Abstract:
The societal challenges in 2020 horizon are represented by food security, sustainable agriculture and bioeconomy.
Romania, as member of European Union, has as objective the competitiveness development in agriculture area, through
integration of innovation in business environment. Many research studies proved that the performance of innovation
process is directly influenced by the cooperation between business environment, research organizations and other
catalytic entities. The paper scope is to highlight the cooperation capacity in the innovation process in Romanian
agriculture. The analysis carried out is based on finding answers to the following questions: Which is the level of
research - development – innovation (RDI) cooperation in Romanian agriculture? Which are the opportunities for
financing the cooperation projects in the 2014 – 2020 period? What is the interest of agricultural entrepreneurs to
collaborate with research organizations? The research methodology was based on: documentary analysis, socio –
economic investigation and multiple correspondence analysis. The results revealed the existence of a poorly developed
network of cooperation between research envirnment and business in Romanian agriculture. The advantages of firms
involved in these partnerships consist in access to high quality RDI services (eg. elaboration of soil studies with the
latest equipment, by the partner research institutes), transfer of scientific information from the research environment,
access to input suppliers networks and customers networks etc. Farmers specialized in different branches of agriculture
have common interests in the production area, market and innovation. For example, their interest is to get the higher
production in terms of quantity and quality, to charge a price increasingly better and to perform minimal consumption
on inputs, with maximum effect in outputs. Cooperation between business and research organisations from agriculture
has a very important place at the level of programs and funding measures which are promoted by the European Union.
Thus, they stimulate by European funds the partnerships between various categories of economic actors in agriculture
and related fields. In the future we believe that there is a high potential for cooperation in this economic field.
