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The objective of this article is to evaluate the impact of the initial context of companies on their propensity to cooperate and on the characteristics of partner companies that they consider to be important. 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 of international R&D cooperation. Based on the contribution of the literature on international business and the framework proposed by Ghemawat (2001), this article develops several hypotheses concerning the effects of distance, analysed by five different dimensions. These hypotheses are tested on a sample of 1.502 international agreements concluded by European companies of 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 to 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.