Over the past two decades, the advent of digital technologies, the pressing need to shift productive structures towards greener systems, as well as recessions due to the Global Financial Crisis, Covid-19 and recent geopolitical tensions have increased the challenges for regions' structural transformation process. At the same time, organisations try to keep pace with increasingly rapid innovation processes by embracing open innovation and co-creation practices. These dynamics have opened a space for public intervention, to solve issues and to coordinate a growing number of stakeholders and activities related to innovation and industrial capabilities.
One of the ways in which governments can intervene is through the funding of innovation intermediaries (IIs). IIs can be organisations of several kinds, such as research and technology organisations, incubators, innovation centres, technopoles, knowledge-intensive business-services providers. They translate early-stage innovation into scale-up and usable products or processes, and they are key in orchestrating innovation and knowledge transfer by filling gaps along the innovation cycles, through the organisation of complex networks of players to solve complex problems. IIs increasingly act as market architects by shaping demand, standards, and regulatory frameworks that enable the emergence of new markets. The emergence of IIs as key actors in the process calls for in-depth analyses of the role, functions and activities that IIs play for regional development.
IIs are key players within regional ecosystems and are increasingly in a position to engage in regional restructuring and diversification processes. Even when IIs do not have an explicit regional mandate, they participate in a dynamic local ecosystem where institutional, technological and economic linkages evolve and shape the regional context. The structure of the ecosystem itself influences the design and the functioning of IIs and it is pivotal to support the processes of knowledge search and generation that IIs are supposed to contribute to. IIs can actively contribute to related and unrelated diversification processes and leverage their role as knowledge repositories, shapers and facilitators within and across industrial value chain structures in different ecosystems.
Effective regional development requires not just any institutions, but the right configurations and capacities in those institutions to adapt to a changing context. By examining IIs, this Special Issue aims to observe institutional work in action – how these organisations evolve new practices to meet emerging challenges like digitalisation or decarbonization. It also intends to provide further theoretical understandings of key concepts, such as the functions of IIs within an ecosystem, specifically addressing what the unique features of IIs and their functions are in the innovation life cycle and within the ecosystem where they operate.
This Special Issue invites conceptual, empirical and policy-focused papers that unpack the interrelations between evolving innovation IIs and regional economic change. We particularly encourage interdisciplinary approaches bridging economic geography, innovation studies, operations management, industrial economics and public policy, as well as studies based on qualitative or quantitative methods and mixed-method designs that combine qualitative case work with large-scale datasets. We also aim to include papers that cover a variety of empirical settings.