International partnerships for building STI capabilities: insights from centres of excellence in Latin America

During the last decade, some countries have promoted large-scale international partnerships aiming to strengthen their domestic STI capabilities. Under the scheme of centres of excellence, Chile and Peru promoted partnerships with foreign universities and research and technology organizations, expecting them to support local actors by collaborating in R&D, facilitating access to knowledge and technology available globally (bridging role), and building local capabilities in knowledge transfer and innovation. Adopting a host-country perspective we explore how international partners have contributed to fulfilling those expected outcomes. As an empirical result, we provide a taxonomy of the roles of foreign actors within international partnerships aiming to support domestic STI capabilities in developing countries. Our findings show that international partners have fulfilled limited roles compared to what was expected and provide some explanations for it. This study also provides some policy recommendations and suggests a research agenda to support the proposed taxonomy.