Emerging business models for digital innovation intermediaries: evidence from the Digital Innovation Hubs Initiative

Digital transition is a complex process in which innovation intermediaries play an important role as facilitators of the adoption and diffusion of digital technologies. A multitude of organisations act as innovation intermediaries in the digital landscape. In this paper, we study digital innovation intermediaries focusing specifically on their business models. Building on a rich data covering 20 digital intermediaries in five European countries – Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and UK – we show that a distinction can be made, on one hand, between intermediaries that focus primarily on supporting a local ecosystem and intermediaries that focus primarily on developing an ecosystem around a specific sector or technology, and, on the other hand, between intermediaries that have centralised and decentralised governance. We analyse our sample of intermediaries based on these two dimensions (ecosystem focus and governance), and detail their roles in the digital transition. Our findings thus uncover a link between the organisational forms and business models of digital innovation intermediaries. We discuss the implications of our study, for research, practice, and policy.