The importance of cooperation in innovation has been widely studied. Cooperative settings are potential platforms for the indirect and direct transmission of knowledge. This article aims to present the results of a systematic literature review on innovation cooperation. It covers topics such as the effects of cooperation according to different governance structures, cooperation drivers, partner's attributes, firm size, regional factors, and the host country's current stage of economic development. In general, cooperation is an organizational setting that determines knowledge sharing and diffusion. A significant part of the empirical evidence analyzed here reveals that cooperation has a positive effect on innovation performance. Such a positive correlation is highly likely to be found in case studies of technology-intensive sectors in small regions. However, large datasets, mainly from Europe and China, also yield positive results. Results may also vary according to firms' attributes and the type of cooperation agreement adopted.

Higher education is extremely important for economic and social development. However, the higher education product has intrinsic traits that require State intervention in the sector, which hinders the analysis of the industry via traditional methods of the Economics discipline. This study aimed to carry out an analysis of competition in the Brazilian higher education sector, focusing on high quality institutions and using the modus operandi of antitrust authorities around the world as a baseline. Specifically, analytical techniques from the field of Industrial Organization have been employed, in addition to the application of non-parametric method of data envelopment analysis to gauge efficiency in the industry. Results showed that public higher education institutions (HEIs) face competitive pressure from high-quality private HEIs. Additionally, relevant markets present a wider scope, with either regional or national range, depending on schools’ quality. In general, markets are not concentrated and do not raise anticompetitive concerns. Independent admissions exams, product differentiation, and price discrimination were identified as the main conducts carried out by schools. Finally, data envelopment analysis shows that average efficiency in the sector is high, scale economies are highly relevant, and public institutions are in average more efficient than their private counterparts.

A importância da cooperação como força motriz da inovação é assunto amplamente estudado. Configurações cooperativas constituem potenciais plataformas a transmissão indireta e direta de conhecimento. O objetivo deste artigo é sintetizar as contribuições dos principais trabalhos que tratam da cooperação voltada para a inovação, enfatizando os efeitos de configurações específicas de acordo com suas estruturas de governança, os motivos para cooperar e as caraterísticas de parceiros, o porte das firmas envolvidas, o contexto regional e o estágio de desenvolvimento da economia onde acontece a cooperação. No geral, a cooperação é uma configuração organizacional que almeja compartilhar e difundir conhecimento. A maior parte das evidências analisadas neste trabalho apontam para um efeito positivo da cooperação no desempenho de inovação das firmas. Salvo raras exceções, esta correlação positiva ocorre principalmente em estudos de caso de setores de elevada intensidade tecnológica concentrados em regiões geográficas pequenas.