How National are National Innovation Systems

We discuss a key feature of national innovation systems, the extent to which they are actually national. In the theoretical part of the paper, we discuss the relevance of the national boundary of the innovation systems approach. In the empirical part of the paper, it is researched how much firms and what types of firms collaborate on innovation with partners from abroad, and if there are country differences in these respects. We consider cross-national collaboration in innovation as a good indicator of the internationalization of innovation systems as recent research has shown that innovation is now largely done in collaboration and that interorganizational collaboration on innovation is an important diffusion mechanism of knowledge. Our empirical findings suggest that even though international co-operation is gaining significance in virtually all the countries we studied, it is still reasonable to analyze the concept of innovation systems from a national perspective. 1 This joint paper was initiated by ‘dinner-talks’ between the two authors during the DRUID Winter Conference 2003.

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