What is the propensity of firms to cooperate to innovate and at what spatial scales? An analysis of French agri-food companies over the period 2006-2008.

Summary Since the work of KLINE and ROSENBERG (1986), innovation has been considered as an interactive process with interactions facilitated when they occur between actors located in proximity. Using original data, the CIS 8 innovation survey (COMMUNITY INNOVATION SURVEY, 2006-2008), our objective in this article is to analyze the propensity of agri-food companies to cooperate in order to innovate in product or process and the geography of these partnerships, without any a priori assumption of their local character. Our results show that agri-food companies cooperate consistently to innovate in process and weakly for product innovation. On the other hand, the innovation networks are mainly regional for a minority of firms, the national level seems to be privileged. Finally, having an R&D potential and belonging to a group are two major variables in the extent of the geographical scale of cooperation.