FGV EBAPE (Escola Brasileira de Administração Pública e de Empresas da Fundação Getulio Vargas)
The current studies on innovation do not consider or tend to ignore innovation in Public Enterprises (PE) and their
effects on other organizations. Recent evidence shows that PE are not necessarily inferior to their private counterparts
(Kowalski, Büge, Sztajerowska, & Egeland, 2013). This article investigates the determinants of innovation in PE of
Ecuador, for the first time, through an empirical study. It identifies internal and external determinants of innovation
and the effect on the probability of innovation in PE. In addition, the variable environmental care is included as
an internal determinant; this variable has not been analyzed in previous work on innovation in PE. The data used
come from the Survey of Activities of Science, Technology, and Innovation of Ecuador (ACTI) published in 2014.
The proposed model is estimated by logit linear regression. The results show that there are determinants that have
a positive effect on the probability of innovation and they are of two types: internal (workers training, technology
acquisition and environmental care) and external (government, through the support program for quality management).
