Can Brazil drive innovation?

Posted by By IT Decisions at 2 February, at 07 : 19 AM Print

Last month, UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) along with the main British ICT trade association, Intellect hosted an event at the Brazilian Embassy in London, which focused on the IT and communications sector in Brazil – in particular the opportunities for Brazilian and British firms to work together.

The CEO of IT Decisions, Mark Hillary, spoke at the event and Ramon Pedrollo Bez, a London-based Brazilian and marketing head at talent community specialist BraveNewTalent, was among the attendees. In the following article, he shares his views on the debate.

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It is interesting to see Brazil finally stepping up as a land of opportunity. With Europe showing little signs of recovery, the Brazilian market starts to become more appealing to UK businesses – as many of their representatives made clear at the event that took place at the Brazilian Embassy in London a couple of weeks ago on opportunities in the ICT market in Brazil.

Although the São Paulo area is very prominent in terms of IT services, Brazil is not usually looked at from that perspective. Out of the BRIC countries, India is best known by offering IT offshoring solutions, so I was glad to see UKTI’s Nitin Dahad pointing out that Brazil should be seen as an IT consumer, not an offshore destination.

As a Brazilian working at a venture capital (VC) funded startup in the UK, I couldn’t help but asking minister Rodrigo Santos about Brazil’s plans on encouraging entrepreneurship – particularly IT entrepreneurship, one of the biggest drivers for innovation and job creation in the world as we know it. The minister assured the panel that the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) has incentive programmes for startups and plans to bring foreign VCs to Brazil, which is great news.

Mark Hillary (CEO of IT Decisions and a Brit living in São Paulo) highlighted the problem around Brazilian bureaucracy as a major impediment for entrepreneurship. He compared the situation in Brazil with the UK, where one can start a business online in under 15 minutes. In Brazil that process it can take weeks to start a company.

As largely explored here and here, the skills gap in Brazil was also presented in the event as one of the biggest threats to developments in the IT industry. Brazil’s education system is ill-prepared to deal with the upcoming economic growth, forcing the country to be a continuous exporter of raw materials and importer of manufactured goods.

The poor state of Brazilian high education (today an unregulated machine of poor-quality Law degrees) is also the main reason why it is challenging to find innovative solutions in a country where most entrepreneurs (with a few heroic exceptions) focus on copying ideas from abroad rather than creating their own. The country’s culture is also dictated by the media – which is a sad display of shallowness and public manipulation of an already poorly educated population. 

I’ll agree that the BNDES fails to communicate their incentives more clearly and there is a bureaucracy problem, but true entrepreneurs find their way around it. It’s in our DNA. However, as anyone who have grown up and studied in Brazil will have you know (if they can make that connection), schools and media actively boycott independent thinking in such a deep way that it cripples innovation and critical assessment, which are key skills for entrepreneurship anywhere.

I don’t mean to be pessimist and I truly believe that Brazil is changing, but it sometimes feels like there’s a lot of people trying to bring Brazil up, while a small – but powerful – minority insists on holding it back.

 

Image by nyoin licensed under Creative Commons.

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