Entrepreneurial Intermediation in Innovation: A Study of Multilayered Contexts and Embedded Dynamics of Organisation-Creation

Abstract

The article is based on a theoretical exploration and empirical analysis of formalized public initiated instruments—eight network entrepreneurs—intended to promote, intermediate and support innovation and entrepreneurship in firms and firm networks located in three different business areas in Mid-Norway: food value chain, experience industries, and renewable energy and environmental technology. The article intends to explore how the intermediation perspectives in innovation theory could be combined with the entrepreneuring perspective in entrepreneurship theory, to build an alternative analytic approach to understand and explain contextually and dynamically embedded organisation-creation, better than the innovation-intermediation and the entrepreneuring perspectives separately are capable of. By inventing a tertius typology representing six archetypes of organizationcreative action and strategies inherent in all innovative and entrepreneurial firm development, intermediation and entrepreneuring are seen as interwoven processes constantly emerging, evolving and interacting in multilayered contexts and dynamics of organisation-creation. Embeddedness or contextuality factors of all kinds are at work in every process of becoming and in spacing of newness, the primary goal for entrepreneurship and innovation suis generis. Accordingly, the article explores the traditional conceptions of change, entrepreneurship and innovation by contrasting them with process and event philosophical perspectives of firm development.