People Management in Public Technology Transfer Officers: Proposing best practices for aggregating and retaining competent professionals.
People management; Technology Transfer Officers; Best Practices.
The activities of intellectual property protection, support and dissemination of entrepreneurship and technology transfer have gained prominence in recent years due to the rapid advancement of technologies and the possibility of generating relevant social, cultural and economic gains for countries that have agents and structures for innovation well articulated. In this context, have grown in Brazil in recent decades, especially after the advent of Law 10.973 of 2004, the Technology Transfer Officers (TTOs), essential structures to promote innovation within Scientific, Technological and Innovation Institutions (ICTs). From the point of view of structuring, especially because most of them are recently created, the TTOs of public ICTs still have barriers to be overcome in order to fully fulfill their role as promoters of innovation. The most relevant barriers evidenced by the literature are linked to organizational factors, especially to People Management (PM) processes. The scarcity of trained human capital, the presence of collaborators with no permanent bond and the absence of a career structure created by law within the Public Administration specifically for ICT servers to work in the TTOs core activities are among the greatest obstacles for the institution to achieve the objectives set forth in the Innovation Law and in the Institutional Innovation Policy. The objective of the research was to present best practices adopted in public TTOs in the five Brazilian regions (North, South, Southeast, Central-West and Northeast), comparing them with the management processes already reported in the literature to overcome PM bottlenecks. The methodology used in the research was inductive, descriptive, quali-quantitative and conducted through 30 case studies of public TTOs and bibliographic survey. The study showed that the consolidation and dissemination of good practices of PM among the institutions can be an effective means for the TTO to act in a way more aligned to what the Science, Technology and Innovation (CT&I) legislation foresees in the current Brazilian scenario.