Access of cooperatives to the Tax Incentive for innovation in Brazil

The objective of the present paper is to elucidate the practices performed by farming cooperatives regarding the tax, accounting and administrative management linked to the Tax Incentive for Innovation (TII). In this sense, the relation between the tax regime of cooperatives and access to TII was investigated. For a better understanding of this, a research of qualitative nature, whose investigation method was the single case study, was performed, in which the analysis unit was a Brazilian Agroindustry Cooperatives Central. Such Central comprehends a group of 30 agroindustry cooperatives and has the largest industrial park of powdered milk in Latin America. Besides that, such organization houses Research & Development (R&D) department. As a result, it was inferred that the policies that regiment the incentive for innovation confront the nature of cooperatives, decreasing the capacity such organizations have in the appropriation of this policy. Thus, there is a reducer factor in the participation of cooperatives in TII. Hence, it is suggested a debate involving the diverse actors in the innovation system, in which cooperatives are involved, to decide if such reducer factor must be overcome or accepted. Finally, the tax, accounting and administrative management that routinely operates in the Central was able to respond to the new specific procedures related to the use of the policy in debate, without the implementation of new processes.