Partners connection process and geography of innovation: new insights from a comparative inter-organizational partnerships analysis

This paper attempts to give new explanations of the spatial patterns of collaborations focusing on the partners' connection process. Taking into account actors are embedded in an historical and socio-economical space, we first consider organizations can construct a new collaboration or renew an old one when they decide to build a research project with a partner. Then, going back to the moment when they initially connect with their partners through the analysis of the genesis of collaborations, we assume that they can turn to their interpersonal ties or to coordination resources. This process of connection may influence the spatial dimensions of collaborations regarding notably the literature linking the use of social ties and the spatial proximity effects observed in innovation activities. We test empirically these theoretical propositions through the collection of individual data about more than 200 histories of inter-company (IC) and science-industry (SI) partnerships. The qualitative and quantitative treatments of these data reveal the way partners connect each other and the spatial patterns of collaborations are significantly dependant to the nature of the partnerships. A strong regularity is nevertheless highlighted: for both partnerships (IC and SI ones), actors renewed prior collaborations in 57% of the total of studied partnerships.