Latecomer firms and the development ok knowledge networks: The case of petrobras in Brazil

Abstract

This paper addresses the development of knowledge networks within learning and innovation systems in late industrialising countries. It examines the development of a firmcentred knowledge network in the case of Petrobras, the Brazilian oil company, over more than thirty years between the late-1960s and the early-2000s. The paper demonstrates that there were continuous shifts in the properties of Petrobras’ knowledge networks through time. There was a clear trend in the properties of knowledge networks to evolve towards increasing intentionality, complexity, diversity and complementarity. A key contribution of the paper is also conceptual and methodological: the development and operationalisation of an original typology of knowledge network properties and its application in conjunction with retrospective historical methods to track out organisational evolution over the long period since the late-1960s.