Despite their crucial role, innovation intermediaries are weakened. A paradox that hinders the scaling up of ecological solutions.
The ecological transition is not only hindered by a lack of scientific advances, new technologies, or capital. It also often gets stuck when it comes to transforming a prototype into a truly deployed solution.
This requires close coordination between laboratories, industrialists, funders, administrations, associations, users, and field operators. Such coordination can only be built through experimentation, continuous adjustment, collective learning, over a long period of time.
However, innovation intermediaries created for this purpose, especially “living labs” that are multiplying worldwide to bring together actors with different constraints around a common project, face recurring difficulties that often prevent them from carrying out this mission.
Taking the example of water, a subject on which more than a hundred Living Labs are working internationally. Their actions show how complex technologies can be transformed into operational devices, usable by farmers. In Senegal, a spatial observation technology of the earth has allowed, through multi-actor workshops, to prototype a platform for visualizing irrigation in rice fields. The project, considered a success, was presented at COP26 and examined by the World Bank for scaling up.
However, as soon as the solution is deemed technically “mature,” the living lab is sidelined from the following phases. The actors keep the technical elements but remove what made collective use possible: the capacity for orchestration, mediation, and continuous adjustment. Yet it is precisely at the scaling-up stage that this function becomes decisive.
Diffusing an innovation involves not only replicating a technical solution but also adapting it, supporting its appropriation, arbitrating between diverging interests, and maintaining cooperation over the long term.
By removing this continuity, the entire innovation is weakened. In the case of the Senegal River, actors acknowledge that the technology is not yet fully utilized to measure, for example, the extent of climate change or control the spread of invasive plants.
It is a true paradox: the more successful the intermediary, the more its contribution becomes invisible. Once the innovation is deemed credible, everyone highlights the technology, the funder, or the institution that supports it, and much less the assembly work, mediation, and adjustment that allowed very different actors to advance together.
The problem is that this contribution remains difficult to highlight and recognize. Worse: situated at the intersection of project tensions, the intermediary often concentrates the criticisms of stakeholders. Because it must deal with conflicting expectations, it sometimes ends up being the convenient receptacle of collective frustrations. The intermediary is therefore often removed too early from the project.
If we truly want to accelerate the implementation and deployment of innovations in service of the transition, two changes are necessary:
Firstly, explicitly measure the contribution of intermediaries, not just projects. This requires adapted criteria: their capacity to structure coalitions of actors, ensure that solutions are truly appropriated and maintained on the ground, promote their diffusion from one project to another, and develop organizations’ competencies.
Secondly, finance these intermediaries in the long term. Most still operate under constraints of short and fragmented financing. Mediation requires time to build trust, consolidate methods, develop networks, accumulate hybrid skills. Without continuity, one produces isolated successes; one does not build the collective capacity to generalize, maintain, and evolve solutions.
Innovation policies focused on impact can no longer consider these actors as mere “project structures.” They are strategic links in scaling up. Weakening them means accepting that promising innovations shine in the pilot stage, then stagnate during deployment.
(*Quentin Plantec is a Research Professor in Strategy and Innovation Management at TBS Education. A graduate of Ecole Polytechnique, he holds a PhD in Management Sciences from Mines ParisTech-PSL. His work focuses mainly on the role of science in innovation. Cylien Gibert is a Research Professor in Strategic Management at TBS Education. His work focuses on legitimizing innovation activities and organizational dynamics in action)
