Innovation and Education
The Science without Borders and 100,000 Strong in the Americas programs are being implemented by both governments with a significant number of beneficiaries.
On the topic of innovation, ongoing partnerships with U.S. institutions must be highlighted, under the scope of MEI.
In October 2014, along with other institutions of the Industry System, CNI entered into a partnership with the Harvard Business School (HBS) to implement the Brazilian Industry Innovation for Competitiveness Program. This program is an initiative of MEI, in response to the challenges of innovation in Brazil, combining on-site activities at companies’ facilities and classroom lectures at the HBS campus with innovation project development for participating companies.
In November 2014, on the occasion of the MEI event Dialogues on Strengthening Engineering Sciences, CNI, the Euvaldo Lodi Institute (IEL) and the US Council on Competitiveness (CoC) entered into a Memorandum of Understanding for the purpose of establishing a cooperation framework in the fields of innovation, entrepreneurship and competitiveness, through mobilization and training and improvement of public policies on innovation.
Through the National Service for Industrial Training (SENAI), the Industry System is engaged in a partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), under the Industrial Liaison Program (ILP), to hold a specific event for the Brazilian business sector, the Challenge of Innovation - Thinking out of the Box with MIT. The event took place in 2015 in the context of CNI’s National Innovation Congress, in an attempt to bring different initiatives together to motivate and guide executives in charge of new product and process development at business organizations on technological trends, generating innovative solutions and academia-business cooperation, as strategic tools to energize innovation and competitiveness. Additionally, since 2014, SENAI and MIT have been conducting a 5-year joint research project, for the purpose of examining the role of SENAI’s innovation institutes in the Brazilian innovation setting, at the regional and national level, and developing support strategies for those institutes.
The Conexão Mundo [‘World Connection’] program is an initiative of the Industrial Social Service (SESI) and SENAI, developed in partnership with the NGO US-Brazil Connect, beginning in 2012. In 2015, schools from 32 cities in 21 Brazilian States took part in the program to promote fluency in the English language and cultural exchange. Through this program, the Industry System provides one-of-a-kind skills-building experiences to Brazilians, by attaching importance to the English language for the students’ personal and professional lives. In addition to supporting enhancement of English language fluency, the program nurtures intercultural relationships and is innovative in the use of social networking in education.
Main results of 2012-2015 period
