Innovation opportunities in the Brazilian sugar-energy sector

Brazil is the second largest producer of ethanol in the world and it has the most competitive raw material: the sugarcane. Even though this industry has undergone great productivity gains, it still offers promising innovation opportunities. Some of these opportunities include second-generation ethanol, biogas and biochemicals. Seeking to address the main difficulties faced by the Brazilian sugar-energy sector in terms of innovation, the objective of this work is to analyze the innovation opportunities in the Brazilian sugar-energy sector, as well as their main drivers and inhibitors, from the Innovation System Agents (ISA) perspective according to the Sectoral System of Innovation (SSI) approach. Therefore, 17 experts were interviewed, and an analytical framework was developed to analyze the innovation opportunities. It was verified that the difficulties to innovate occur due to inhibitors present along all dimensions of the sectoral system. To solve this, the creation of an ecosystem with players from other sectoral systems was suggested.