Innovation intermediaries, TTOs, RTOs, incubators and university-affiliated centres are widely seen as the actors that bring SMEs, startups, and university researchers together. The matching part, in most regions, works. The collaboration part often does not. Pilots stall, technologies do not reach the shop floor, and the same parties show up at the next event without much to show from the last one. The harder question for an intermediary is therefore not who to connect, but what to do after the connection what has to be in place so that meetings turn into working partnerships. The granular, micro-level view of how this happens is underdeveloped in literature. This paper opens the "MITC box", Mälardalen Industrial Technology Centre, a non-profit innovation intermediary co-managed with Mälardalen University through the MATCH project, which brings together manufacturing SMEs, deep-tech startups and university researchers in a sector-specific testbed. We use a reflexive single-case design, drawing on 11 semi-structured interviews with SMEs, startups, intermediary staff and university stakeholders, complemented by direct observations of testbed activities and project meetings, and by internal project documents. The data were analysed using a Gioia-style approach. Five interconnected mechanisms emerged. The intermediary acts as an applied research translator between university knowledge and the shop floor; provides hands-on implementation capability that goes beyond matchmaking; uses the testbed as trust and social infrastructure rather than only technical infrastructure; sustains a contextual discussion space around regional digitalisation; and works through individual-level relationships that hold across organisations. Together, these mechanisms shift intermediation from a transactional logic to a relational one and produce gains for all three sides SMEs digitalise with technology that fits production, startups gain customer access and reference cases, and the intermediary builds sector legitimacy and a regional knowledge base. The mechanisms create the conditions under which something closer to ecosystem orchestration could develop. For universities and regional actors, the paper offers a concrete picture of what has to be present "inside the box" of a university- affiliated intermediary for collaboration with manufacturing SMEs to move beyond the meeting.