After a hiatus of eight years, the Innovation Survey (PINTEC) is set to return in the form of a triennial review of the extent and intensity of innovation actions among Brazilian companies, and the dynamics of private-sector investment in research and development (R&D). PINTEC, a survey conducted by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), began in the year 2000 and quickly became a reference for academic studies and public policies on business innovation, though the background series has not been updated since 2017. This will be the eighth survey, now based on information from 2023, 2024, and 2025 disclosed by dozens of thousands of industries and service companies with a minimum of ten employees. Data collection is set to commence in May next year, with the final results to be published in 2027.
The questionnaire, still in the validation phase, will be based on new methods, such as the inclusion of more types of innovation activities. Previous editions looked at product innovation—new merchandise or service launches on the market or the company portfolio, and process innovation, defined as the implementation of production technologies or methods. The new methodology will broaden this scope, and when evaluating company efforts and spending on R&D, will now consider “business process innovations,” adding two new categories to technological processes: the first is marketing innovation, which covers the implementation of new or refined techniques for the promotion and sale of products and services; the other is organizational innovation—the application of new ideas and working methods capable of enhancing efficiency in management and competitiveness among companies, with impacts on their financial results.
This expansion should increase the overall innovation rate, which reflects the proportion of companies deemed to be innovative in Brazil. In the 2017 edition, this rate was 33.6% of a total 116,962 private and public Brazilian companies associated to the industrial, selected services, and electricity and gas sectors—this percentage of companies, according to the survey, had applied some kind of innovation to products or processes.
The discontinuation of PINTEC was primarily due to budget limitations. Early editions of the survey were funded by the Brazilian Funding Authority for Studies and Projects (FINEP), an agency linked to the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation (MCTI), but the 2017 survey depended exclusively on resources from the IBGE, competing with the dozens of other surveys that their technical body conducts. The aging of concepts and methods also weighed on the interruption. In 2018 the Oslo Manual, the leading international guide for industry collection and use of data on innovation, underwent alterations, with the incorporation of marketing and organizational innovations, for example.
It was necessary to remodel the questionnaire for the 2020 survey in line with the conceptual changes and to achieve compatibility with international data; given the severely restricted budget, this was considered infeasible, according to economist Fernanda Vilhena, of the IBGE Unit for Structural and Thematic Statistics on Companies, and one of the PINTEC leads. “There weren’t the financial or personnel resources to conduct the survey at that time, with implementation of the necessary changes, but we never gave up on PINTEC,” she says. “Fortunately we were able to reconstruct the institutional mechanisms to make it happen.”
According to MCTI executive secretary Luis Fernandes, the resumption of PINTEC will be essential for guiding public investments in innovation. “The lack of more detailed information on investment, research, development, and innovation in Brazil is a tragedy for public policy,” he stated on announcing the survey’s return. Fernandes was one of the engineers of efforts to resuscitate PINTEC, seeking new ways to fund it. This time, it will not rely on the IBGE budget—the survey will be produced with resources from the Brazilian National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development (FNDCT), provided by FINEP, with the support of scholarship holders from the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).
During the eight-year period, Brazil was deprived of detailed indicators on its innovation activities. “Unfortunately, the government ceased to record information on investments which are increasingly important for driving competitiveness among companies and in Brazil generally,” says João Carlos Ferraz, of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) Economics Institute. He explains that innovation investments and results are not easy to measure, and the development of a methodology capable of doing so has mobilized specialists on the theme over the last 60 years. “Without PINTEC data, the government’s capacity for creating and monitoring evidence-based innovation policies is reduced.”
The hiatus did not go so far as to constitute a complete statistical blackout because, during this time, IBGE engaged in an initiative to generate a set of basic indicators on innovation. In 2022, funded by the Brazilian Industrial Development Agency (ABDI), with academic support from researchers at UFRJ, the Institute began a survey called PINTEC Semestral (Semiannual PINTEC). Its scope, however, was much more restricted: it was based on the application of a 20-question form, applied to some 10,000 industries with more than 100 employees. The traditional PINTEC survey collects data on three consecutive years by means of a questionnaire with more than 40 questions applied to a group of over 100,000 companies with 10 or more employees, including those in the selected services and energy sectors, in addition to industrial corporations.
PINTEC Semestral has neither the capability to measure the number of innovative countries in Brazil—start-ups with fewer than 100 employees, for example, are outside the parameters—nor the intensity of innovation that they practice, but their data are useful for estimating R&D investments by companies, as the greater part of their expenditure is concentrated on the industries with more than 100 employees surveyed. One key advantage is that the information is disclosed rapidly: three months after data collection is concluded. Despite the reference to the six-monthly period in the name, the survey generates general data on innovation just once a year, while the survey for the subsequent semester deals with specific themes such as the use of advanced digital technologies and the adoption of environmental practices by companies.
According to PINTEC Semestral, the innovation rate among extractive and transformation industries with 100 or more people employed in Brazil in 2023 was 64.6%, falling short of the figures for 2022 (68.1%) and 2021 (70.5%). The best performance was seen among machinery & equipment and chemical product industries, with an innovation rate of around 88%; the worst was in wood product manufacturing (31.2%). The results of the sixth round of PINTEC Semestral, on the adoption of advanced digital technologies, are set to be published in September 2025. Also in the second semester, data will be collected for the seventh edition on innovation activities in 2024. This six-monthly survey will then be suspended while IBGE personnel focus fully on PINTEC Trienal (triennial PINTEC) up to 2027.
