Knowledge Brokering for Open Innovation: A Case Study of Innovation Intermediaries

An open innovation strategy is increasingly being adopted by firms to leverage external knowledge sources for solving internal problems. However, firms face challenges to implement this strategy such as needing to identify, motivate, and manage external sources of innovation. Thus, innovation intermediaries are being established to assist client firms (seekers) in leveraging this strategy through recruiting external sources to solve seekers’ problems. However, there is limited understanding and research on how these innovation intermediaries perform. Motivated thus, we conducted an exploratory case study of 4 innovation intermediaries to identify antecedents of their performance, based on the knowledge brokering perspective. Through the case study, we identified three brokering capabilities that affect innovation intermediaries’ performance in supporting seekers’ open innovation, i.e., problem-defining, problem-solver matching, and proposal-filtering. We thereby develop direct and interaction hypotheses linking these capabilities to innovation intermediaries’ performance. The study’s potential contributions and the plan for future work are discussed