Formal cooperation activities for product and process innovation in Bulgaria: go international or stay national?

Abstract

The objective of the current paper is to investigate what factors significantly influence the likelihood of an enterprise to be inclined towards formal national or international cooperations for product and process innovation. For this purpose, we develop a generalised multinomial model and test it empirically, employing a representative data set consisting of 1070 innovative Bulgarian companies surveyed in April 2006. Our main finding suggests that operating on international and EU markets and developing new products increase the propensity to be inclined towards formal international cooperations. Human capital operationalised by technical, business and Research and Development (R&D) staff play a minor role in cooperation behaviour. Finally, public subsidiaries raise the likelihood for international and national cooperations by 11.07% and 6.33%, respectively.