This paper aims to study to what extent participating in technological cooperation agreements can be a useful mechanism for improving the innovative capacity of Spanish firms, specially in the context of the economic recession. We analyse if there are differences in the returns obtained from cooperation alliances according to the firm’s size as well as different geographical scopes of such alliances. In addition, we want to study to what extent innovation cooperation may have a different effect on incremental innovations than on radical/breakthrough innovations. We use the Spanish Technological Innovation Panel from 2004 to 2012 to provide evidence on the above issues.