Building innovation ecosystems – the case for intermediaries

Intermediaries bridge academia, industry, and policy through neutral coordination without full centralization.

Recent EU policy debates—captured in the Letta and Draghi reports—have sharpened a familiar concern: Europe needs to better orchestrate its innovation resources. The ambition is clear. More focus, more coordination, more transformative impact. Mats Benner, professor and Academic Lead for the coordination of CCI at Lund University reflects on the challenges and opportunities shaping Europe’s innovation landscape.

Yet from the outset, European research and innovation funding has wrestled with a basic dilemma: should support be concentrated or dispersed, sector-specific or broadly defined?

With many actors across many countries, operating through programs designed to serve multiple purposes, the result has often been incremental rather than transformative, inclusive rather than targeted. As Draghi similarly notes, the system tends to generate a proliferation of initiatives, each with its own agenda, rather than unified direction.

Calls for greater coordination do little to resolve this. The deeper issue is one of governance. Europe’s system allows stakeholders to hold back, preserving autonomy instead of committing to shared direction. The missing piece lies in the development of flexible yet binding intermediary mechanisms, platforms where actors give up some control in exchange for trust-based collaboration.

EU research and innovation policy has evolved in phases: an early focus on specific sectors and technologies; a shift toward pre-competitive research and enabling technologies; and more recently, an emphasis on societal challenges. Today’s framework reflects this layering, with separate pillars for excellence, societal challenges, and ecosystems.

The “Draghi and Letta moment” exposes the limits of this structure. The pillars operate largely in parallel rather than in alignment: excellence stands apart, clusters remain too narrow, and ecosystem policies are too diffuse to drive globally competitive innovation. The proposed alternative—a European Competitiveness Fund guided by a strategic compass—seeks to address this, but raises its own questions.

Empirical case: cultural and creative industries

In practice, CCIs remain fragmented within EU programmes. Their activities are either contained within their own domain or only loosely connected to fields like engineering or life sciences. Even initiatives designed to bridge sectors, such as the New European Bauhaus (NEB), have been split into thematic silos without a coherent overarching direction. While NEB initially aligned architecture with the environmental ambitions of the European Green Deal, its implementation reveals clear constraints. More broadly, Green Deal policies are formulated within separate domains and expected to align downstream—something that rarely happens.

As a result, projects tend to focus on isolated issues: green corridors, accessibility, circular buildings. Rather than contributing to integrated transformations of Europe’s cities and economies.

This underlines the need for genuine innovation ecosystems, the very ambition highlighted by Draghi. The proposed European Competitiveness Fund reflects a push to mobilize investment at scale, aiming to match the technological strengths of the United States and China.

But the issue is not simply the volume of investment. Europe’s fragmented financial systems and public budgets cannot replicate US capital markets or China’s state–bank coordination. What matters instead is direction: concentrating resources on a limited number of clearly defined priorities.

Europe’s structural challenge is that it is not a state but a union of 27 member states, primarily operating through regulation and complex decision-making processes with multiple veto points. This has historically produced a wide array of support instruments, but also fragmentation with programmes that are narrow, small in scale, and weakly connected.

Will the European Competitiveness Fund change this? Early indications suggest continuity rather than transformation. The next framework programme will remain separate, reflecting the longstanding divide between academic and industrial policy agendas. Even the overarching goal remains unclear—whether to prioritize productivity, as suggested by Draghi, or to focus on specific technologies or sectors.

The role of intermediaries

For CCIs and beyond, intermediaries remain critical. Even with streamlined funding and governance, a key question persists: how will different goals and interests actually be aligned?

Intermediaries offer a way forward. Positioned between academia, industry, and policy, they provide neutral platforms for coordination without requiring full centralization. Universities, despite growing interest in innovation districts and “fourth-generation” models, remain constrained by internal structures and bottom-up decision-making. Industry, meanwhile, is still largely organized along sectoral lines and illustrated by the difficulties of traditional car manufacturing in adapting to software-driven, electrified mobility.

Intermediaries can bridge these divides. By operating between institutional logics, they enable alignment where direct coordination fails, creating the conditions for more coherent and effective innovation ecosystems in Europe.