ABSTRACT
The single European market (SEM) initiative, through its various stages of economic cooperation until the establishment of the European Union, can arguably be said to be one of the most important socio-economic developments of this century. At the heart of much of this activity has been a belief that co-operation by institutions and firms across the various European countries represents a means by which the technological and economic gap between the US and Europe after the Second World War might be narrowed. As Peterson (1991) has pointed out, although technological collaboration has constantly remained high on the agenda of European policy makers, pan-European R&D activities have only been systematically developed by policy makers since the 1980s. Several initiatives by the European Commission have been implemented over the past two decades in an attempt to bolster the competitiveness of European firms, particularly in high-technology sectors.
