When people talk about what makes a startup and innovation ecosystem work, the conversation almost always gravitates toward the same group of characters: the founders, the investors, and the unicorns. Occasionally, the policy frameworks are mentioned. What rarely comes up are the organisations that sit right in the middle – the ones that connect founders to capital, ideas to markets, and talent to opportunities.

I spent several years researching exactly those organisations. And to properly identify who they are, what they do, and for whom they generate value, one of the things I had to do was give them a name. The framing emerged through a series of conversations and iterations with my PhD supervisors as I defined which kinds of organisations would be the focus of my research.

Where do VSIIs come from?

In the academic literature, these organisations – business incubators, business accelerators, venture capital firms, and other innovation hubs – are grouped under the umbrella term of innovation intermediaries. The term, established by Howells (2006)1, describes organisations that facilitate and accelerate the innovation process by connecting actors, transferring knowledge, and bridging resource gaps across an ecosystem.

But within this broad category, incubators, accelerators, and VC firms occupy a distinct position. Unlike systemic intermediaries such as technology transfer offices (TTOs) and standards bodies – whose primary role is to mediate between research systems and industry at a macro level – these organisations are characterised by close, sustained, and hands-on engagement with individual ventures and entrepreneurial teams. They provide bundled combinations of financial support, mentoring, network access, infrastructure, and strategic guidance directly orientated towards helping nascent, early-stage firms survive, scale, and generate value (Mian, Lamine and Fayolle, 2016; Hausberg and Korreck, 2020; Drover et al., 2017)234.

This shared positioning – venture-proximate, entrepreneur-facing, and actively intervening in the development trajectory of the ventures they support – distinguishes them from other intermediary types. It also justifies treating them as a coherent analytical category.

Throughout my thesis, and since this “category” of innovation intermediaries was framed in my mind, I refer to this group of organisations as Venture-Supporting Innovation Intermediaries (VSIIs).

The term helps to capture two defining characteristics. First, they function as innovation intermediaries in the established sense: organisations that connect, broker, and bridge across an ecosystem. Second, their specific orientation towards venture support: the provision of direct, proximate, and multidimensional assistance to startups and growth-stage firms.

More about my PhD research, VSIIs, findings and related themes in other articles.

References:

Organisations don’t learn, sense opportunities, build capabilities, or create value – people do that work. Knowledge is generated, shared, and absorbed by human beings using tools, technologies, and processes1; dynamic capabilities live organically in them2. The organisation is the container around that work, gathering scattered, individual knowledge, giving it a single identity, and carrying it out into the world. And what connects it all is the intermediary – sometimes a whole organisation, but often a single person quietly brokering across boundaries3. As AI, automation and digitalisation blur the human role in learning, knowledge development, capability building, and value creation, that connective work led by the network weavers becomes more valuable, not less.

People are the point.

That’s the conviction that this blog is built on, so it’s worth being clear about it from the first sentence.

Why this, why now

The easy story to tell in 2026 is one of replacement. Every leap in AI and automation reads as one more reason to design people out of the system. I think that story misunderstands both halves of the equation.

Start with us. A large part of what makes human beings remarkable is precisely that we imagine, create, build, and wield tools – from the first sharpened stone to the model answering questions today. I am very convinced that AI isn’t the opposite of human capability; it’s one of its most recent expressions of creativity. So the framing of people versus technology is equivocal. The real distinction is between the tool and the toolmaker – and the toolmaker matters more.

That’s why value doesn’t drain away from people as the tools improve; it concentrates in them. The more capable the technology, the more everything hinges on the work it’s worst at: judgement under ambiguity, translation across boundaries that don’t share a language, and the slow accumulation of trust that lets a genuinely new capability take hold inside a real organisation rather than dying in a pilot4. Models can generate, but people decide what’s worth making.

Technology in isolation struggles to broker the real value generation — to sit between a research insight and a sceptical operations team, between a funder and a founder, between what an organisation knows in one corner and what it desperately needs in another. That brokering – intermediation, network weaving – is human work, and I believe it’s getting more valuable, not less.

Where I’m writing from

I’ve spent nearly two decades in entrepreneurship and innovation, researching, designing and delivering venture-supporting and growth programmes across deep tech, digital transformation and venture building in the UK, Brazil and the Middle East. Today I do that as a Principal Innovation Solutions Consultant at Digital Catapult, which is itself an innovation intermediary: an organisation whose whole job is to connect, translate, and help good ideas travel.

Alongside the practice, I’m completing a PhD on venture-supporting innovation intermediaries in resource-constrained ecosystems – studying, up close, why and how these kinds of organisations develop dynamic capabilities that enable value to be generated, shared, and absorbed, especially when resources are tight, and the usual scaffolding isn’t there.

That’s the perspective point this blog comes from: one foot in the doing, one in the studying. I get to watch the same phenomenon from both sides – building innovation in practice and trying to understand how it actually moves.

What I will explore and share here

A lot of the best thinking in management – dynamic capabilities, knowledge creation, organisational learning, and the work of Teece, Howells, Zott and Amit – is genuinely powerful and almost never reaches the people who could use it.

I want to write, share my perspectives and lessons, ask questions about these themes, and explore new ones. I will be focused on bridging (intermediating myself) academia and industry insights.

Expect:

Value – what it is, why it is important to generate, share and absorb it.

Dynamic capabilities - how organisations sense, seize and transform, and why so few manage to keep doing it.

Venture-supporting innovation intermediaries – who are they? What do they do and for whom, and why do they do what they do?

Organisational learning — the stubborn gap between what an organisation knows and what it does.

Innovation management — how novelty actually gets funded, structured, and absorbed, and the intermediaries that help it cross boundaries.

Where the evidence is thin, or I’m genuinely unsure, I’ll say so rather than dress a hunch up as a finding.

Let’s connect

If you build, fund, lead, or study innovation — and you suspect, as I do, that the human element is the part everyone undervalues right now — this is written for you.

Subscribe, and let’s work through it together. The technology will keep getting better. That’s exactly why people are the point.

What’s the human capability you think automation is least equipped to replace? I’m curious what you’re seeing — share in the comments.

A note on tools: The thinking and the writing here are mine. I use AI as a tool along the way – Claude and Grammarly to review grammar and flow, and Google Gemini to create and edit imagery – with the final judgement kept human.