Technological competence leveraging projects via intermediaries: Viable means to outbound open innovation and mediated capability building?

Aiming at reaping the benefits of open innovation, a growing number of organizations utilizes innovation intermediaries as external facilitators. However, the effectiveness of such intermediaries, especially in outbound open innovation, such as leveraging existing technologies in new market opportunities, remains unclear. We aim to investigate if and how externally conducted technological competence leveraging (TCL) projects provide value to the focal organization. Based on interviews with key personnel and analysis of reports from such projects conducted in the course of several research consortia at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, we find that the projects were successful in identifying new application fields. Further, the externally conducted projects also contributed to the development of TCL-related project capabilities within the focal organization. This research also identifies a number of barriers to short- and long-term success such as lack of a company-internal perspective and project owners without management responsibilities.