ABSTRACT
Co-location in a science park allows its members to reinforce strength and trust of relationships among organizations that are geographically nearby, to facilitate the exchange of sensitive and tacit knowledge and to control partners’ opportunistic behaviour. A sample of Spanish manufacturing companies demonstrated that belonging to a park improves the firm’s capacity to apply for patent rights; in addition, this effect is progressively higher when a company belongs to it more time.
Our results let us conclude that the benefits of belonging to a park are especially great in the first years when the company cooperates with other external partners characterized by diverse and heterogeneous knowledge. Nevertheless, maintaining multiple and complex relationships requires that the company either counts on skills to manage these relationships or be in a position of power and influence in the industry. The results obtained showed that only with time do these variables permit the greatest value to be extracted.
