¨Navarre's business associations must strengthen their social contribution¨, highlighted Andrés Mejía, author of the thesis "Analysis of business associations as innovation intermediaries", defended at the University of Navarra last December 15 and which obtained the maximum score of "A cum laude".

Traditionally, business associations have been representatives of the interests of companies, and additionally, they have become coordinators of economic activity and facilitators of the flow of information in the industries, says Mejía.

Today, associations are going further, and are developing a new role as innovation intermediaries vis-à-vis their member companies, he said. However, although their work is very valuable, it is not evident and therefore they suffer from invisibility with respect to other organizations, explains researcher.

In the words of the author, this doctoral thesis aims to deepen the study of the role of associations as agents core topic of open and collaborative innovation processes in business ecosystems, a dynamic that is part of the phenomenon known as "innovation intermediation".

This work allowed, in a first study, to show how 81% of business associations consider innovation as a fundamental part of their strategic plan". As result of this work the book "Business associations as drivers of strategic innovation in companies" was published.

In the second part of the thesis , sample shows how business associations in Navarra have had to evolve in aspects such as their vision, mission statement, strategy and capabilities in order to develop their role as innovation intermediaries for their member companies. With the aim of helping associations to enrich social value, Andrés Mejía developed a second study with managers of 16 associations, representing industrial and service sectors, such as construction, hotels, agri-food, ICT, graphic arts, wood industries, labor companies and transportation. This work allowed to propose a model of Innovation Brokerage Capacity Maturity, and also to define the concept of business associations as Collaborative Innovation Communities.

As a result of this work, actions will be developed to disseminate results and individual reports to the associations that have actively participated since 2014 in the different stages of the thesis , but it is especially relevant that a network of international experts in innovation intermediaries will be created where various business associations of Navarra will be integrated in order to design tools and material of training that can help associations to reach the maximum stage of development as an innovation intermediary and where they are the reference of a collaborative innovation ecosystem.

The work has been carried out by the group of research ¨Innovation Decisions in Business Environment¨, of the School of Economics of the University of Navarra, composed by José Antonio Alfaro (coordinator of the group and director of the thesis presented here), and the researchers Mónica Recalde, María Isabel Rodríguez and Elena Sanjurjo. 

7 steps towards excellence

The maturity model , presented in the second part of the thesis develops the seven stages that associations follow to go beyond their role as a representative of their members to become a benchmark within a network of organizations whose goal aim is to make member companies more competitive. deadline To this end, a series of key factors have been defined to explain how to move from one stage to another and a tool has been developed to analyze the current status of each association and thus determine an action plan to become a benchmark in the field of collaborative innovation within a period of 2-5 years.