An exploratory study of innovation intermediation in IS education

The importance of innovation to economies across the world has been widely documented and this has been particularly true in Irish terms in the development of a knowledge-based economy (SSTI, 2006). One of the ways of facilitating an innovation culture is through third level education and students taking innovation and entrepreneurship programmes or modules. Innovation education is a central part of third level education globally (O'Gorman and Fitzsimons, 2007; Streeter and Jaquette, 2004) and manifests itself in different undergraduate and postgraduate levels and across different disciplines, such as, ICT, Engineering and Food. There is clear evidence of significant innovation and entrepreneurship activity in Ireland (Cooney and Murray, 2008) and worldwide (World Economic Forum, 2009), yet there is limited research into the organisation or process roles of participants in this area and even less cross disciplinary comparative reflection. The objective of this paper is to investigate the innovation intermediation role of IS student enterprise teams, identify the intermediation processes adopted, explore sources of innovation, examine the practice and effectiveness of the process and consider the comparative cross disciplinary implications in relation to the food sector. Innovation intermediation (Howells, 2006) is the theoretical sensitising lens that underpins this research study. This perspective is widely cited and has been applied to countless research areas, such as technology transfer, innovation and networks. Innovation intermediation can be viewed as organisational roles, such as bridge builders, technology brokering, surrogate ties and diffusion facilitation. It can also refer to a range of functions in innovation processes, such as scanning, knowledge creation, testing, validation and commercialisation. The innovation intermediation model is therefore an ideal device for articulating this comparative case study research.