The different roles of innovation intermediaries to generate value

The development of innovation management practices toward openness, societal grand challenges and emerging technologies have changed the roles and supporting activities of innovation intermediaries. Innovation intermediaries are considered to be organizations that generate value to other institutions or societies within an innovation system. Despite the growth of innovation intermediary research in recent years, there is still a lack of clarity about the different roles that intermediaries can play and the way in which they generate value to the other institutions, industry and/or society. This paper reviews current research to identify contemporary roles of innovation intermediaries and explore the mechanisms they use to generate value. Through the use of bibliographic coupling the paper presents a robust analysis of the intellectual streams and key concepts underpinning innovation intermediary research. The paper makes a contribution to the ongoing debate by proposing a framework that explains the different roles of innovation intermediaries (knowledge broker, knowledge transfer enabler, orchestrator, and value generator) and the functions embedded within the roles at different levels of analysis, i.e., firm, industry, and national. The paper concludes by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of the framework and details key areas for future research.