| Abstract |
In the most demanding markets, the internationalization model is linked to the innovation of new products and technologies, production methods and the exploration of new business opportunities, incremental innovations, involving continuous improvements in activities already performed by firms. Innovation is, in this context, considered as one of the key factors of the competitiveness firms and countries. It is generally accepted that sustainable competitive advantages are increasingly dependent on the innovation capacity of enterprises and therefore impacting on their innovative performance. This work includes a statistical study, using univariate and multivariate analysis, in particular factorial and discriminant analysis. The database used is the Community Innovation Survey 2010 (CIS2010), in which enterprise innovation is measured by a survey carried out in throughout the European Union (EU), following the recommendations of Eurostat. This survey is the main statistical element for collecting information on innovation, including product innovation, process innovation, organizational innovation and marketing innovation. In this analysis, the Portuguese dataset was considered. Our objective is to analyse the cooperation of Portuguese firms with different stakeholders (e.g. firms, universities, research and development centers, business associations, public bodies, clients or consumers, among others) as sources of information for product and process innovation during the time period between 2010 and 2012. For that, the importance given by the enterprises to the institutional information sources, in innovation activities, and their effective co-operation with Government, public or private research institutes, are studied. Besides that, co-operation partners, information sources and innovation objectives are studied using factor analysis, having been identified, among these, the main concepts associated. Finally, firms that effectively cooperate for innovation have been discriminated by the degree of importance that they give to the various sources of information. |