THE ROLE OF INTERMEDIARIES SUSTAINING INNOVATION PROCESSES IN SMEs: THE COMPETENCES OF TECHNOLOGICAL BROKER

As literature highlighted, collaboration and partnership between Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and research centers can increase the level of innovativeness of an economy. The role of intermediaries is recognized as the best way to connect SMEs and research centers. Large part of practical experiences demonstrate this assumption and there exists a numbers of scientific articles illustrating organizational and social aspects of intermediaries and the activities developed in the technological transfer processes. In this perspective, brokerage is a process aimed at improving the exchange of knowledge among two or more communities and facilitate the exchange of information about innovation amongst companies and research centres. Brokerage processes can be viewed from different perspective: as contributor to innovation by facilitating the integration of knowledge (Innovator role, Cohen and Levinthal, 1990; Hargadon and Sutton, 1997; Cillo, 2005); as a facilitator in the diffusion in a social system of new ideas from outside the system (Facilitator role, Aldrich and von Glinow, 1992); as a developer of new applications for new technologies in new ways (Seeking role, Hargadon, 1998); or as a gaps filler in information and knowledge in industrial networks (Bridge role, Provan and Human, 1999). From an organizational point of view, brokerage activities can be structured as an agency, as a governmental institution or in an actor’s perspective. Our assumption will be on an actor’s perspective. Being a broker will not appeal to everyone. Whether or not people emerge as brokers seems to depend on the characteristics of people and the context in which they work (Kyrkels and Duyster, 2010). Indeed, broker’s role and characteristics depend on the environmental and productive context, kind of network the broker is involved in, width of key activities performed by the broker, broker’s affiliation, role of the partners. Literature is still poor of field analysis about competences and skills a technological broker should posses. Skills and competences of the broker are contextualized based on specific attributes of the environment the broker is involved in and also on the specific way it is structured the network of firms, institutions and research centers. Aim of this paper is to analyze broker’s skills and competences as a critical issue in successful brokerage processes. In particular, the following research questions will be threatened in the paper: • Which is the role of the broker in an actor perspective? • Which competences? • How to develop brokerage processes based on their regional context? • How to plan training program to spread broker professionals? To answer to this question, a methodological proposal based on a competency approach theory to map the competence’s profile of a technological broker will be proposed. The methodology is seek to test a set of competences knowledge broker should owned to improve the level of innovativeness in a specific regional context. The competences’ mapping is performed through a set of explorative case studies. Interviews with successful brokers will exploit the competences and the skills a broker should owned to manage the collaboration between firms and research centers.