Considering the role of interpersonal ties in the formation of innovation partnerships, the concept of social proximity has been increasingly used these recent years for the analysis of the geography of innovation. Nevertheless, the existing works reveal problems of measurement that prevent determining the precise weigh of social proximity in the partnerships build-up and deducing its effect on the geography of innovation. Our purpose is to fill in this gap by defining precisely social proximity as a modality of partners networking. On this basis, we propose an original method for empirically tracking the weigh and effects of social proximity, and we apply it to more than 200 cases of French science-industry collaborations. The combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches to construct and analyze relational data makes it possible to reaffirm both the significant and stable role of interpersonal ties and its significant but variable effect on the geography of partnerships.