The different roles of innovation intermediaries to generate value

Abstract

The development of innovation management practices toward openness, societalgrand challenges and emerging technologies have changed the roles and supportingactivities of innovation intermediaries. Innovation intermediaries are considered to beorganizations that generate value to other institutions or societies within an innovationsystem. Despite the growth of innovation intermediary research in recent years, thereis still a lack of clarity about the different roles that intermediaries can play and the wayin which they generate value to the other institutions, industry and/or society. Thispaper reviews current research to identify contemporary roles of innovationintermediaries and explore the mechanisms they use to generate value. Through theuse of bibliographic coupling the paper presents a robust analysis of the intellectualstreams and key concepts underpinning innovation intermediary research. The papermakes a contribution to the ongoing debate by proposing a framework that explains thedifferent roles of innovation intermediaries (knowledge broker, knowledge transferenabler, orchestrator, and value generator) and the functions embedded within theroles at different levels of analysis, i.e., firm, industry, and national. The paperconcludes by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of the framework anddetails key areas for future research.