One of the key objectives of cooperation through interactive relationships is to find new forms of management taking into consideration the pressure for innovation. This article is an effort to review and organize the literature about innovation and cooperation identifying possible patterns of scientific production from 1991 to 2010. Therefore, the authors conducted a bibliometric study and a qualitative analysis. A search in the ISI Web Knowledge databases was performed with the topics "innovation" and "cooperation or collaboration or partnership or alliance". Analyzing the keywords and the nomenclature used to encode the ISI areas eight areas that were most closely related to the topic of research were identified, namely absorptive capacity, strategic alliances, knowledge, performance, management, technological innovation, research and development, and new product development and networks. The articles were concentrated in 17 journals. The following journals were those with the highest number of publications: International Journal of Production Research, International Journal of Technology Management, Technovation and Management Science. The number of publications has grown since 2000 with a peak seen in 2008. The growing need for interaction between entities and innovation through a combination of internal and external resources justifies the analysis of trends in literature.
Innovation; Cooperation; Collaboration; Partnership; Alliance
