摘要：The objective of this article is to evaluate the impact of the initial context of com-panies on their propensity to cooperate and on the characteristics of partner companies that they consider to be significant. More specifically, the authors attempt to measure the influence of different dimensions of distance (cultural, administrative, geographic, economic and technological) on the choice of the country of partners in international R&D cooperation. Based on the contribu-tion of the literature on international business and the framework proposed by Ghemawat (2001), this article develops several hypotheses concerning the ef-fects of distance, analysed by five different dimensions. These hypotheses are tested on a sample of 1502 international agreements concluded by Europeancompanies in the biotechnology industry. The findings of the empirical study show that distance influences the choice of the country of partners, but that the impact varies according to the dimension analysed and the context of the agreement. In particular, they reveal that administrative, geographic, economic and technological distance plays an essential role, whereas cultural distance does not have a significant influence on the choice of the country of partners, at least in the biotechnology industry and when projects are subsidised
关键词：International cooperation; distance; choice of partner; research ;and development; national environment
