Drivers of Entrepreneurial Performance: An Assessment of the PIPE Program in Brazil

Knowledge-intensive entrepreneurial firms (KIE) represent a core part of this specific cohort of SMEs. Scientific capabilities need to be translated into market skills that allow creating R&D skills oriented towards innovation. This can be achieved through strategic decisions and deployments that facilitate the creation, sharing, and transfer of the company’s knowledge base. Plus, strategic commitment to R&D can play multiple roles throughout the initial stages of KIE ventures: it enables the establishment of alliances, exploitation of external knowledge, and, as expected, new product development. The success of KIE ventures in Brazil is traceable to the PIPE Program (the acronym stands for Technological Innovation in Small Business), an initiative from the Research Foundation of the State of São Paulo, Brazil. This initiative dates back to 1997 and it follows a similar structure to that of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program in the US.