The aim of this paper is to analyze the innovating effort of the Brazilian industrial firms, which comprises manufacturing and mining activities. Why do Brazilian industrial firms differ strongly in their effort to innovate? Our hypothesis is that these differences in firms' behavior to innovate come from the huge sectoral technological heterogeneity and firms' technological segmentation. The sectoral heterogeneity is due to not only to the structural expected differences between sectors in their propensity to innovate but also to the specific gap differences between the Brazilian sectors to the technological frontier. And the segmentation between firms is due to the strong differences in their competitive internal resources related to their capital origin and foreign trade insertion once already controlled by sector market structure and firm's size. The methodological procedures to test this hypothesis are multivariate analysis to characterize the pool of variables and Probit model to verify the relation between the decision to innovate and patterns of innovating behavior. The database is the micro-data of the Technological Innovation Survey (PINTEC) and the Yearly Industrial Survey (PIA) of the Brazilian Statistical and Geography Bureau (IBGE). The main results showed evidences to confirm the hypothesis that different innovation patterns are related to technological heterogeneity of sectors and technological segmentation of firms.
