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Written by Richard Shearmur, Professor, McGill School of Urban Planning

The language we use to discuss innovation and creativity has such a pro-urban bias that we’ve forgotten these qualities flourish outside of cities, too.

“It can be argued that urban innovation and creativity have combined, giving birth to the smart city. This new city showcases urban technological and cultural prowess, furthering the triumph of the city.”

Few people, particularly those cognizant of current writing on cities, culture, and technology, would blink at the sentence above. “Urban innovation,” the “smart city,” and the “triumph of the city”—these have become familiar as buzz phrases and even book titles.

But what about peripheral regions, rural areas, and small towns—can’t they be smart and innovative? And what exactly is meant by “the triumph of the city”? Triumph over what?

Language can perpetuate and reveal fundamental biases. Gender scholars have analysed how male bias has permeated language, and how it can shape the way women and people of other genders are perceived and how they perceive themselves. I find that there is a strong pro-urban bias embedded in the language used to discuss innovation and creativity—a bias that makes it difficult to conceive of them outside of cities. The non-urban is systematically, and usually unconsciously, devalued by scholars and policymakers. And this bias persists despite abundant evidence to the contrary.

Why innovation outside of cities gets ignored

In fact, there is plenty of innovation—that is, the introduction of new products, processes, or organisational approaches—outside of cities.  This is overlooked in studies of innovation’s geography because data used to identify innovation (often patents) are themselves biased toward cities in various ways. For example, they tend to undercount process and organisational innovation, innovations protected by secrecy, and innovations in smaller establishments (all prevalent outside cities), and to count defensive patents tabled by (often city-based) large companies as innovation.

As Jakob Eder has recently shown, multiple studies reveal that establishments outside of cities are just as likely to innovate as those within them. These studies also reveal that innovation in local firms does not necessarily lead to local growth and development, since expansion and growth require resources and labor that are easier to access in cities.

Studies that provide evidence of innovation outside of cities are basically of two types: statistical studies using detailed survey or administrative data (which have less spatial bias than patents) to investigate whether firms outside of cities are as likely to innovate as those in cities, or case studies that describe examples of innovation in non-urban settings.

The statistical evidence is important, because it establishes that the case studies are not mere exceptions. Neil Lee and Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, for instance, studied 9,000 Small and Medium-Sised Enterprises (SMEs) in creative industries in the U.K. They concluded that “firm characteristics are more important than location in determining the likelihood of innovation” and found “no support for the hypothesis that urban creative industries firms are particularly innovative.”

Markus Grillitsch and Magnus Nilsson, analysing administrative data covering over 32,000 firms in Sweden, found “no evidence […] that knowledge-intensive firms grow faster in knowledge-rich regions.” This study, like many others, shows that firms in peripheral areas are not necessarily at a disadvantage. My own survey-based research in Canada, on both services and manufacturing, shows that certain types of innovation—process innovation in particular—are more prevalent farther away from cities and that, for similar firms, the probability that they introduce an innovation does not vary between urban and non-urban locations.

Fast vs. slow innovation

There are differences, though. Whereas firms in cities often introduce innovations that rely on intense market-related interactions (fast innovation), this type of innovation falls away as one moves to the periphery, where innovative firms predominantly operate in more technical fields and rely more on internal capacity and targeted collaborations (slow innovation). Two of many examples: Jackson Labs operates out of Bar Harbor, Maine (five hours north of Boston), and Dehnel-Particle Accelerator Components and Engineering is based in Nelson, British Columbia (seven hours from both Calgary and Vancouver).

Why does this evidence have so little effect on urban bias? The bias is such that only urban types of innovation and urban spatial patterns are recognised. There are few fast innovators in low-density regions, and few innovation clusters. Their absence signals—to a predominantly urban-based research community—the absence of innovation.

In this conceptual diagram, the urban cluster of innovators (white dots) is more noticeable, but the proportion of innovators in the city and outside the city is the same. (Richard Shearmur)

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