https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8803-0495
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ABSTRACT
Intermediaries were once considered to be a product of a market economy, however, in some statist industrial countries, the top-down national innovation system limited the ‘redundancy’ in regions (cf. Leydesdorff 2018), and the local governments have to establish intermediaries to strengthen the regional knowledge base. An innovation intermediary established by a local government is an initiator of regional collaboration and a collaboration of triple helix spaces in itself. In this study, we consider public innovation intermediaries (PIINs) as hybrid innovation agents with an institutional design at the meso level and examine the role of PIINs played in regional innovation from the framework of triple helix spaces. To render the virtual spaces qualitative, we construct a framework of activity-functions-spaces (AFS) and analyse the innovation activities of PIINs. Through the comparison of two PIINs in Japan, we find the asymmetric relationship between the triple helix spaces in PIINs and the regional triple helix, and the differentiated but intersected spaces in PIINs are most conducive to regional innovation, which provides insights for theory and practice.
Acknowledgement
This work was supported by Global Creative Leadership Project (2013-2016) of the University of Tokyo and the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant number: 71672045, 72072043].
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Run Duan
Run Duan is a Ph.D. of the University of Tokyo (Japan) and works as a postdoc of the School of Management at Guangdong University of Technology (China). Her research directions include knowledge creation, innovation ecosystem and regional innovation.
Linlin Jin
Linlin Jin is a full professor of Management at the School of Management, Guangdong University of Technology, China. His research interests include innovation management and entrepreneurship, especially study from management, sociology, psychology and multiple disciplinary perspectives.