New business models for public innovation intermediaries supporting emerging innovation systems: The case of the Internet of Things

In several countries, governments have assigned to public innovation intermediaries (PIIs) the mandate to support the digital transition, by facilitating the development and adoption of new digital technologies on the part of firms and other organisations. This new mandate requires PIIs to upgrade their business models, moving beyond their traditional involvement in firms’ technology upgrading and university-industry knowledge transfer, toward supporting the creation of new innovation systems around the emerging digital technologies. To understand how PIIs are reconfiguring their business models to support the digital transition, we study four cases of PIIs operating in the United Kingdom and France, whose mandates include providing support for firms and other organisations in the implementation of new digital technologies, focusing in particular on the Internet of Things (IoT). We show that, despite their differences, all four PIIs have substantially reconfigured their business models in similar ways in order to fulfil these mandates. Both the formal legitimacy arising from their policy mandate, and the knowledge resources and informal legitimacy they have developed, have played a decisive role in their ability to orchestrate the development of innovation systems around IoT.