The Missing Function: Building Australia’s Innovation Intermediation for the Integrator Era
- Dr John H Howard
- 5 days ago
- 7 min read
John H Howard, Victor Pantano, 11 December 2025
The idea of an "innovation intermediary" often suffers from vagueness, serving as a catch-all term for any third party in the ecosystem. A closer examination of Australian models reveals four functional roles: consultants, brokers, mediators, and resource providers.
While organisations often blend these functions, understanding their specific value propositions and their inherent structural weaknesses is critical for effective policy and management. But even these four roles do not fully explain the persistent gaps in Australia’s innovation system, pointing to an important function, the Technology Transfer Agent (TTA), that has never been adequately recognised.
Four Intermediary Roles
The Consultant: Expertise on Demand
The consultant operates on a professional services logic, selling specific knowledge-based capabilities that a client lacks internally. In the innovation context, this typically involves due diligence, strategic marketing, or intellectual property management. The primary strength of this model is its ability to bridge immediate capability gaps. Consultants provide a necessary "expert" resource that can be deployed rapidly to solve defined problems or manage risks that an SME cannot handle alone.
The consultant model faces a significant "value recognition" barrier. SMEs often do not want to pay full commercial rates for advice, struggling to perceive the value before the service is delivered. The separation of advice from implementation can be problematic. A consultant may deliver a sound strategy, but if the client lacks the resources to execute it, the value is lost. This creates a challenging sales environment where providers must constantly justify their fees.
The Broker: The Deal Maker
Unlike the consultant who offers advice, the broker is an agent of exchange. Their role is to interpret business needs and translate them into a commercial transaction, representing either the creator or the acquirer of knowledge. The strength of the broker lies in the "human interface". Experience shows that businesses rarely acquire technology "sight unseen" from electronic databases; they require a broker to negotiate the complexities of the deal and manage the relationship.
The shortcoming of this model is its vulnerability to conflicts of interest. A broker representing both sides of a transaction faces an ethical dilemma, often requiring regulation to ensure fairness. The business model is also high-risk. Brokers are typically remunerated via success fees or commissions. If deal flow dries up, or if negotiations stall, the intermediary has no revenue stream, making stability a constant concern.
The Mediator: The Trust Builder
Mediators act as "go-betweens" focused on building networks rather than closing specific deals. Operating often on a membership or association model, their currency is social capital. Their greatest strength is creating a high-trust environment. Organisations like the former Innovation Exchange, IXC Australia, have shown that "trusted intermediaries" allow firms to scout for technology and intelligence anonymously, preserving confidentiality until a match is confirmed.
The weakness of the mediator model is sustainability. The value they create, connections, intelligence, and trust, is often intangible and long-term. Members may enjoy "being in the club" but struggle to measure the return on their subscription fees. This model is also susceptible to "free-rider" problems, where non-contributing members benefit from the network's collective value without adding to it.
The Resource Provider: The Enabler
Resource providers focus on the material means of innovation, supplying grants or funding to secure external capabilities. Their strength is the direct reduction of financial risk. There is high demand from SMEs for funding programs that offset the costs of accessing research or contracting expert advice. This role is essential for catalysing collaborations that would otherwise be too costly for a small firm to entertain.
A critical shortcoming is the structural disconnect between the funder and the service provider. For probity reasons, the organisation providing the grant rarely provides the service being funded. This can lead to bureaucratic delays and a perception of "spin" from the funding body. Rigid program criteria can sometimes force collaborations into artificial structures to meet grant requirements rather than genuine business needs.
The Absorptive Capacity Challenge
While "Integrators" attempt to combine these roles to capture more value, all four models face a shared systemic barrier: the client's absorptive capacity. No matter how skilled the intermediary, their effectiveness is limited by the firm's internal culture. The "not invented here" mentality and a lack of readiness to integrate external ideas remain the most persistent hurdles to intermediary success in Australia
The Missing Function: The Technology Transfer Agent (TTA)
Despite the diversity of intermediary roles, a structural gap persists in the Australian innovation system: the absence of a dedicated technology transfer agent (TTA) function. While many jurisdictions have formalised this role, whether as industrial liaison officers (US), innovation catalysts (Fraunhofer), technology scouts (Israel, Singapore), or embedded translational fellows, Australia has never institutionalised it at scale.
The distinguishing feature of the TTA is embeddedness. TTAs operate close to the problem-owner, not behind university or government walls. Their purpose is not merely to advise, fund, or mediate, but to translate, aggregate capability, and activate adoption pathways inside firms. They combine technical fluency, sector-specific commercial understanding, and long-term relationship networks.
