisms through which the program sought to improve the latter and make them feasible, the exceptions being few ones that have remained in activity without PRIME’s having the expected impact on them. Therefore, an attempt to indentify and strengthen innovative enterprises through the combination of social resources and competencies found in the studied region turned out unsuccessful.