Anotace:
Though innovation cooperation was rather out of business interest even almost a hundred years ago, uncertain economic conditions and crises, competitive struggle and globalisation now make it a necessity for firms to survive. Since the first systemic theories in the 1980s, scholars have developed several policy models covering innovation-focused relations of firms with researchers, institutions and other actors to spur their competitive advantages. One of them, quadruple helix, covers also societal impacts. This paper presents the results of the empirical research of such relations – the effects of five cooperation levels on five innovation forms in Slovakia, Czechia, Hungary, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. Applying a propensity score matching pairing method with probit model and nearest neighbour setting, a caliper of 0.2 and common support to the Eurostat’s CIS microdata from 2012, 2014 and 2016 (a total of 63,615 observations), I identified that the majority of cooperation positively affected innovation processes and competitiveness. More specifically, Slovak firms benefited mainly from firm-public sector cooperation and Czech firms from the cooperation of firms with both research entities and public institutions. While Hungarian, Estonian and Lithuanian results vary by innovation form, Latvian firms got the best results from the last three cooperation levels. In general, the strongest positive effects were measured for goods innovation, while cooperation in the innovation of logistics processes had a rather negative effect in most selected countries. Finally, the research confirmed that cooperation is essential for the majority of firm innovation activities, stimulating competitiveness and business performance.