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Graduate studies in health and the entrepreneurial state.

Reinaldo Guimarães discusses the hypothesis that in Brazil, at least in human health, research is dependent on graduate studies, when the opposite should be true. In academic institutions, knowledge output should always have primacy, as expressed so simply by Carlos Chagas Filho: “Teaching is done here because research is done.” In addition, he adds, research should be oriented by the demand for knowledge by society in general and by the productive sector (industry, agriculture, and services) in particular. In the Brazilian case, the primacy of teaching (graduate studies in this case) over research reveals the immaturity of the innovation system, defined as “a network of public and private institutions whose activities and interactions initiate, modify, and disseminate new technologies”. If this immaturity can be characterized by the fact that the Brazilian innovation system is organized by the “supply” of knowledge, it particularly emphasizes the demand side’s weakness, resulting from (1) Brazilian industry’s economic and technological subordination to the international political and economic power centers and (2) civil society’s weaknesses in the political arena. According to the author’s line of reasoning, although the essential requirement for the innovation system to “mature” (and consequently promote economic growth and social development) is to strengthen the demand side of knowledge (increasing the innovation rates in the national productive sector), it is important to adjust the supply side. This adjustment requires changes in the graduate studies system, including its approach to evaluation, in order to promote a turnaround in primacies, for scientific research to orient teaching activities and to prioritize the kind of knowledge required for innovation. In this sense, Guimarães recommends the following changes in Brazilian graduate studies: (1) include evaluators affiliated with nonacademic institutions or sectors; (2) reevaluate the role of evaluation indicators, decreasing the relative weight of publication of scientific articles in indexed journals; and (3) abolish the “course offerings” format in order to value interor transdisciplinarity. He further highlights that the emergence of executive master’s programs has been the most significant adjustment among graduate studies programs in health, in the sense of drawing social and economic demands closer to the supply of knowledge. In broad strokes, the author’s hypothesis is more than plausible: suffice it to observe the vigor of research institutions in the health field that strengthened their teaching activities since the 1980s and the reduction in the relative importance of institutions that remained exclusively as research centers. Still, the article does not discuss the explanations for the strengthening of graduate teaching as compared to scientific research. One can assume that it resulted from a political choice by Federal government in the 1970s and 1980s that prioritized the expansion of teaching to the detriment of investment in research. This prioritization can be viewed as consistent with the need (perceived by policymakers at the time) to train qualified labor for the country’s growing industry, in addition to legitimating the dictatorship in the eyes of the middle and lower classes that were seeking social advancement via schooling. This may be an explanation worth exploring. (If this is true, it reconfirms the political competence of the Brazilian academic community, which was able to build a high-level graduate studies system, overcoming the narrowness of official policies, although without succeeding in guaranteeing the primacy of research over teaching). The hypothesis is plausible and merits discussion, and the arguments are well linked, with the immaturity of the Brazilian innovation system as the point of departure. It would also be relevant to discuss this assumption, or question the contribution and limits of the innovation system concept for explaining the development’s dynamics. If, on the one hand, the historical experience and studies on the role of technical progress have shown that innovation systems are necessary for knowledge and innovation to spread throughout the economy, on the other hand, the concept of innovation system has not focused on precisely defining the role of each specific actor (including the state) within the system. The concept particularly fails to value the fact that the state has been the central actor behind most of the technological revolutions and prolonged periods of growth 1. Thus, in order to promote innovation and growth, it is essential to understand the roles played by the public and private sectors, which requires – beyond recognizing the importance of the innovation system – understanding each actor’s contribution to the system’s functioning, given the necessarily collective nature of innovation. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/0102-311XCO020814