Exploring the role of intermediary organizations in firm and user community collaborations: Resolving or multiplying paradoxes?

Research on user innovation shows that innovation can be impeded by the conflicting demands that arise in the context of collaborations between firms and their user communities. One stream of research, however, applies a paradox lens to argue that intermediary organizations can help to resolve these conflicts, by bridging the opposing logics in which they originate. On the basis of an embedded case study, this article suggests that instead of resolving a paradox of innovation, intermediaries create new paradoxical tensions. Further, I argue that mediating firm-community collaboration is not a matter of bridging opposing logics, but of managing new forms of membership uncertainty.