Innovation intermediaries as a response to system failures: Creating the right incentives

Innovation intermediaries, i.e. intermediary organisations that support firm-level and collaborative innovation are a varied set of organisations that provide either networking services (e.g. support to R&D partnership formation and to university-industry collaborations) or other knowledge-intensive services (e.g. knowledge and technology mapping, various types of consultancy) or both. Since intermediaries can facilitate knowledge exchange among organisations with different languages, cultures, decision-making horizons, systems of incentives and objectives, they can play an important role in policies aimed at promoting innovation and technology transfer within local, regional and national innovation systems. In particular, as we will argue in this Chapter, the range of activities that intermediaries engage in can potentially address numerous failures in their innovation systems. Our study provides a theoretical framework to address the mismatch between the policies’ objectives to address innovation system failures, on the one hand, and the indicators used to evaluate the intermediaries’ performance, on the other. By suggesting that the measurement of the intermediaries’ performance should be explicitly linked to their success in remedying such failures, this approach can then provide a guide to the design of appropriate indicators. These issues are illustrated through a case study of publicly-funded innovation intermediaries in the Italian region of Tuscany in 2011-2014.