We often hear about how the world needs more innovation to deal with our current global challenges. This was truer during the pandemic when everyone from government, businesses, or individuals was after innovative solutions to our everyday struggles.
Thankfully innovation is not something we humans lack. Our inquisitive minds and thirst for uncovering the unknown have been pushing our limits for ages, rolling out innovations at the same time.
However, these innovations are useless if they don’t offer practical solutions. And that’s something an innovation broker can really help.
This article will shed light on the dawning role of the innovation broker and its usefulness in the current economy.
What a broker does
You should already know that a broker is essentially a mediator between parties, often found in the finance and banking industries. In these industries, brokers usually liaise between buyers and sellers of various kinds of goods and services, like investments, real estate, and insurance. Essentially, they listen to their customers’ needs and try to connect them with the right services, goods, or people to fulfil them. JOIST Innovation Park, for example, is the perfect example of an innovation broker as it provides Innovation Funding and Innovation Management services to its clients, helping them to understand their innovation needs, fund them, and implement them.
What is an innovation broker?
The above is roughly the definition of the well-known role of brokers in our economy throughout the years. But nowadays, the increased demand for innovative solutions has created a new role, that of the innovation broker.
Similarly to the above, an innovation broker connects ideas, people, organizations, and communities to enable and support the innovation process. They are the bridge builders that try to connect every question with an answer. This is hard to achieve since it requires deep knowledge and understanding of many things together with good connections in the field.
What innovation brokers do
Innovation brokers are essential in procuring innovative goods and services by linking buyers’ demand and suppliers’ innovation capacity. Innovation brokers can help buyers identify their needs and connect them with the startups and SMEs that are able to develop tailored, innovative solutions for them.
Further, innovation brokerage includes giving advice on project development, encouraging unconventional thinking, hunting for potential innovation partners (“matchmaking”), promoting focused knowledge transfer, and increasing information sharing.
Conclusion
Innovative solutions are needed in the current competitive and digital world. Unfortunately, firms often lack the knowledge to deal with their problems or know their options. Innovation brokers can fill that void with their expertise in matchmaking these innovation needing companies with the right people or firms that can provide them with a tailored solution to their needs.
PPI GO: The innovative VET Curriculum for the Public Procurement of Innovation Manager
The PPI GO is an Erasmus+ project to promote the creation of the professional profile of experts in the Public Procurement of Innovation. These experts, called PPI Managers, are ready to assist the PA in the execution of Public Procurement of Innovation, as well as organisations (specifically SMEs and inventive new businesses) in investment in PPI and the appropriate double-dealing of its own creative potential.
Despite their increased importance, there is no such thing as an official role of innovation brokers in public procurement. PPI GO wants to come up with a definition that can be widely used, something that would be really beneficial for professionals in the Public Procurement of Innovation sphere, especially on the regulatory side.
Learn more about PPI GO project and its results on the project’s webpage here.
