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Many public efforts have been made to foster the creation and development of organisations aimed at encouraging innovativeness in firms (and especially in small and medium-sized enterprises). In Spain, technology institutes (TIs) have been a key tool in this respect and it is necessary to evaluate whether their performance is meeting the objectives of technology policy postulated by both neoclassical and evolutionary authors. We create a set of specific indicators designed to accomplish this empirical task. Our results suggest that TIs are helping to reduce market failures in the area of technology and to foster relationships among innovation-system actors. Wide regional disparities can be explained by the different roles played by regional governments.

This paper examines cooperation between public research centres (PRCs) and industrial firms. We analyse two types of impact-scientific and techno economic-using objective and subjective measures, and explore the determinants of these impacts by investigating the pre-project context, and the way that relationships are implemented and managed. The main novelty of this paper is that the empirical analysis focuses on project level relationships, based on an original database for the Spanish case; it is the characteristics of these relationships that are the core of our analysis. The results show that the impacts identified are contingent on different characteristics in the relationships between PRCs and industrial firms, and that the influence of these characteristics varies depending on the type of impact considered.

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