The relevance of interactions in innovation systems: how to consolidate the framework

Innovation Systems constitute an analysis framework which tries to identify the agents, and the interactions produced among them within an innovation system, endowing thus authorities of a tool for the definition of innovation policies. Accordingly, cooperation or interaction related practices become crucial. However, there is a need for the development and implementation of a more sophisticated measures and indicators as regards these interactive patterns, both from a theoretical and a quantitative approach.

This papers aims at empirically contributing to highlight the relevance of these interactions. In order to do that, we first start by offering a clear taxonomy of the Spanish regions concerning R&D and innovation activities, to then analyse the extent to which interactions are relevant or not by considering in this case Spain as the unit of analysis between 1995-2002.