Purpose The purpose of this paper is to better understand whether firm cooperation and absorptive capacity foster success in seeking public financial support for innovation activities and, by doing so, how they contribute to innovation output. Design/methodology/approach The authors therefore extend the existing literature focusing on the effects of cooperation and absorptive capacity on specific public financial support for innovation activities in Portuguese firms from local or regional government, central administration and the European Union by using available data from the Community Innovation Survey CIS 2010 and the application of logistic regression models. The empirical analysis enabled a better understanding of the positive relationship of the variables that determine the form of public financial support in the integration of incentives within firms to stimulate innovation. Findings Therefore, as the level of absorptive capacity in Portuguese firms increases, so does the demand for benefits from public financial support to stimulate innovation from the European Union also increases. The same analysis, now considering the determinant cooperation, notes the positive effects of institutional sources of information and cooperation, in the propensity for seeking public financial incentives from the Central Administration and the European Union. As for internal information and cooperation sources, they are positively related to the integration of incentive measures from the local or Regional Administration and Central Administration. Originality/value The paper presents results that allow us to propose some suggestions that both the firms and those responsible for the implementation of public policies can undertake to increment innovation performance.

This paper aims to identify and analyze the main limiting factors of innovation performance in terms of product and process innovation. The limiting factors to innovation make the innovation process of a firm difficult, which influences its innovation performance. The goal of this essay is to develop a theoretical support based on current reference approaches, corroborated by empirical support, which allows for the identification and analysis of the factors that restrict innovation activity and innovation performance.The database is extracted from the Community Innovation Survey -CIS 2010, which was conducted under the responsibility of the Office of Planning, Strategy, Evaluation and International Relations/Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education (GPEARI/MCTES), in collaboration with the National Statistics Institute (INE), under the supervision of EUROSTAT. We have developed a logistic regression model that highlights the barriers to innovation and identifies the factors that limit innovation performance. The analysis suggests that several barriers to innovation influence the Innovative performance of Portuguese firms. These results may be attributed to the fact that perceived barriers stimulate the firm to overcome these difficulties, which promotes the internal propensity to innovate. The most significant barriers identified in the study are the following: high innovation costs and perceived uncertainties in both the demand and market for new goods and services. This study shows that firms that do not have either qualified personnel to carry out innovation activities or sufficient market information are less likely to innovate than firms that do not experience these difficulties.

Purpose-This paper aims to analyses barriers as a determinant of ongoing or abandoned innovation activities. The literature exploits barriers as the nature of innovation and its influence on firm's. The main focus is the Portuguese SMEs and the impacts that act as barriers in the development of innovation activities. Design/methodology/approach-The database was obtained through the Community Innovation Survey 2010 (CIS 2010) that was coordinated by EUROSTAT. In this sense, a logistic regression model is proposed, which makes it possible to analyse the relations between three or more variables, depending on whether the relationship is one of dependence or interdependence, thus allowing the application of distinct statistical techniques, using 6,160 firms Findings-There are several sources of information that are associated with the development of innovation projects. Practical implications-The importance of barriers to the development of innovation activities, as well as it being a decisive factor in the impediment to and abandon of the same, was noted. Originality/value-This study also demonstrated that each case is different and that a barrier in one firm can at the same time be a window of opportunity for another firm.

The aim of this paper is to better understand whether cooperation, absorptive capacity and public financial support for innovation activities, how they influence the innovative performance of Portuguese enterprise. The literature review focuses the importance of these three factors both drivers as the limiters process of business innovation, influencing the innovative performance of enterprise. Based on a review of the literature, hypotheses are formulated, which are tested with secondary data resources from the Community Innovation Survey 2010. This questionnaire was implemented under the supervision of EUROSTAT. The method used is the logistic regression model. The results obtained confirm that the implementation of cooperation with partners belonging to internal sources of business has a significant influence on the innovations achieved at the level of both products and processes.

ENTEPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION AND ENTREPRENEURIAL INTENTION: THE CASE OF PORTUGAL1 Entrepreneurship promotes job creation, increase of competitiveness and new forms of economic development and growth of countries or regions. The research aims to understand how it has influenced the intention and entrepreneurial skills of the trainees of the project Apreender 3.0. It is important to examine how various factors, including entrepreneurship education, family background, prior experience/vocational training and propensity to take the risks, will condition the entrepreneurial intention of the respondents of this study. Based on these variables, we formulated four hypotheses. For this empirical analysis of research hypotheses, we used primary data in a form of a sample of 150 responses, collected through the online survey application. We opted for the method of the Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), also called Common Factor Analysis (CFA), which can provide important information on the multivariate structure of this study, identifying the theoretical constructs. The obtained results allowed us to conclude that the entrepreneurship education and propensity to take risks influence positively the entrepreneurial intention. As for the factors of family background and prior experience/ vocational training, the research did not provide satisfactory results that would allow us to confirm their influence on the entrepreneurial intention.