Economics and Business Administration

Resumo: Uma recente imigração de brasileiros para Estônia é revelada no presente artigo, evidenciando trajetórias dos imigrantes e o surgimento de negócios étnicos e tecnológicos. O país situa-se no seio do Mar Báltico e promove a imigração qualificada, focada na economia digital. Foi aplicado um questionário tipo survey a 65 respondentes brasileiros que vivem na Estônia, sendo complementado por oito entrevistas em profundidade com empreendedores brasileiros e artistas que se empresariam no país. Os pesquisadores apresentam as características dessa comunidade em formação e possíveis caminhos para futuros imigrantes, evidenciando aspectos dos negócios étnicos e interações dos brasileiros com a cultura estoniana, trajetórias migratórias, dificuldades enfrentadas e oportunidades levantadas por esses imigrantes.

The interaction between product innovation and companies' activities aimed at improving the energy efficiency of production facilities has been relatively little studied, but is of great relevance to society and companies given the strong focus of governments on grand challenges like climate change, green innovation technologies, and environmental problems in general. This paper utilizes the 2009 European Manufacturing Survey for the Danish subsample including 335 manufacturing firms. Through factor analysis, this paper confirms three main areas of focus of new product development: efficiency considerations, market attention, and greening of innovation. Logistic regression analysis demonstrates that while market attention is important for the development of new products, green aspects of innovation and efficiency considerations are important for production companies wanting to improve their energy efficiency. When these models are combined, the results highlight that energy efficiency moderates the effect of market attention to new product development. This paper therefore finds that aligning product innovation and energy efficiency is a complex and intertwined processfocusing on one may have indirect detrimental effects on the other. These results point to the conclusion that researchers and practitioners in innovation management have to consider more carefully the specificities and interactions of different types of products and process innovations and their environmental implications, and must formulate new, more sustainable managerial practices combining energy efficiency and product innovation.

There is a large body of literature in economics and economic geography developing theoretical and empirical work exploring innovation and economic growth processes at the local level (for recent reviews on the relevant literature see Hatakenaka , Caniëls ). Accordingly, economists and economic geographers have widely accepted that sub-national territorial layers (such as clusters, learning regions, regional systems of innovation, milieus, agglomeration economies, Marshallian industrial districts or city-regions) are suitable levels of analysis to study innovation and economic growth. Our main research interest focuses on the processes of innovation and economic growth in cities going through the transition from an industrial to knowledge based economy. Drawing on research on the socio-economic processes taking place in the last two decades we characterise this transition trough the accelerating pace of development of innovations driven by the application of knowledge to develop devices for knowledge codification and diffusion (Castells 2001), through the increased international integration of economic activities (Archibugi and Iammarino 2002) and through the establishment of a new system of industrial organization composed of decentralised networks linking vertically disintegrated nodes along the value chain (Langlois 2003). Additionally, in European post-socialist economies these processes have been accompanied by the transition to a market based economy. Accordingly, besides the challenge of keeping up with the accelerating innovation pace, with globalization forces and with the vertical disintegration in the organization of industrial value chains, economies in European post-socialist countries have faced the task of transforming their centrally-planned production systems into decentralized market systems . Against this background, and considering that cities may have different economic roles and draw on different capabilities for innovation, we are interested on studying the impacts of these socioeconomic changes on urban development in the last two decades and the way cities can prosper in this new environment. Our contribution to the conference will sketch our current efforts to design an interdisciplinary research project tackling these issues. The project should carry out comparative case studies in multiple locations, each focused on a different industrial sector. The case studies should involve quantitative and qualitative analysis at 3 levels of analysis: (i) the firm level, (ii) the city-region level and (iii) the sectoral level. The project should take into account less favored cities. The analytical framework and the main methodological issues will be presented for discussion.