The bright and dark side of cooperativeness for regional innovativeness’, Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography 200811. mimeo

In the literature on ‘innovative mileus ’ and ‘regional innovation systems ’ it is frequently ar-gued that intra-regional cooperativeness plays a crucial role for firms ’ innovation performances. While there exists substantial qualitative evidence for this, the quantitative literature is rather thin. The paper provides a quantitative-empirical analysis on this issue for the Electrics & Elec-tronics industry and 270 German labor market regions. Using robust nonparametric frontier techniques, intra- and inter-regional cooperativeness measures are tested for their influence on regional innovation performance. It is found that below a certain level both types of cooperative-ness have positive effects, while exceeding this point, they yield negative effects