Abstract
The purpose of this chapter is to describe how the institutional entrepreneurship that led to the formation of a public-private innovation network in the field of Molecular Biology applied to public health in Southern Brazil could improve the quality of life of the Brazilian population. There is still some resistance in Brazil in investing public resources to finance applied research with potential for improving life conditions. If the results are expected to be achieved in the long term, and they usually are, such resistance tends to be amplified. The present case study about the network leaded by the Fiocruz Paraná arrangement, which evolved to the National Institute of Science and Technology for Diagnosis for Public Health (INCT INDI-Saúde), shows how institutional entrepreneurism led to the legitimation of collective interests’ actions in a developing field. For achievement purposes, we held a qualitative research between 2013 and 2014 in the city of Curitiba, Paraná State, Brazil, based on the principles that are cornerstones of the organizational institutionalism with a sociological perspective of analysis. Given the main concepts and the methodological procedures that were adopted as the beacon of analysis, the results allowed the understanding of how innovative and entrepreneurial practices of a group of individuals could contribute to the effective improvement of the national Public Health system provided for the Brazilian general population, and, consequently, their quality of life.
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Notes
- 1.
This argument dates back to the Kantian idealism, like in the classic book Perpetual Peace, where Kant argues that liberty is only viable when we live according to rules that we ourselves help to construct (Kant 1989).
- 2.
As addressed by the definition given by Maguire et al. (2004), the institutional entrepreneurship occurs not only at the institutional creation, but also at the transformation of current institutions. It is noteworthy that it is important to define distinction if the process is an institutional creation that comes from an unprecedented social innovation, or if is a posterior stage, like diffusion, in which the solution is not unprecedented, but it is a novelty for the established field (i.e. there is already an established institutional arrangement or configuration). In the cases where we are not talking about an institutional creation, we believe that the institutional work is more appropriate as the theoretical lens than the institutional entrepreneurship approach, since the former considers not only the entrepreneurs of the change in the analysis, but also considers the actors that resist the new order in favor of the established order.
- 3.
The Patent War was ignited when the Brazilian government promulgated the so-called Sarney Law, which established that the Unified Health System (SUS) had the obligation to distribute free drugs for the treatment of HIV and AIDS to the disease carriers. However, at that time, the antiretrovirals (ARVs) were produced exclusively by multinational labs and with high costs for the Ministry of Health standards, which would prevent the government from attending the demands for the treatment without compromising the Ministry’s budget. In order to solve the matter, the Federal Government authorized the compulsory licensing of the ARVs with the excuse of national emergency and public interest, what was later known as Patent Breaking. Once determined, the public lab Farmanguinhos, from Fiocruz, performed the reverse engineering of the drugs’ formulas and tested them for the national production of the ARVs. As a response, the multinational labs have unsuccessfully sued the Brazilian government at the World Trade Organization (Loyola 2008). For an extensive review, see Tachinardi (1993).
- 4.
According to Bonfim (2014), the institutional heft can be fundamental for the legitimacy of new networks as the arrangement studied here. The institutional heft is a composition of the reputation, prestige, tradition, and results of each organization involved in the network, constituting another resource for the network. The concept of institutional heft is comprised of elements that are present in both the organization’s technical and institutional environments.
- 5.
See Table 7.1 (page 5).
- 6.
The Federal Law 8,666/1996 regulates contracts and biddings for providing services and materials for the Public Administration. By being a CSOPI, the IBMP have the benefit of being exempt from biddings for the acquisition of materials and services and of the need of civil service examinations to hire employees.
- 7.
The consortium would be composed by Bio-Manguinhos, UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro), and the IBMP with support from the public institutions FINEP (Funder for Studies and Projects), Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCT&I), Hemobrás (Brazilian Enterprise of Hemo-derivatives and Biotechnology) and ANVISA.
- 8.
It is noteworthy to understand that the managers and directors of the IBMP are also Fiocruz’s career employees. They never left Fiocruz, even when they moved to Curitiba at the time of the IBMP foundation. Such actors live with this conflict of institutional logics daily, given that they must adapt their interpretive scheme (see Bartunek 1984; Ranson et al. 1980) according to each organization they are performing their action and their decision-making (ICC or IBMP) every time they cross the street of the campus from one building to another.
- 9.
The liquid microarray diagnosis, developed by the American lab Luminex, have as one of its key properties “anextensive multiplexing capacity, allowing the detection of different nucleic acid targets simultaneously. This is particularly important for HCV genotyping, as there are many different HCV genotypes and subtypes” (Duarte et al. 2010). Through the multiplex tests is possible to detect multiple pathogens in a single test.
- 10.
The Dual Path Platform® allows fast diagnosis of up to five diseases in the same reaction within 20 min, using only between 5 and 10 mm of collected blood through digital puncture. The INDI-Saúde negotiated the technology transfer with the American lab Chembio Diagnostics.
- 11.
The Partnerships for Productive Development (PPD, or PDP in Portuguese) is a program launched by the Brazilian Ministry of Health with the intent of reducing the Government dependency on multinational labs. The program works with partnerships between private labs and public labs, where the private labs might transfer the full production technology to the public labs. In exchange, the Government grants exclusive rights to supply the demand of the Ministry of Health within a period of 5 years.
- 12.
According to the criteria of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2003), spin-offs “are firms established by staff from a PRO [public research organization] to develop or commercialize an invention”, and startups “are new firms established specifically to develop or commercialize an innovation licensed from a public research organization, but without participation from that PRO”.
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Bonfim, L.R.C., Gonçalves, S.A., Moreira, M.S., Jacometti, M. (2016). Institutional Entrepreneurship and Improvement of Quality of Life: The Formation and Legitimation of a Public-Private Innovation Network in Molecular Biology Applied to Public Health in Southern Brazil. In: Leitão, J., Alves, H. (eds) Entrepreneurial and Innovative Practices in Public Institutions. Applying Quality of Life Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32091-5_7
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