La innovación en Antioquia estudiada mediante la simulación basada en agentes

Innovation in Antioquia studied through agent-based simulation

Julián Alberto Uribe Gómez

When talking about the concept of innovation in a region, as in the case of the department of Antioquia, without a doubt, it should be directed to a more widely accepted and widespread concept such as Regional Innovation Systems (for its acronym RIS). Thus, to talk about SRIs, it must initially be defined as the infrastructure that supports innovation in the productive structure of the region, which is mainly formed by a network of relationships between the different entities or agents of public and private nature that interact in the region of Antioquia, with the objective of working from their different capacities to promote innovation.

The general structure of an SRI is defined as presented in Figure 1, where the bidirectional relationship of the 4 main entities that compose it is observed:

• Explorers: Universities and research groups.

• Exploiters: SMEs and large companies.

• Catalysts: Technology support and development centers, transfer facilitators.

• Government: Policy makers.

The theoretical development of RISs has been influenced by different schools of thought such as, for example, the school of evolutionary economics, institutional economics, new regional economies, learning economics, innovation economics and network theory (Quintero & Robledo, 2013)

Historically, the RIS of Antioquia has been developing for more than two decades after the implementation of local initiatives considering the key agents of the process as the basis of its construction. Already in the eighties, Antioquia had great strengths and a certain structure of science and technology in the academic, productive and public sectors and, for those years, it was raised as a challenge to develop a policy of science, technology and innovation (CTI) that It will revolve around the interaction between the agents.

In the 1990s, with the change in Colombia's political constitution, some attributions and functions were granted to the regions to take autonomy in decisions, to promote the development of capacities and institutions, as well as a basic infrastructure for a system of Science and innovation

In the last decade the university-company-state committee is created and linked to the regional competitiveness councils and the CTI departmental council. This makes Antioquia achieve an important development in terms of innovation among the different agents of the RIS (Llisterri & Pietrobelli, 2011)

From all of the aforementioned, the continuous and relational behavior of the RIS must then be understood, conceptualizing the system as a complex network, this implies the use of computational tools to simulate their different innovation dynamics, therefore, it has been used the NETLOGO platform to study these continuous structures and the various scenarios.

Mainly, the model (see figure 2) has two input variables that are the percentage of R&D and the number of agents (Companies, Universities, Transfer Centers and Policy Generators) in the system, and as output variables , the model has the number of scientific publications and patents generated over a period of time, as indicators of the generation of innovation activities within the region.

According to the simulations carried out with the model (see figure 3), it has been concluded that the greatest generation of innovation indicators occur in the Medellín area, since most of the agents immersed in the system converge there. Other agents to a lesser extent such as SMEs are outside the Medellin area, where some of them do not participate as active actors in the innovation process.

In addition to this, incremental results in the indicators are due to directly proportional relationships to greater clusters and interrelationships among agents, as well as to a greater number of explorers participating in the system and to a greater extent greater percentages of R&D in the region.