SUMMARY
Universities play an important role in economic development and in the network to improve innovation in organizations. Besides the acknowledged influence in innovation to the outside, is important to consider the ability of universities to innovate on the inside too, in its process and choices. Therefore, this study aimed to analyze the academic research about innovation in universities, considering Brazilians journals in the period of 2001-2010. The research was exploratory and bibliographic, using thirty five journals classified by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) in the levels A1, A2, B1, B2 e B3. Between those, sixteen presented the total of thirty five articles about the main subject. The results revealed that the biggest part of articles is published in only five journals, mostly into evaluation level B3. Most of those were writing by two authors, usually from different institutions, and there is a growing tendency in the number of publications, especially in the evaluation level B3. The most frequent subject was de University-Industry relationships, with lower participation from the subjects: patenting, incubators, Center for Technological Innovation (CTI), academic spin-offs, technology transfer, and innovation adoption. The study concludes that almost all of the publications deals with the perspective of innovations produced by university for external environment, and the innovations for the internal environment have poorest publication, which leads on to the need of development of an innovation culture in universities, in order to improve its innovative and entrepreneurial abilities.