This paper builds upon the knowledge-based view and organizational learning perspective. It develops and empirically tests a conceptual model to analyse the drivers and benefits of university-industry cooperation from the firm perspective. We used structural equation modeling to examine data collected from a sample of small and medium-sized Italian firms in the information and communication technology sector. We found that past collaborative experience increases the benefits drawn from university-industry cooperation. Both collaborative know-how and trust, however, play a significant mediating role on the relationship between collaborative experience and benefits. In particular, collaborative know-how is the main factor enhancing intangible benefits, such as knowledge transfer and learning, while trust is the main driver of tangible benefits, such as product and process innovations. Taken together, these findings suggest that firms should develop strategic competences to fully benefit from collaborations with universities because past collabora-tive experience alone is not sufficient. From the policy point of view, effort is needed to build channels and tools enhancing trust between industry and university, especially to support small firms.

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Impact evaluations of collaborative research projects usually focus on private benefits of participants, e.g. their turnover or employment growth. We study the innovative performance of collaborative research projects and how it depends on the organizational diversity of participating organizations. Our population includes participants to EC-funded collaborative research projects that are considered as key organisations behind delivering innovations. The focus on innovative rather than, for example, financial outcomes allows us to assess the transformative effect of publically-funded collaborative research. We show that the innovative potential of research output of homogenous partnerships, e.g. between two SMEs or two large companies, is likely to be higher, as compared to heterogeneous partnerships, e.g. an SME and a large company. The impact of universities on the potential of innovations is unclear. The total number of key organizations in delivering an innovation has negative impact on its potential. Neither project funding nor duration affects the potential of innovation. Our results implicitly show that, depending on the type of organization and consortium design, there are different incentives to contribute to innovative efforts and opportunities to appropriate their benefits.

The present paper investigates the role of research and development (R&D) cooperation in firm innovation. In particular, we evaluate the direct impact of cooperation on firm innovation and its moderating effect on the relationship between internal R&D and innovation. The empirical analysis is based on a large sample of Italian firms drawn from the Sixth Community Innovation Survey. We estimate a multivariate probit model which takes into account the complementarity of different types of innovation and the heterogeneity in the choice of cooperation partners. The estimation results indicate a strong and positive effect of non-competitive collaborations with suppliers, clients and private research institutes on the different types of firm innovation. Collaborations with universities enhance organizational innovations but have weak effects on the other types of innovations. Also cooperation with competitors positively affects firms’ innovations, especially in the case of organizational innovations. On the other hand, moderating effects are scant and restricted to some forms of non-competitive cooperation.