Open Innovation Intermediaries - New trends?

OI intermediaries market has been growing quite fast during the last 16 years since H. Chesbrough coined the term back in 2002. I have seen many different types of vendors offering intermediary services, from traditional technology brokers, software companies, consulting companies and alike. On the other hand, quite a big effort has been made by top leading industries to better understand where the real value of OI is and gain internal skills to develop better processes and internal teams to engage with external partners by using direct channels for connection. I currently see this similar trend also from the offer side of technology, so that Universities, Startups, RTOs and even individual researchers are increasingly gaining experience on marketing of technology and thus on selecting the most effective and well developed channels to directly run technology transfer activities.

This has led to the disappearance or attempts to refine the business model of some and even well known OI intermediaries that used to limit direct access to Open Innovation and technology transfer players. And, I predict that we will see further mergers between Open Innovation intermediaries having similar value proposition.

This is basically because there is a clear trend that intermediation in Open Innovation is becoming more and more web and digital based given the rise of new technology such as the blockchain or Big research data models being in an advanced development phase in many industries.

I believe successful innovation usually happens by applying unstructured processes within well manged organizations so no matter the form Open Innovation intermediaries will take in the future they will have to adapt to these type of organizations in order to bring value to the OI ecosystem.