Tecnologías de propósito general y políticas tecnológicas en la semiperiferia: el caso de la nanotecnología en la Argentina

Abstract

At the end of the 1990s, the U.S. government decided to start promoting nanotechnology as the next general purpose technology (GPT). Influenced by this tendency, a group of Latin American countries, Argentina among them, decided to take the first steps in this new field of knowledge. This paper explores the evolution of nanotechnology in Argentina as an example of a semiperipheral country that aims at developing institutional, organizational and scientific and technological capabilities to promote a GPT in its stage of “irruption”. According to its relevant local actors’ discourse, the main goal was to improve the competitiveness of the Argentine economy. However, our analysis displays the weakness of the organizational capabilities that are needed to meet the level of complexity involved in the irruption stage of a new GPT. This paper suggests the inconvenience of using the notion of GPT for a semi-peripheral economy and discusses an alternative approach related to the concept of “catching up”.