Despite the improvement of a lot of indicators and the hard and laudable work of several institutions and government organizations in the awareness of the importante of intangible actives, Brazil still has a long way to go to be written inside the circle of countries that treat the intellectual property as the key of the doar to the conquest of political and economic power.
The distante between the scientific production of Brazil and its transformation in patents susceptible to secure economic results remains. If, in a way, the publication of scientific works, containing valuable information about the result of researches, contributes to the academic promotion of our scientists, it implies, on the other hand, in practical terms, the free transference of technology to the developed countries that use now and will use this knowledge in the development of products that, once patented there, will secure gains to the respective owners and not to our researchers, who will continue to receive salaries incompatible with their intellectual level.
By the way, the comparison with South Korea, where around 75,000 researchers work in technological innovation in the companies, against only 9,000 in Brazil, has become anthological, and it is also inevitable to mention the slowness of the processing of demands for trademark registration and of patent applications, attributable on the other hand to the situation that the National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI) has been passing through for years and that has not been stimulating the investors and the entrepreneurs, the Brazilian ones basically.
The subject is very opportune, in a moment in which Brazil tries to occupy an outstanding position on the international stage, expressing firm and courageous points of view and aspiring to a position of a leader. In order to get respect in its propositions, a country needs ballast and this ballast nowadays consists basically in the detention of intangible assets. So much it is true that the intellectual property is a necessary item in the negotiation of any international treaty. Well, the list of Brazilian trademarks and inventions protected and spread internationally is inexpressive, unfortunately. In contrast to which happens in the developed countries, there is not among us a systematic challenge in the capacity of the generation of technology and the conquest of markets, translated in the availability of credit and the offer of juridical security, through the concession of patents and the registration of trademarks. The political and economic power of countries like the United States comes exactly from the addiction of forces of their companies, laying their roots in a historic altitude of giving credit to the capacity of creation and of disposition to face risks. Besides that, many Brazilian scientists and entrepreneurs that, disenchanted with the lack of conditions to work in Brazil, emigrate and offer their work to other countries, add to this situation. So, the marginal position of Brazil, showed in the statistics, is not a work of chance, but it comes from the lack of conscience of the value of the intangible assets, which are today more than ever the big engines of development. This thought has as background a culture that only attributes some patrimonial value to the perceptible goods and.that, with fear of losing, has created a curious model of capitalism without risk.
In Brazil, the companies that pay attention to the problem are few and when they invest in innovation, in reality they invest much more in tangible assets, like machines and equipment. On the other side, only now, after a dramatic outcry in the press, the country proposes a program to capacitate the INPI, the institute responsible for the sector, that since the beginning of the new government has remained around one year and a half without a confirmed president. The problem of the INPI is rather chronic and one of its sources is the sophism that the industrial property is a matter of interest only to the Great Powers, when it is the cause and not the effect of the richness of a country. The industrial property is a catapult for growth, useful mostly to the small and the medium companies. Treating it inadequately Brazil frustrates its researchers and entrepreneurs, loses the inventive capacity and the markets, besides causing the displacement of scientists and people with entrepreneurial capacity to countries where their work will be better paid.
