Cooperation for innovation: evidence from southern European countries

Innovation today is an important means for firms to achieve competitive advantage, but few firms recognise the importance of cooperation in developing innovative processes. This paper is a study of cooperation in innovation in southern Europe (Portugal, Spain, Greece and Italy) and analyses how R%D, incoming spillovers, public support, appropriability of innovation, financial constraints on innovation, firm size and sector can contribute to cooperative behaviour in firms. The literature review demonstrates that cooperation encompasses sharing R%D costs and risks, reducing duplication spillovers, internalisation and introducing other benefits. This paper uses Community Innovation Survey (CIS 4) micro-data for the four southern European countries in question and applies a logistic regression in order to study cooperative behaviour in innovation. We believe that the results relative to these countries will provide important clues as to different arrangements of cooperation between firms and will highlight innovation patterns between them.