Innovation intermediaries and capability-building: institutional, economic and social change in regional innovation systems

Context

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 (Martin et al., 2016). 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 (Flanagan et al., 2022).

Innovation intermediaries (IIs) 

One of the ways in which governments can intervene is through the funding of innovation intermediaries (IIs) (Caloffi et al. 2023; Holland et al. 2024). 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 (Arnold et al., 2010), through the organisation of complex networks of players to solve complex problems (Rossi et al., 2022). 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 (Anzolin and O’Sullivan, 2025a). 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 (Reischauer et al., 2021). 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 (Randhawa et al., 2022). Gertler (2010) and Rodríguez-Pose (2013) both urged that 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.

Contributions

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. We welcome contributions that:

• Analyse how different configurations of IIs foster knowledge transfer, upgrade value chains and enable regional diversification or resilience;
• Analyse what are the structural conditions (i.e., institutional, economic, production and technology related) that lead to the emergence of specific types of IIs;
• Investigate how IIs shape – and are shaped by – place-based, mission-oriented or smart-specialisation policies;
• Explore how IIs support regional sustainability goals, including decarbonization, circular economy initiatives, and the integration of social and environmental objectives into innovation strategies.
• Explore the role of IIs as orchestrators of human-capital formation and labour-market transitions;
• Examine how the activities, governance and revenue structures of IIs have adapted to new technological waves (e.g. digital or green transitions) and to changing public-private funding landscapes;
• Analyse the impact of policy interventions on IIs in specific ecosystems (or comparing different regional ecosystems);
• Explore the different activities and functions that IIs perform depending on the sectoral needs, segments of the value chain and size of the firm;
• Investigate how IIs contribute to market formation processes, including the creation of standards, certification schemes, and demand articulation for emerging technologies.
• Develop novel typologies or metrics that capture the dynamic functions of IIs within regional innovation systems.

Examples of questions to be addressed: 

• Which organisational forms of II (public, private, hybrid) are best suited to which regional objectives, and should policy selectively fund some models over others? ​
• What specific regional or/and sectoral failures are different types of IIs trying to solve, and how does this shape their activity mix over time? ​
• How are IIs engaging with different types of regional actors (including other IIs) in order to support institutional, economic and/or societal change within the region?
• Which local IIs maximise efficiency and absorptive capacity for SMEs in a given ecosystem, and how? ​
• What role do intermediaries play in workforce activities and skill formation?
• How do IIs align their resources with SMEs and other actors’ needs?
• What is the role of IIs in transforming regional innovation systems and industrial paths, and which configurations of capabilities of IIs underpin successful diversification? ​
• What can we learn from industrial policy measures targeting IIs in a specific regional context?
• Given their growing influence on standards and regulation, how do IIs act as market shapers, and what does this imply for regional competitiveness and inclusivity? ​