Innovation intermediaries, that is, intermediary organisations that support firm-level and collaborative innovation (henceforth: intermediaries), are a varied set of organisations that provide either networking services (eg support to R&D partnership formation and to university–industry collaborations) or other knowledge-intensive services (eg knowledge and technology mapping, various types of consultancy) or both (Bessant and Rush, 1995; Hargadon and Sutton, 1997; Den Hertog, 2000; Howells, 2006; Wagner et al., 2014). Since intermediaries can facilitate knowledge exchange among organisations with different languages, cultures, decision-making horizons, systems of incentives and objectives (Howells, 2006; Russo and Rossi, 2009; Caloffi et al., 2015), they can play an important role in policies aimed at promoting innovation and technology transfer within local, regional and national innovation systems (Kauffeld-Monz and Fritsch, 2013). In particular, as we will argue in this chapter, the range of activities that intermediaries engage in can potentially address numerous failures in their innovation systems (Klein Woolthuis et al., 2005).

A number of policies around the globe have targeted intermediaries (Martin et al., 2011; Uotila et al., 2012; Knockaert et al., 2014; Fiordelmondo et al., 2014). However, policymakers can very rarely directly mandate the activities of intermediaries (which are usually private or public–private organisations or partnerships), so they need to create appropriate incentives for intermediaries to satisfactorily address the system failures they are called to confront. A frequently used instrument is the conditioning of public funding on the intermediaries’