Conversão do conhecimento: estudo de caso em incubadora universitária de empreendimentos de economia solidária

Abstract

The solidarity economy is a way of economic organization and social practice relatively recent. The universities incubators, when working with the population that is most affected by the ills of an unequal society, contribute on a well known way of solidarity economy initiatives, the popular cooperatives. These incubators, for being part of a line of university extension, share knowledge between the academy and the popular sectors and, for this to be socialized on a uniform way for the incubated groups, must be disseminated, managed and shared within the technical crew of these incubators. Given the importance of creation, usage and sharing of knowledge generated by technological incubators of solidarity economy entrepreneurship located in Brazilian universities, this paper aimed to systematize and analyze the knowledge conversion in a university incubator of solidarity economy entrepreneurship. The process of knowledge conversion has been studied within the Regional Incubator of Popular Cooperatives of the Federal University of São Carlos and for its development, as well as an extensive literature review, theses and dissertations database consultation, query and analysis of documents from this incubator, interviews have been realized in order to characterize the knowledge conversions identified in the activities of the executive coordinators of the incubator, using the model of knowledge conversion proposed by Nonaka and Takeuchi (socialization, externalization, combination and internalization). The result of this study of case allowed to identify that the way of organization of those incubators allows and incentives the creation and sharing of knowledge, considering the self-managed format, the values of solidarity economy and the characteristics present in this kind of organization, provide a greater democratization of the knowledge produced, contributing to the conversion of knowledge. On the other hand, due to their different characteristics from other types of organization, it becomes necessary the use of appropriate ways that ensure that the produced knowledge is stored, aiming it sharing as: an easier access to documents and the produced knowledge; create mechanisms to store published works in the repositories and to enhance the internalization of the full reports.