Track: Business Management

Abstract

This paper presents and analyzes the performance of a private nonprofit entity, called Serratec, that is a member of a Local Productive Arrangement (LPA) of Information Technology (IT) in the mountainous region in Rio de Janeiro State, Brazil, which exercises the governance of it. This article shows a single case study based on a bibliographical research and unstructured interviews with managers of Serratec. The geographic region of this LPA involves four cities and around four hundred companies of software development, mostly small and medium sized. Serratec is a part of LPA, and sixty-three of those companies are associated with Serratec, contributing financially and benefiting from it. Besides economical results, this LPA acts an important social role, training and offering first job opportunities to young people or people under social vulnerability conditions. These cities and companies of this APL are officially part of another productive arrangement of IT that involves nineteen cities in a large geographic area, that includes the capital of the state, which makes this arrangement unable to meet the demands of companies and society of the mountain region. Although it is just three years old and did not take part of the genesis of the LPA, Serratec inherited and reactivated a thirty-year history of alternating expansion and contraction phases, motivated by planned actions by the government and business representation bodies, in order to promote technology and innovation in the region. The LPA under analysis is classified as “development” stage and the governance could be called “soft”. Serratec is focused on creating conditions for companies and society to develop themselves in economic and social aspects with low environmental impact.