Políticas públicas na área de materiais avançados, principais características e tendências: sugestões à política de C, T & I brasileira

Abstract

In Brazil, the promotion and encouragement to the development of science, technology and innovation are constitutional premises encompassed in the article no. 218 of the Federal Constitution, and, under this framework, the field of advanced materials can be regarded as one of the most important enabling areas, whose innovation potential is emphasized. This field’s development is historically muddled up with mankind evolution, since the names of periods such as the stone and the iron ages derive from it, which provided different sorts of benefits, particularly in agriculture and war, for the population that mastered these materials. Currently, advanced materials are still a source of the interest for scholars and the private sector, since they are regarded as the foundation for the promotion of technology-based innovation and, also, because they have the potential to add value and competitive differential. When taking into consideration the efforts of the Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovations and Communications (MCTIC) in the national scientific development and the tenure of the National Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy (ENCTI 2016-2022), which has established Converging and Enabling Technologies as a priority, something that encompasses advanced materials, this work presents an analysis of the most important international public policies in the field of advanced materials, thus identifying their main characteristics, tendencies and priorities, with the intent of subsidizing the devising of a National Plan for Advanced Materials. The countries/blocks selected for analysis were the European Union, the BRIC, United States, Japan and Germany, due to their significant investment in Research and Development (R&D) and the relevance of the field of Advanced Materials as an enabling technology for innovation and economic development. Based on this study, and with the intention to get it to fit the national reality, the main suggestions presented to the managers of Science and Technology in the field of advanced materials are the following: (i) the need to establish favorable conditions for an interaction between the Academy and the Private Sector; (ii) promotion of the training of specialized human resources, geared towards technology-based entrepreneurship; (iii) an incentive to international cooperation, in order to promote a knowledge exchange to boost national technology-based companies to reach new markets abroad; (iv) a special support to future-devoted fields like aerospace and defense, energy, health and biotechnology, nanotechnology and nanomaterials; (v) a sustainable exploitation of national biodiversity, to benefit from the potential for innovation and also the discovery of new materials extracted from national biodiversity; (vi) an incentive to add value to mineral raw materials and to the exploitation of strategic minerals such as rare earths, niobium and graphene; and (vii) emphasize the need to overcome social issues in Brazil, such as poverty, low access to drinking water, malnutrition, limited access to health, improper basic sanitation, among others.