The current study focuses on exploring how cooperation can help companies to reach their targets in new product development and market launch successfully. The overarching research question of the study is whether cooperation in innovation can help Russian companies to overcome market and institutional context inefficiencies and achieve better performance outcomes. More specifically, we address two aspects of cooperation: the role of cooperation with external partners as a factor of innovation success and the balance of internal versus external stakeholders’ interests in framing innovation strategy. The study is empirically based on a cross-industry quantitative dataset of Russian innovative firms.