The Brazilian software industry's production processes and exports

Abstract

The supposition that issues about quality are inherent to the conquest and maintenance of firm competitiveness motivated this study. Many factors lead to the assumption that the usage of quality practices would feature a meaningful contribution in international business – and this concept could be applied to the software market. This research evaluates the influence of production processes metrics in the Brazilian software industry export performance. For the analysis, 488 companies of the Brazilian software industry were selected from SEPIN/MCT database. The aim of this study was to evaluate the correlation between technological capability, i.e. the number of software certificates obtained by the companies, and its export behavior. The level of software certification does not seem to be significantly related to export performance. The paper discusses this finding and other results related to the competitiveness and perspectives for the Brazilian software industry.