The role of firm and national level factors in fostering R&D cooperation: a cross country comparison

This paper explores the factors that affect firms’ propensity to engage in R&D\r\ncooperation using a CIS-3 sample of innovative firms located in seven European countries.\r\nIt performs the analysis separately for the manufacturing and the service sectors in order to\r\nexamine whether there are specific features that shape the service firms’ R&D cooperative\r\nbehaviour in particular ways. Differences between the manufacturing and the service\r\nsectors in the cooperative behaviour of firms become much more evident once an appropriate\r\nstructure of endogeneity is determined. We compare different countries because, so\r\nfar, the empirical evidence produced comes from single countries or countries that are all\r\nquite homogeneous in terms of industrial structure. Instead, we consider also countries,\r\nsuch as transition economies, that have not been analyzed so far. We find that public\r\nsubsidies positively affect firms’ propensity to engage in R&D cooperation in all countries,\r\nbut they seem particularly important to enhance firms’ cooperativeness in the service\r\nsector. Implications for innovation policy are examined.