INTRODUCTION

In different scientific fields (e.g., organisation and business studies, economics), and in policy practice, there is growing attention for the importance of interorganisational relationships (IORS) and networks (IONS). Central issues are the functioning and performance of the business community in general, and the relationship between IORS and IONS for the innovative behaviour of organisations in particular. It is believed that having IORS and being part of IONS is beneficial to innovation. However, reviews that have been done so far, predominantly focus on the effects of so-called dyads on innovation (i.e., the IORS between two organisations) (Pittaway et al. 2004), whereas only Provan et al. (2007) reviewed generic effects of complete networks on all kinds of organisational outcomes. Our main aim with this chapter is to identify features of socalled egocentric and whole (or complete) networks and their impact on the innovation of individual firms. Moreover, the findings on this relationship are used to evaluate the extent to which current Dutch innovation policy portfolio is geared towards ions.

This chapter is organised as follows. Section 2 briefly introduces the relevance of the topic to the Dutch economy by showing to what extent innovation and collaboration are empirically associated. Section 3 introduces the research model and the main arguments supporting it. Subsequently section 4 reports on a review of the literature pertaining to the features of inter-organisational networks and their potential impact on innovation The fifth section shows to what extent current innovation policies impact on networks to achieve their goals. In the final section we draw some conclusions.

THE IMPORTANCE OF COOPERATION FOR INNOVATION: SOME EMPIRICAL UNDERPINNINGS

Each ion starts out with cooperation between two legally independent organisational entities, which eventually leads to additional relations. To set the stage for this chapter it is relevant to know whether innovation and collaboration are related. Table 1 displays a review of eight surveys covering a period of more than ten years, on collaboration in the context of R&D, and the type of actors with whom a focal firm has R&D relations.

It is the diversity of samples, their varying composition, and spatial range, which helps us to identify patterns in R&D collaboration.