Collaboration Patterns and Product Innovation in the Basque Country. Does a Firm’s Nationality Matter?

More and more, the ability to innovate can be considered as an explanatory factor in determining the long-term potental of frms to be compettve. Therefore, it is of increasing importance to understand the critcal success factors behind notably radical product innovatons. The present paper explores the yields and results in terms of a series of compettveness indicators that domestc and foreign frms in the Basque Country obtain from technological collaboraton practces. In partcular, the study seeks to assess di?erences in the way these two groups of frms organize their technological partnerships (in terms of the geographical spread of partners with whom they cooperate and the purposes for which they deploy collaboraton: for commercial or science/knowledge generaton), and the comparatve di?erences that stem from their respectve practces. The study uses frm level data from the Euskadi Innovaton Survey 2011, for frms located in the Basque Country. The paper fnds that (a) technological collaboratons comprising di?erent types of partners have the greatest positve impact on innovaton novelty, and (b) when looking at the frm’s natonality, collaboraton strategies developed by foreign frms have a higher impact on achieving novel innovaton. We posit that the higher degree of product innovaton we observe among foreign frms – as opposed to domestc frms in the Basque Country – relies on their ability to beneft from both inter-regional partnerships and commercial-based networks for the sake of innovaton purposes.