“…Cooperation activities with other firms or institutions are seen by firms as an opportunities to access complementary technological resources (as skill sharing), for faster development of innovations, to improve market access, to realise economies of scale and scope, and to share costs and spread risk (see, for example,. Hagedoorn, 1993;Glaister and Buckley, 1996;Narula and Hagedoorn, 1999;Cassiman and Veugelers, 2002;Sakakibara, 1997;Miotti andSachwald, 2003, Aschhoff andSchmidt, 2006). Cooperation activities are usually characterised by intensive knowledge exchange and mutual learning, basically by combining complementary assets and building synergies (Dachs et al, 2004;Becker and Dietz, 2004).…”