Government-affiliated intermediary organisations as actors in system-level transitions
By Paula Kivimaa. 2014
363 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The article draws from two theoretical fields, innovation intermediation and sustainability transitions, to examine the role of government-affiliated intermediary organisations in system-level transitions. The role of intermediaries working between actors – producers and users, entrepreneurs and adopters, idea generators and funders – has seldom been specifically addressed in the transitions literature. Thus, the role of intermediary organisations in enacting change in socio-technical regimes, particularly of intermediaries falling between traditional public sector and private sector actors, is of interest in this article. Empirical analyses of two Finnish organisations, Sitra and Motiva, show that government-affiliated intermediaries are likely to engage in strategic niche management processes in diverse ways, each organisation having its own distinct characteristics. The analysis also points out that to get from niches to transition, sustained systemic intermediaries are crucial in articulating new visions and expectations. Government-affiliated intermediaries may make an important contribution to sustainability transitions by initiating and managing new policy or market processes and by acting as an impartial contact point or voice for new networks of actors. While independence from public administration is likely to facilitate networking, too neutral a stance or limited temporal engagement may reduce the transition-facilitating effects.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management of Technology and Innovation, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a64ca5a319189c514041d6ccb6ed432289d09fdd
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In Global and Planetary Change
In Management of Technology and Innovation
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Addressing barriers to eco-innovation: Exploring the finance mobilisation functions of institutional innovation intermediaries (2016, background): “Because of their affiliation with policy bodies, institutional innovation intermediaries may have limited independence, as conflicts of interest between the public bodies to which they are affiliated and the private entities could arise (Klerkx & Leeuwis 2009; Kivimaa 2014).”
- Three frames for innovation policy: R&D, systems of innovation and transformative change (2018, background): “In this process the role of intermediary actors in advocating competitive niches, new visions and policies is crucial (Kivimaa, 2014), as is the construction of networks embracing both niche and dominant regime actors (Diaz et al., 2013) The need for anticipation, experimentation, learning, and the…”