Diverse diversities—Open innovation in small towns and rural areas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract It is generally accepted that cities and other forms of geographic agglomerations are conducive to innovation because their density and variety of firms, sectors and individuals create a diverse environment. However, a growing body of work shows that innovation also occurs in peripheral regions and small towns. Furthermore, work on rural social networks shows that diversity is multidimensional, and that along certain dimensions networks developed in rural areas are more diverse than those observed in cities. In this paper, we develop these arguments, then report our observations of seven successful firms in Swiss small towns. These firms benefit from at least three types of diversity: internal diversity; multiplexed interactions between workers at different hierarchical levels; and external diversity as firms reach beyond the region. We conclude that diversity conducive to firm‐level innovation is not a specifically urban attribute: at least some of its dimensions are present in small towns and more peripheral areas.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".