The determinants of inter-firms R&D cooperation and partner selection. A literature overview

Firms which want to augment their technological capabilities can do it through in-house efforts or external R&D activities, such as R&D contracting or R&D cooperation. In this paper I focus on R&D cooperation, developing an originally structured and detailed review of its main determinants with a particular attention to the selected cooperation partners. The main contribution of this paper is to highlight points in which literature has not still achieved clear cut conclusions on the factors affecting firms' propensity to engage in R&D cooperations with other firms or science institutions, suggesting open fields of research.