Prioritization of potential agreements between science, technology and innovation institutions: Prospective analysis for sorting countries according to interest areas of Brazilian army from the scientific and technological perspectives

This paper presents a new quantitative prospective methodology for decision support in the field of Science, Technology and Innovation (STI). It defines a priority order for potential agreements between STI institutions from the quantitative modeling of certain specific features based on internal priority criteria of the organization seeking specific partnerships and attributes of potential partners. The suggested prospective analysis is based on weights of quantitative parameters taken from scientific literature, patents and business publications of the candidate partners, also weighted by sociocultural criteria of proximity between institutions. The final result is a listing of potential partnerships ordered according to indexes computed from weighting the partial scores obtained for each measurement criteria. A case study is presented in which research areas and lines prioritized by the Brazilian Army are used as the basis for defining a set of criteria to evaluate a group of countries in order to establish those most appropriate for cooperation agreements aiming at scientific and technological development.