R&D collaboration networks in Spain

This paper is the first draft of a series of analysis conducted within the inter-firm collaboration focus group of the OECD/NIS project. Its aim is to provide a basic Framework for our understanding of the empirical issues tackled on inter-firm collaboration and more precisely on product development collaboration.

The specific target of the activities conducted by the focus group has been to develop comparative knowledge, between different countries, on the way that firms related one each other and interact in the innovation process. Since there is not a single tool, at international level, for conducting such specific analysis, our major interest was in developing and implementing a survey on product development collaboration based on the DISKO questionnaire, previously implemented by the lead country (Denmark).

The strategy followed by the Spanish team has been two-fold: First, to generate a basic frame for understanding the concrete empirical issue to be tackle with a new survey. In order to accomplish such task we decided to analyze in deep the results of the first systematic and accurate measure of the innovation in Spanish firms: the 1994 Technological Innovation survey (Encuesta sobre Innovación Tecnológica en las Empresas 1994).

Secondly, to contribute to the preparatory works of the new ad hoc survey on "product development collaboration". In this domain most of the Spanish action has attempted to increase the comparability of the draft questionnaire proposed by our Danish colleagues. At the time of preparation of the first draft of this document the negotiation of the final core questions of the new version of the "product collaboration questionnaire" is almost over, but still we did not have started the process of implementation of the questionnaire to the firms. Fieldwork of the Spanish survey will be develop in January 1998.

Because of the planning of our research activities, most of the content of this draft report refers only to the information and analysis linked to the first approach taken to the problem of innovation collaboration, and based in the Spanish Innovation survey.