The Brazilian textile industry has been facing fierce competition from low cost imports coming from China and other Far East countries. In order to keep their ability to compete in the local market, Brazilian companies have adopted a product differentiation strategy. This has been achieved by developing new products with better quality at lower costs, characteristics to be provided by new technology in manufacturing equipment. Usually, this new technology is transferred to Brazilian firms by international equipment manufacturers. Hence this paper aims at contributing to increase the competitiveness of Brazilian textile companies by supporting them with theoretical knowledge and practical guidance to allow them to improve the effectiveness of their technology transfer (TT) processes. To this end, we developed an exploratory evaluation of four fabric production companies where technology transfer projects have been implemented, using the Stage-gate model proposed by Jagoda, Maheshwari e Lonseth (2010) as a normative framework. As a result of such analysis, similarities and dissimilarities between the technology transfer practices employed by the four companies evaluated were identified. Also, it was possible to demonstrate that the utilization of a TT process based on a Stage-gate framework could be employed to implement significant improvement in the TT practices used by Brazilian textile companies, which could help them face the fierce competition imposed by the low cost imports from Far East countries.
Technology transfer; Stage-gate model; Textile industry
