Montréal's Capacity for Creative Connectivity: Outlook & Opportunities

Regional economic growth is powered by creative people, who prefer places that are diverse, tolerant and open to new ideas. Diversity increases the odds that a place will attract different types of creative people with different skill sets and ideas. Places with diverse mixes of creative people are more likely to generate new combinations. Furthermore, diversity and concentration work together to speed the fl ow of knowledge. Greater and more diverse concentrations of creative capital in turn lead to higher rates of innovation, hightechnology business formation, job generation and economic growth. The Montreal region is ideally suited to exploit those opportunities. Among the 25 most populous metropolitan areas in the U.S. and Canada, the Montreal region ranks third in average population density (behind the Boston CMSA and New York CMSA). Among that same group of regions, the Montreal region has the second greatest percentage of its workforce in the “super creative core” (Florida, 2002, p. 328). These two offer the combination of density and diversity likely to result in signifi cant opportunities for the region. This study was conducted through a series of focus groups and interviews with individuals from the business, education, arts and government sectors of the Canadian Montreal region. (Further detail on the methodology is available in the academic paper.) The Montreal region is defi ned by Statistics Canada as the Montreal CMA (Census Metropolitan Area) and includes the entire Montreal metropolitan area. The study also included a comparison of the Montreal region with the 24 other largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. (MSAs and CMSAs) and Canada (CMAs).