Cooperation for Innovation and Its Influence on Enterprises’ Innovativeness Level

Innovation is one of the key sources in obtaining competitive advantage by enterprises. The abilityto innovate is generally accepted as a critical success factor for competitiveness and firms’ performance.The paper discusses cooperation for innovation and its influence on enterprises’ innovativenesslevel. The main aim of the article is to determine the relationship between cooperation forinnovation and innovativeness of the surveyed companies, which is investigated empirically. Thepaper discusses the channels and level of cooperation taking place in enterprises correspondingto its sources, specific character and determining the significance of the impact of cooperationfor innovation on the actual level of innovativeness. The specific objectives of the article relateto examining what kind of cooperation for innovation occurs in enterprises and whether there isa relationship between the cooperation and innovativeness level of the enterprise. The study is basedon a survey of firms (n = 100) located in Poland. The article first establishes the research framework,then deduces the research hypothesis and finally describes the analysis tools, the sample structureand statistical methods. The analysis has been done with the SPSS software. The statistical methodused in the survey is multiple step regression. The study has determined the positive relationshipbetween cooperation and innovativeness of the surveyed enterprises. The relation between cooperationand innovativeness is positive concerning the channels of vertical cooperation, especiallyin the area of cooperation with suppliers of equipment, materials, components or software. Thesefindings suggest that the measurement of cooperation for innovation and its channels should be developed further in order to make it a more relevant concept for empirical studies of enterprises’innovativeness and competitiveness