Innovating in small communities isn’t easy. The fact is that non-metropolitan areas lack the diversity of cities. Diversity is a key driver of business creativity – the cross-pollination of ideas, the adaptation of innovations in one sector being adapted to another, and ideas building on ideas.
Physicist Geoffrey West found that the creative energy in big cities (as measured by patents, startups, so-called creative industries etc) is disproportionate to their sizes. A city of 1 million isn’t ten times more creative than a town of 100,000. It is 17 times more creative.
The further a community is located from a major city, the less chance of innovation.
Fortunately, there is a solution. Regional business owners simply need to use today’s technology to collaborate – across shire boundaries, across time zones and across business sectors. Modern technology largely makes geolocation irrelevant. Every connected organisation in the country, and the world, has equal access to diverse knowledge and therefore equal opportunity to innovate.
Technology enables collaboration.
Collaboration leads to cross-pollination.
From cross-pollination ideas are born.
From ideas come innovations.
It’s as simple as that.
