The Innovation Intermediary: A Review and the Widening Roles

The role of innovation intermediaries has received increased attention from the academic and practitioner community as a result of more collaborative approaches to innovation together with rapid advances in the application of internet technologies in support of innovation activities. There have been significant developments in this field since the last reviews were published (Howells, 2006, Gassmann et al., 2011) and so the aim of this paper is to review the extant research to explore the changing nature of the role of innovation intermediaries, map the current knowledge and outline a future research agenda. The review has been conducted using bibliographic coupling. This is the first time that a quantitative review method has been used to analyse this research area and it provides an opportunity to bring new insights to complement previous qualitative reviews. This paper makes a contribution to the on-going debate by proposing a framework that explains the widening role of innovation intermediaries and the varying nature of this role at different network levels and stages of the innovation process. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of the framework for theory and practice and detailing the key areas for future research.

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