ABSTRACT
The Silicon Valley consensus (SVC) is an emerging development agenda that proposes that growth and development are driven by formal scientific and engineering knowledge embodied in new products involving discontinuous technological change introduced into the marketplace by entrepreneurial firms. This agenda has been developed in the context of industrialized economies. As such, its relevance to middle-income countries, which have a large deficit in primary and secondary education and a significant portion of employment in traditional industries, is open to question. This chapter explores the tensions between this new agenda and old development models through a case study of the Serviço Nacional de Aprendizagem Industrial (SENAI) and its initiative to support innovation in the country’s manufacturing industry through the creation of the Institutos SENAI de Inovação (ISIs). It explores how this tension manifests within SENAI, and how two particular units, the Centro Integrado de Manufatura e Tecnologia (CIMATEC) in Bahia and the Centro de Tecnologia da Indústria Química e Têxtil (CETIQT) in Rio de Janeiro, have managed these tensions. The ISI program has placed SENAI at the institutional intersection between the SVC and more traditional models, and it will ultimately be called upon either to choose between them or to figure out how to combine them in a politically viable way.
