How knowledge brokers emerge and evolve: The role of actors’ behaviour

This article investigates how actors positioned in a network can evolve as knowledge brokers, as wellas how they act to develop new brokerage roles. Our focus is on actor’s behaviour while previous stud-ies concentrate more on the structural and positional determinants of brokerage roles. This researchcombines brokerage roles with a broker’s functions in an exploratory study of a small Italian comicspublishing house. Over 20 years, the firm played different brokerage roles involving different actors atnational and international levels. We find that if all brokerage roles involve transcoding functions, theability to overcome transcoding obstacles, through the use of shared imprinting with receiving part-ners, could be useful for developing any brokerage role. Moreover, heterogeneity in the competencesand industry experience of hired members of the management team could support the development ofnew brokerage roles, with differentiated effects on various brokers’ functions. If a brokerage role involvesnew actors with no previous allegiance, the status of the broker, signalled through network relations, canhave significant impacts by indirectly communicating its superior knowledge. The proposed, emergingtheoretical framework has direct implications for studies of knowledge brokers and innovation in socialnetworks, as well as for entrepreneurship research.