Out of Sight? Revealing Creativity-Led Innovation in Rural Regions

Economic geography has offered several insights to understand the role of geography in shaping creativity, innovation, and the way they are connected in space. Unfortunately, most attention has been devoted to analyzing cities and urban regions as the ideal context where creativity and innovation come together. Emerging counternarratives are challenging this urban perspective and proposing that creativity-led innovation can also thrive in rural, often more peripheral, places. Theoretically, different arguments have been proposed, yet a clear conceptualization is lacking. Methodologically, most evidence comes from intriguing case studies and country-specific surveys, yet comparative quantitative evidence is missing or misleading. We propose a conceptualization of creativity-led innovation that can be operationalized in comparative analyses of rural regions. Our conceptualization captures two complementary ways in which creativity-led innovation might be at play, either as innovation in creative industries or as creative workers contributing to innovation across industries. We then propose to use trademarks as an alternative indicator to patents, better fitting both dimensions of creativity-led innovation. We illustrate the opportunities from our conceptualization and measurement with a comparative study of European regions. Using a database combining large-scale occupational data with patent and trademark activity for the period 2011 to 2019, we analyze the relationship between creative occupations and innovation activity in rural regions. Our findings suggest that creativity-led innovation processes operate in rural regions but can only be uncovered when using trademarks as innovation indicators. These findings bear key policy implications, since they inform efforts toward formulating and monitoring the role of creativity and innovation for rural contexts.