Global intellectual capital brokering. Facilitating the emergence of innovations through network mediation

The market for intellectual capital has become global. Ideas, knowledge, and technology are now flowing more freely than ever as companies are opening up their processes in the spirit of open innovation. Simultaneously, firms are being increasingly forced to utilize new external channels to gain input for their innovation process. This development has led to the emergence of intermediate actors who facilitate transactions on intellectual capital. This study concentrates on one type of these intermediaries, global intellectual capital (IC) brokers. These brokers act as mediators between previously unconnected parties, providing their customers access to a global pool of providers and buyers of intellectual capital, partly enabled by the internet. This study aims at building a holistic picture of the phenomenon of global intellectual capital brokering. The ways in which global IC brokers create value for their customers and facilitate the emergence of innovations are explored. The open innovation paradigm provides the principal theoretical basis for this study. Furthermore, the phenomenon is observed from the perspective of industrial network theory, in order to understand how interorganizational networks affect the role of global IC brokering. Empirical insight into the topic is gained through a case study, where the views of all actors in the brokering process – the providers, mediators, and buyers of intellectual capital – are analyzed. The observed cases represent a variety of industries, cultural backgrounds, and company sizes, ranging from individual scientists to multinational corporations. The main findings of the study imply that global intellectual capital brokers do facilitate the emergence of innovations by building unobvious contacts between previously unconnected parties. The transactional contacts established by the