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Studies analyzing the importance of intra- and inter-regional cooperation for regional innovation performance are mainly of qualitative nature and focus strongly on the positive effects that high levels of cooperation can yield. For the case of the German labor market regions and the Electrics & Electronics industry the paper provides a quantitative-empirical analysis taking into account the possibility of negative effects related to regional lock-in, lock-out, and cooperation overload situations. Using conditional nonparametric frontier techniques and cooperation behavior measures we find positive as well as substantial negative effects of cooperation with the latter being induced by excessive and unbalanced cooperation behavior.

This paper investigates the possible presence of three problems in regional innovation systems (RIS): intermediation, reciprocity and compatibility. Based on firm data gathered for three different regions, Northern Hesse, Jena and Sophia Antipolis, we can show that a low propensity to cooperate in a RIS is related to poorly performing intermediaries and a low complementarity with the regional knowledge base. The issue of trust in cooperating tends to have no effect on the propensity to cooperate. However, it is a main determinant of failed cooperation projects.

A key issue of dfferent streams of economic literature is to determine the impact of certain dimensions of proximity on the cooperative behavior of actors and, thus, on interactive learning processes. This paper is a quantitative study on the impact of technological and geographical proximity on the choice of the cooperation partner. Patents that were filed for Germany in the years 1998 to 2003 are used to identify the impact of both dimensions of proximity as well as their interplay. It can be shown that an increasing proximity in either of these dimensions has an independent positive impact on the cooperation probability.

This paper concerns the regional innovation system approach. It deals with the characteristics of three regional systems, Northern Hesse, Alpes-Maritime and Jena, and focusses on each regional network of innovators. In this context the importance of the size and homogeneity of a regional pool of knowledge spillovers for those networks is analyzed. We find evidence that an increasing regional knowledge base in combination with an increasing homogeneity of this knowledge base enhances the knowledge ows and the incentives for actors to interact with each other.