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We investigate co-operative innovative activity in four major European countries, France, Germany, Spain and the UK, using internationally comparable firm-level data for manufacturing and service sectors. We examine the roles of knowledge flows, cost- and risk-sharing and public financial support in firms' decisions to collaborate. Our results suggest that firms which place greater value on external information flows are more likely to co-operate with the research base than with other firms and that firms facing appropriability problems are more likely to co-operate with the research base and with upstream and downstream firms than with direct competitors. We find evidence for Spain to suggest that firms collaborate to overcome risks and financial constraints. We also find that receipt of public support is positively related to undertaking collaborative innovation. In line with the focus of policy, this relationship is strongest for co-operation with the research base.co-operative innovation, spillovers, joint ventures,

The determinants of R&D are an important topic of industrial economics. The classical Schumpeterian hypotheses about the influence of size and market power have been complemented with the role played by industry determinants, such as demand pull, technological opportunity and appropriability, in determining R&D investments.However, R&D has always been considered as a whole, even though research and development are different activities with different purposes, knowledge bases, people involved and management styles. We take advantage of a new panel database of innovative Spanish firms (PITEC) to distinguish between research and development efforts of firms. We analyze the role jointly played by traditional R&D determinants in driving research and development, accounting for the differences between both activities. Results show that demand pull and appropriability have a higher effect on development, while technological opportunity is more influential for research.Differences are statistically significant, important in magnitude, and robust to the use of different indicators for demand pull, technological opportunity and appropriability and to several robustness checks. * We acknowledge support from Fundación Ramón Areces. Part of this paper was developed during the visit of A. López to the Columbia Business School at Columbia University. Errors are ours.

R&D is considered to be the main source of innovation. We argue that R&D is too broad a measure, including activities differing in purposes, culture, people, management and other features. However, empirical studies have not analyzed them separately, mainly due to the lack of data. Using firm-level data, the aim of this paper is to estimate the differentiated effect of research and development on different innovation outputs. Results show that both research and development activities are important. However, we find that development activities are more important for product innovation, while the effect of research activities is higher on process innovation. Moreover, we analyze differences by technological intensity of the sector. When analyzing product and process innovations, we find evidence supporting the existence of higher payoffs to development and, especially to research in low-tech sectors when compared with high-tech ones.

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