The creation of business knowledge leads to the generation of innovation and development capabilities in various functional areas; such knowledge creation requires an interaction between individuals and organizations, and multinational firms offer opportunities for the analysis of cooperation among different units. Thus, the aim of this paper is to analyse the main sources of cooperation used by subsidiaries of a multinational enterprise for the creation of knowledge in the functional areas most related to technological knowledge: R&D, production and marketing. For such purpose, after a review of the literature three working hypotheses are formulated, which are contrasted through multivariate analysis on a population of 80 Spanish subsidiaries. The results show that the cooperation relationships developed between the subsidiary and its internal network (i.e. its internal environment and corporate socialization) exert a significant, positive influence upon knowledge creation, whereas its external network has a non-significant influence.

Creativity is becoming a phenomenon of growing interest to organizations. Thereby organizations need to be aware of which factors boost employee creativity. However, there are still important gaps about the relationships between leadership and groups’ behaviour and creativity. In order to provide new empirical research, the objective of this paper is to analyze how the employees’ relationship with their superiors and colleagues relate with their creative performance. Data from employees of an automotive plant were collected to test a creativity model of employee relationships. Results confirm that high quality relationships with the leader and the members of the group are positively related to employee creativity, as measured by self-ratings. So, we can emphasize the relevance of groups’ composition in order to achieve the appropriate scene for creative behaviour.

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of the governance choices in R&D alliances. This effectiveness is measured through the stock market response to the formation of this kind of alliances. Special attention is paid to the moderating effect exerted by the protection of the intellectual property rights in this effectiveness. Specifically, we pose that whenever the protection system of the intellectual property is effective, the creation of joint ventures is not necessary in order to protect firms from the risks of opportunist behavior. As empirical evidence, a sample of R&D alliances carried out by the European telecommunications firms is used. The results show that as the protection of the intellectual property increases, the stock market valuation of the joint ventures decreases.

Two main forces coincide nowadays in the characterisation of productive systems. On the one hand, the internationalisation of markets and economic activities deal to an increasing competition worldwide. On the other, the greater complexity of technology makes innovation a key factor for manufacturing firms’ competitiveness. Cooperative network relationships seem to be important in both processes. This paper aims to explore the interaction between co-operation and competitiveness behaviour in four manufacturing industries: food, chemicals, electronics and vehicles. Data has been obtained from a Survey conducted specifically for this purpose at the firm level in Spain.

Nowadays, many industrial firms point out to the necessity of incorporate the innovation in their daily activity, with the purpose of face the cheaper labour costs of the new projecting countries. This worry is supported by the Basque, Spanish and European government; as we can see in the Innovation White Book (2003), de R&D and Innovation Plan (2004-2007), and the Green Book (1995) respectively. The transformation process of a teaching-research based university project to an enterprising university, requires an effective mechanism for changing the technological opportunities in commercial results, that is, the creation of innovative and new technology based firms from the university. Among the different mechanism to increase innovation, the created spin-offs from the cooperative environment of Mondragón University can be useful to generate sustainable and quality employment in an industrial region. Mondragon University is located in a cooperative context, and the technology transfer is its bet, focused in the launching of technology companies based in the university research: university spin-off. This technology transfer is based in the investigation and agent participation. In this paper I emphasize the need to have an university model focus in a cooperation to promote the creation of technology based activities in a cooperative context. The defined model will be apply to the Mondragon University, which is involved in a transformation process from a based teaching-investigating university to a management tendency.

Scientific citation indexes have been generally accepted as parameters for the evaluation of research activities. This paper shows the constraints of the citation system to measure the quality of scientific contributions.