The main objective of the research was to prospect the state of the art in the management of innovation and port governance in order to identify models and practices in the different ports around the world, through the international scientific bases Web of Science and Scopus, which allowed the exploratory study. More specifically, we sought to raise the level of development in the field of scientific production in the areas of innovation management and port governance. Scientometric methods were applied to prepare graphs that reflect the treatment of data and information generated from selected publications, as well as the search in the patent database of the National Institute of Industrial Property – INPI. In general, a gap in scientific production related to the researched field of knowledge was evidenced, which may be associated with the low level of port innovations which, therefore, may also reverberate in the search for patent protection. Thus, it is recommended that scientific productions be encouraged to support innovations in the port sector, in addition to incremental innovations, playing a prominent role in the collaborative action of agents in the port cluster and scientific, technological and innovation institutions (ICTs).