What is the propensity of firms to collaborate for innovation and the geography of cooperation? An analysis of french Agrofood companies during the period 2006-2008

Since KLINE & ROSENBERG and their seminal work in 1986, scholars define innovation as an interactive process and consider that geographical proximity fosters interactions inside this process. We have used data from the European Innovation survey (CIS 8 - COMMUNITY INNOVATION SURVEY, 2006-2008) to analyse the propensity of agrofood firms to collaborate when they develop product or process innovations. We have analysed the geographical scale of such collaboration. Our results suggest that these firms are collaborating intensively for process innovation and weakly for product innovations. The analysis also show that the innovation networks developed are local only for a minority of firms, and that most of them collaborate at a more national scale. The main factors influencing the geographical scale of the developed collaborations seem to be the R&D competences and the fact that the firms is a subsidiary of a bigger group.