Linking Entities in Knowledge Transfer: The Innovation Intermediaries

Firms are now looking at how they can effectively recognize different ways of exploring, creating, experimenting, and developing R&D processes to increase value and to outperform their competitors. For this reason, many firms have focused their attention to opening up their internal innovation processes to include more external parties with the support of intermediaries of innovation. The purpose of the paper is to investigate emerging research fields on innovation intermediaries. These organizations can play an important role for developing and accelerating the combination of knowledge and competences necessary to solve innovation problems, by realizing the adequate connections and links among different actors geographically dispersed. They have also emerged as a networking platform, creating, developing, and stimulating innovation communities through interconnected networks of people and knowledge. From a mostly qualitative research, the paper stresses the findings in two specific directions. The first more theoretical layer identifies the main trends of analysis on innovation intermediaries; the second one underlines the practical involvement of the creative minds in the search and the development of innovation products and services. The outcomes can be useful to pinpoint the different mindset of researches on innovation intermediaries. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013