The Role of Competence Brokering in Regional Innovation and Development

Competence brokering and knowledge transfer plays an important role in innovation and development of regions within a country. The Research Council of Norway administrates an innovation programme named VRI (Program for Regional R&D and Innovation) to facilitate this kind of development. VRI has duration of 10 years from 2007, and covers the whole country divided in 15 regions. Two of the instruments in VRI are competence brokering and company specific projects. The basic idea of competence brokering in VRI is to improve collaboration between companies and research and development (R&D) institutions in order to facilitate innovation and value creation in regions. The major characteristic of competence brokering is to assist companies to obtain and apply R&D knowledge. The aim is also to initiate and carry out company specific projects. The companies are responsible for and are the owner of the projects. However, the projects are conducted under supervision of a competence broker. R&D personnel are hired to work in the project. Each region applies for funding from the Research Council of Norway and Innovation Norway. Companies can participate as a single firm or in network with more firms. The paper presents the Norwegian approach and experiences of competence brokering in regional innovation and development, and focus on describing aspects like (1) Working methods and experience from different programme for regional R&D and innovation (2) Challenges, constraints and obstacles that are related to this collaboration, (3) How the challenges and obstacles can be dealt with effectively. The paper is based on action research, reflection and experiences from competence brokers' point of view, and literature studies. The paper also presents a description of a case ("Region VRI-Innlandet").