Supporting Collective Action Through Contextualized Innovation Intermediation

Abstract

Collective action is essential for addressing complex societal challenges. To this end, cross-sector partnerships (CSP) are regarded as a key vehicle for collective action, with innovation intermediaries playing a central role in sustaining commitment and coordinating resources among other roles. Yet, many CSPs struggle to move beyond superficial collaboration, remaining characterized by fragmented efforts, misaligned goals, and limited collective impact. Despite growing attention to the role of innovation intermediaries, we know surprisingly little about how intermediation practices become effective in specific organizational and societal contexts. We fill this gap by drawing on a retrospective, multi-case analysis of six CSPs. We identify eight components of collective action: mission framing, stakeholder structuring, governance design, knowledge translation, capacity building, resource coordination, trust building, and strategic scaling. We distinguish between intermediary practices and micro-practices. While intermediary practices comprise a set of recurring support components used to facilitate CSP, micro-practices refer to their situated enactment. We show that these micro-practices are highly contingent on where and when intermediation occurs, resulting in distinct configurations across contextual conditions. We contribute a framework of contextualized intermediation thereby providing micro foundations for collective action in CSPs. By doing so, we contribute to the understanding of intermediation by demonstrating that intermediary effectiveness depends on the fit between contextual condition bundles and configurations of practices, showing how intermediaries adaptively bridge structural and behavioural dimensions of collective action.