• innovation
• R&D cooperation
• services

This thesis is composed by three chapters dealing with the determinants of R&D cooperation in the manufacturing and the service sectors. The first chapter provides a literature review on the factors that mainly affect firms' propensity to engage in R&D cooperation and highlights points which literature has not still achieved consistent results.
Moving on these points, the second chapter provides the analysis of R&D cooperation determinants in the Italian manufacturing and service sectors using the fourth Community Innovation Survey data (2002-2004). This analysis shows some important differences, between the manufacturing and the service sectors, in the cooperative behaviour of Italian firms. First, the appropriability of innovation results increases the probability of cooperation but this effect is much more evident in the manufacturing sector than in the services. Second, subsidies for innovation have the effect to increase the probability of cooperation in particular in the services. Since this last results could have some important policy implications if confirmed in other scenarios, the last part of the thesis try to understand if this positive relationship between public funding and R&D cooperation is consistent across countries and if it is particularly relevant in the service sector, as the analysis of the Italian case would suggests. This analysis, in fact, should help policy makers to acquire a better understanding of national innovative behaviours and to develop policies that can shift firms' capabilities toward greater collaboration and innovation activity.
The empirical analysis of this last chapter is performed using the third European Community Innovation Surveys (1998-2000) for seven countries. Results show a positive impact of subsidies for innovation on R&D cooperation. This impact is often larger in the service sector than in the manufacturing one. However, the most evidently emerging result is that innovation subsidies increase, in particular, R&D cooperations between firms and universities or research institutes. This result is consistent and highly significant for all the countries analyzed, thus leaving room for policy implications.