Evolutionary economics is a theory that helps understand the relationship between knowledge, technology, and innovation as a driver of economic and productive development. From this theoretical approach, this document presents an explanation of the role that the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia and its Coffee Research Center, Cenicafé, played in the generation and management of knowledge related to Colombian coffee growing, and the transfer of technology. A careful bibliographical review was carried out, which subsequently allowed us to select and classify the scientific production of the Coffee Research Center, in order to identify the main fields in which the generation and application of knowledge was concentrated. The bibliographic material was classified into two categories: (a) the propositional knowledge, which refers to the scientific knowledge - scientific articles published in Cenicafé journal; and (b) the prescriptive knowledge, which refers to sets of techniques and instructions for specific applications - the documents called "technical advances", books and manuals, primers, bulletins, and brochures. Finally, the analysis of the information enabled us to conclude that, although the main technological advances incorporated in Colombian coffee growing have been oriented and promoted from the scientific and technological work of Cenicafé, the generation of scientific knowledge such as the transfer of technology were focused on the production of grain, leaving aside the aggregation of modern value through industrialization.
