Federica Rossi

Innovation intermediaries are increasingly mobilized in policy programs to support the adoption and diffusion of digital technologies. Yet we still have a limited understanding of how different types of organizations enact this role and which business models they adopt. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 20 (European) Digital Innovation Hubs in Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and the UK, we investigate how intermediaries create and deliver value in policy-driven digital transition initiatives. We identify four recurrent business model configurations that combine technology/sector, or territorial focus (value proposition) with centralized or decentralized governance (value delivery), each associated with specific organizational forms such as Research and Technology Organizations (RTOs), business associations, territorial development organizations, and technology and knowledge transfer networks. The study clarifies how organizational characteristics shape the enactment of digital intermediation and offers guidance for the design and targeting of future policy initiatives.

This Special Issue represents an effort to go beyond a narrow notion of knowledge exchange (KE) and explicitly address broader questions related to the measurement of and incentives towards KE in Higher education institutions (HEI). Specifically, we bring attention to a number of under-researched topics in the literature. These relate to: (i) The participation of a diverse set of academic actors in KE activities – in particular, academics in emerging economies and women academics – whose role in KE is insufficiently investigated in the extant literature; (ii) academics’ engagement with under-explored KE stakeholders, specifically policymakers and the public sector; and (iii) the tensions and tradeoffs that are implicit, but often unacknowledged, in the relationship between HEIs’ traditional teaching and research activities, and KE as a third institutional mission.