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.

摘要

中介曾被认为是市场经济的产物，但在一些中央集权工业国家，自上而下的国家创新体系限制了地区的“冗余”（参见 Leydesdorff 2018），地方政府不得不建立中介加强区域知识库。地方政府设立的创新中介机构，本身就是区域合作的发起者，也是三螺旋空间合作的发起者。在本研究中，我们将公共创新中介（PIIN）视为具有中观层次制度设计的混合创新代理，并从三螺旋空间的框架中检验 PIIN 在区域创新中的作用。为了定性渲染虚拟空间，我们构建了活动功能空间（AFS）的框架并分析了 PIIN 的创新活动。通过对日本两个 PIIN 的比较，我们发现 PIIN 中的三螺旋空间与区域三螺旋之间的不对称关系，以及 PIIN 中差异化但相交的空间最有利于区域创新，这为理论和实践提供了启示。