Resumo

HERNANDEZ GIRON,, José de la Paz; DOMINGUEZ HERNANDEZ, María Luisa  e  CABALLERO CABALLERO, Magdaleno. Innovación de producto y aprendizaje dirigido en alfarería en Oaxaca, México. Revista de Ciencias Sociales [online]. 2005, vol.11, n.2, pp.213-228. ISSN 1315-9518.

In the pottery sector, skills and the learning of techniques are developed in a family environment, where knowledge is shared and innovation is a very slow process. In order to accelerate this process an experiment was applied to two groups (External elements and local artisans), an iterative process was established and a learning process, where the test of the innitial hypotheses lead to consequences that were compared with previous data, and the discrepacies lead to modifications in the initial process. This resulted in a second hypothesis, this process was repeated until a new product was developed. The field work was carried out over nine months in Santa María Atzompa, a municipality in Oaxaca State. The results show that today artisans are more willing to change, they feel more sure of themselves, they show a great commitment and they take more risks. With the new process they reduced production costs and made new better quality products, which increased the sales prices, and incomes and well-being of the artisans.

Palavras-chave : Innovation; product development; pottery; technology adoption; learning.