Strategies of industry-science cooperation in the Russian manufacturing sector.

The debate on the industry-science cooperation has raised questions about what determines the successful interactions and their impact on a firm's innovation performance. This paper discusses the relevance of traditional hypotheses on the relationship between industry and science to developing countries using the evidence from Russian manufacturing. We distinguish between several modes of cooperation (new-to-market innovation, new-to-firm innovation, acquisition of non-R&D services) and investigate a broad range of determinants, including competition regime, absorptive capacity, technological opportunities, appropriability conditions and public support. Our findings illustrate that in less-developed national innovation systems with below average levels of technological opportunity, the industry-science link is influenced more by the specificity of economic activity, firm size and maturity than a result of higher firm-level innovation effort. Public support should be specifically tailored to promote networking with R&D organizations and universities and must consider expanding the focus to account for non-R&D based cooperative activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]