From Dependency to Innovation Autonomy: The Evolution of Brazil's Innovation Ecosystem Through the Lens of the Fintech Sector

This thesis investigates how Brazil has developed an increasingly autonomous innovation ecosystem, through the analysis of its fintech sector. It examines whether Brazil is moving beyond the adoption of foreign technologies and business models towards greater domestic capacity to generate, adapt and scale innovation in response to its local needs.The study combines academic literature, secondary data and three case studies such as Nubank, Pix and PagBank. The overall findings show that Brazil’s innovation trajectory has been driven by the interaction of market gaps, entrepreneurial capabilities, proactive institutional intervention and shared digital infrastructure. The thesis argues that Brazil’s autonomy should not be understood as technological self-sufficiency, as the country remains strongly connected to global technologies, capital and knowledge networks from other countries. Rather, autonomy reflects an increasing capacity to selectively combine and adapt external resources, while developing domestic capabilities to generate and scale solutions to local challenges. The Brazilian fintech sector therefore provides us evidence of a broader transition towards a more autonomous innovation ecosystem, although some significant structural constraints continue to persist and shape its further development.