Internationally, TTAs fill the space between research readiness and industrial implementation:
In the United States, industrial liaison officers and technology scouts map demand early, assemble cross-disciplinary research teams, and broker long-term engagements.
In Europe, institutes such as Fraunhofer, TNO and VTT rely on sector-facing catalysts who mobilise researchers across institutes to solve complex, multi-actor industrial problems.
In Israel and Singapore, innovation brokers are embedded directly within firms, making sure absorptive barriers do not stall good technologies.
These examples demonstrate that no effective innovation ecosystem relies only on consultants, brokers, mediators or funders. Each plays a role, but none is designed to solve the most persistent challenge in Australia: the absence of a sustained, relational, technically fluent actor whose job is to pull the system together and escort ideas into implementation.
The absence of TTAs helps explain why Australian firms struggle to internalise research-derived innovations. Without a function explicitly responsible for navigating absorptive capacity constraints, matchmaking becomes episodic, adoption becomes fragile, and multi-party opportunities fall between institutional boundaries.
The Quest for the 'Integrator'
Given the missing TTA function, the concept of the “Integrator” becomes even more compelling, yet also more dependent on a capability that Australia does not currently have. Traditional formulations of the Integrator imagined a single organisation capable of combining the roles of consultant, broker, mediator and resource provider into a seamless offering.
However, global practice suggests that integration is not achieved through organisational structure alone. It depends fundamentally on the presence of individuals or teams who perform the TTA function:
aggregating capabilities across universities, CSIRO and industry
shaping industry demand into actionable technical briefs
brokering multi-party projects
guiding firms through the organisational and cultural shifts required to absorb new knowledge.
The Australian Institute for Commercialisation, in its TechFast pilot, which ran from 2005 to 2006, hinted at this dynamic. It targeted established, technology-receptive SMEs with a specific mission: to accelerate growth by adopting technologies from research organisations. It promised a "one-stop-shop" solution, offering hands-on advice, funding to de-risk the transfer, and the necessary brokering to close the deal. A unique feature of its design was its ability to provide grants that paid for its own consulting services.
The pilot revealed an inherent challenge of true intermediary integration. It acted as a broker on the demand side and a knowledge provider on the supply side, managing the entire value chain. However, the evaluation evidence suggested that client businesses placed a high value on this arrangement. They viewed the support primarily as government grants for consulting services, delivered seamlessly by an intermediary. The program met its key performance indicators, successfully assisting 20 SMEs to transfer technology and knowledge. The Government did not develop or continue with the pilot.
The effectiveness of TechFast was in its integrated model, its ability to act as a de facto Technology Transfer Agent (TTA), advising, brokering, de-risking, and accompanying firms through adoption in a hands-on way. The ability to provide consulting services was an added bonus.
Without TTA roles, integrators may become hollow constructs, well-designed on paper but unable to overcome real-world frictions. With these roles, TTAs can become powerful system orchestrators capable of reducing transaction costs, aligning incentives, and enabling complex, multi-institution innovation journeys.
Hence, the quest for an intermediary as an integrator is for a model built around and powered by a technology transfer agent function.
Enabling a TTA-Driven System
If Australia seeks to reduce the long-standing gap between research excellence and industrial adoption, a coherent policy response must establish TTAs as a recognised, supported and professionalised function.
Establish a National Technology Transfer Agent Program: Modelled on Fraunhofer innovation catalysts and US industrial liaison officers, governments could fund a distributed network of TTAs embedded across universities, applied research institutes, and industry sectors such as green metals, critical minerals, defence manufacturing and clean energy technologies.
Create mission-oriented vouchers that fund embedded TTAs: Instead of grants that only support research inputs, vouchers could fund TTA placements inside firms, ensuring adoption pathways are built from within. This mirrors programs in Singapore, Israel and the UK that fund “innovation associates”.
Require major national missions and CRCs to include TTA capability: whether Missions-to-Markets, NRF priority areas, or future ARC/CRC schemes, integrated projects should include dedicated TTA roles responsible for aggregating and translating capabilities.
Develop a professional accreditation for TTAs: To ensure credibility and mobility across institutions, Australia could establish a national accreditation linked to commercialisation, sector knowledge, and translational leadership skills.
Create shared cross-university capability maps maintained by TTAs: Rather than expecting industry to navigate fragmented institutional structures, TTAs could curate and continually update shared maps in priority areas (e.g., green steel, AI, advanced materials) to support rapid matching and coalition-building.
By embedding TTAs into the policy architecture, Australia can move beyond fragmented intermediation and build a system capable of translating research strength into industrial capability at scale.
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