Exploring critical factors of developing cross sectoral intermediaries of regional innovation systems: A case study of central Taiwan industrial cluster

Taiwan has been recognized worldwide for its outstanding industrial clusters. According to the Global Competitiveness Report published by the World Economic Forum, Taiwan has topped the world in terms of the index of state of cluster development for several years. The famous clusters in Taiwan include: the electronics clusters in the northern Taiwan, Precision Machinery clusters in the central Taiwan, Optoelectronics clusters in the Tanzi-county, etc.. The different sectoral actors in clusters may interact through various intermediate platforms to foster their innovation. Inter-organizational collaboration within the same industry has been widely discussed in the past researches; however, little attention was paid on the intermediation for interdisciplinary collaboration. This paper tried to investigate the critical factors of developing cross domain intermediary that can help industries to construct the interdisciplinary innovation platform. Based on the classification from literature reviews, the critical factors for effective innovation intermediaries in the sectoral systems are collected. And then the European and American experiences extracted from past researches together with field study of Taiwan industrial clusters, help to form a comprehensive framework to point out how the interdisciplinary intermediaries can foster the regional innovation. This study also provides some advices for successful interactions between actors in the regional innovation systems. The current result could be useful for researchers and practitioners to enhance their understanding of innovation intermediaries and to construct a better mechanism for the regional innovation.