Análisis Crítico al componente de Verdad en la Ley de Víctimas.

Despite the positive effects derived from collaborating internationally, it is a matter of concern to witness that few research teams actually collaborate internationally in Colombia. In fact, this clearly is an account of a market-failure situation that justifies government intervention. In this sense, it is important to note that governments may have different levels of influence to positively affect research team performance. For example, they cannot influence some of the characteristics discussed here such as team scientific specialization, their affiliation to a specific sector or institution, their location, or their age. Governments may or may not be able to influence team size, or their internal dynamism. By contrast, they may make substantial contributions to team output and ability to contribute to local knowledge by facilitating international collaboration or by encouraging higher standards of member quality. For these reasons, and based on the impacts these two variables have for explaining team bibliographic production and team orientation, there should be aggressive policies stimulating both international research collaboration and the strengthening of S&T human capital in developing countries.

The understanding of what explains international collaboration is an important input for the design of policies in S&T. In this sense, we found that the number of PhDs, the number of projects active, team age, and the characteristics of the team leader were the factors with the greatest impact on the decision of collaborating internationally. This leads to the conclusion that what Colombian teams need is more support to engage members with PhD, more funding for the performance of R&D activities, more stability for their members, and leaders able to write well in a second language and with foreign education.

More importantly, and according to the interviews done, the main reason why Colombian teams do not collaborate internationally is because they lack direct public support for such activities. Public policies could include tools to encourage physical interaction among scientists, network creation, network membership and operation, access to external information, and diplomatic support among other alternatives. Several ways governments can foster international research collaboration include:

1. Promoting the participation of local teams in international projects

2. Supporting workshop participation by local scientists, when they are held overseas 3. Supporting international scientific workshops organized by local research

institutions

4. Funding international dissemination of information related to local scientific activities and communities (through the web, the internationalization of local scientific journals, or the countries’ diplomatic representations overseas)

5. Funding local dissemination of information related to international scientific activities (including translation of relevant work into local language) and communities

6. Sponsoring courses of foreign languages for local researchers

7. Supporting the negotiation of collaborative agreements between institutions 8. Sponsoring international education at the graduate level

9. Training local researchers on international cooperation for the performance of science, technology and innovation activities

10. Supporting international research internships and networks

11. Sponsoring local access to international databases (both Journal and Patent databases)

12. Encouraging university-government-enterprise partnerships

13. Training local scientists and engineers in intellectual property rights issues 14. Supporting programs oriented at attracting foreign researchers and national

researchers living overseas to work in or with local institutions

15. Promoting workshops where the international research collaboration is the object of study

For this goal, public funding for these activities should dramatically increase. There is no information on government expenditure on the internationalization of local S&T available, but it is easy to guess that the budget assigned to facilitate international research collaboration in Colombia is meager.

A second policy implication of the findings of this research refers to the strategy of supporting local research teams as the basic structural unit of the national S&T system. As discussed through the dissertation, research teams are an incontestable need for the advancement of science and technology as they are the building blocks of the national innovation system. For these reasons, they should be seen as the target of R&D policies oriented toward the development of local scientific and technological capabilities. For international research collaboration to positively impact the local system, it has to be mediated or channeled, by the local units of research and development. In this context, research teams act as the bridges between the society and the external world, which is full of opportunities somewhat unexploited by local communities in developing countries.

For this purpose, a strategic research team policy that takes into account their structure, dynamism and potential should be developed. If there are structural deficiencies that prevent teams from capturing the benefits of international research collaboration, a set of tools should be designed to increase their readiness and ability to become

multipliers of such benefits.

For instance, research teams in developing countries need to increase their absorptive capacity (Cohen and Levinthal 1990) of international research collaboration. To do that, it is necessary to combine human capital policies with the support to local infrastructure for research and with policies oriented at encouraging the diffusion of ideas and skills in Colombia.

As for the policies oriented at increasing teams’ quality is concerned, the analyses showed that a large portion of team productivity and of teams’ ability to contribute to local knowledge is explained by the number of PhD holders a team has, and that these

effects rise almost linearly. In some cases, the effects of having PhDs were larger than that of collaborating internationally.

For this reason, Colombian government should make an important improvement and raise its support to researchers’ education and training. In fact, in Colombia less than 15% of the researchers are PhD holders, and less than 62% of the teams have a PhD graduate. Colombia has one of the lowest ratios of PhD graduates per million inhabitants in the region (less than 1.5 per million a year). Colombian expenditure in PhD education is one of the lowest in the region. Without such human capital, both team productivity and team ability to contribute to local knowledge would remain at the low levels they

currently are.

However, the study also found that the number of doctorates a team has was negatively associated with teams’ ability to contribute to local knowledge. This implies a trade-off that suggests the need to evaluate the pertinence of the graduate education received by Colombian students. More investigation in this respect is worth doing, however as the study also shows that such negative effects tends to reverse among teams with 9 members with PhD, when the effects become positive at an increasing rate. Similarly interesting, a matter that deserves further investigation refers to the curvilinear effects found in the size of teams, their age, and the number of R&D projects active they manage. These effects, implies the identification of specific characteristics a team should have in order to be productive and relevant.

In sum, the combination of the fact that few teams collaborate internationally; that there are high opportunity costs associated with not collaborating internationally; that there a potentially high transaction costs associated with managing international

collaboration; that there might be low levels of team absorptive capacity; that there seems to be a lack of strategic selection processes in place; and that teams tend to overlook south-south collaboration results in a clear justification for government intervention in developing countries.