Ronald C. Beckett and Gerard Berendsen
First published 2017
Exploring
innovative opportunities and exploiting knowledge spillovers may give a
competitive advantage to an established enterprise or may lead to the
establishment of a new enterprise. Regardless of the context, some-one must be
passionate about an emergent idea, and some-one must sponsor its utilisation,
contributing credibility and resources. The literature on innovation,
entrepreneurship and knowledge management suggests there may be other key roles
to be enacted, such as an interpreter, catalyst or a broker. In this chapter,
we extend a representation of five generic internal and external innovation
roles observed in more than 60 Australian and Dutch innovative SME projects to
consider entrepreneurial and spillover influence, building on the combined work
of others. One Australian and one Dutch initiative illustrate the suggested
generic roles in action.