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Development of new ideas, processes, and products—and the ability to bring
them to market through entrepreneurship—is fundamental to the growth and
development process and to a vibrant economy. But innovation is an elusive
topic, particularly in rural communities. In this volume, leading scholars of ru-
ral economic growth and development have come together to discuss various
dimensions of innovation, and more importantly, how rural communities can
foster a more innovative environment. This is an excellent read for both scholars
of rural economics as well as practitioners.
— Steven C. Deller, Professor and Community
­Development Specialist, Center for Community and­
Economic Development, Department of
Agricultural and Applied Economics

An excellent collection of works exploring the important role innovation and

entrepreneurship play in community-based rural economic development across
the United States. A must read for anyone working in the field of rural economic
development.
— James C. McConnon, Jr., Extension Specialist and
Professor Emeritus of Economics, University of Maine

The premise of the book is that innovation is far more than patent counts. For
rural areas across OECD countries that face demographic decline and new forms
of competition, innovation by firms, governments and organizations will be key
to their future viability. The chapters provide a highly eclectic set of ideas and
approaches to rural innovation that help identify ways to increase productivity
and revitalize struggling communities.
— David Freshwater, Professor Emeritus, Agricultural
Economics, University of Kentucky

Most of the discussion about growth and innovation tends to focus on urban
advantages, yet the reality is that some rural areas are thriving—or doing better
than expected. This collection of articles explores the drivers of rural innovation
and ways in which rural communities can support this innovation and bolster
their economic outcomes. It is a valuable resource for both researchers and prac-
titioners focused on rural economies.
— Heather Stephens, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Resource
Economics and Management, West Virginia University
This book provides an holistic, ecosystems-based approach to community-­
economic development. This work helps us understand how communities—
especially rural communities—can create the conditions for innovation and
­v itality, which is timely and important.
— Thaddeus Guldbrandsen, Ph.D., High-Impact
­Departments, LLC, Formerly Vice Provost for Research
and Director of the Center for Rural Affairs,
Plymouth State University
BUILDING RURAL COMMUNITY
RESILIENCE THROUGH INNOVATION
AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Drawing from empirical analyses, case studies, and a synthesis of best practices,
this book explores how innovation manifests itself in rural places and how it
contributes to entrepreneurial development and resilience. Innovation in rural
places may come about as a result of new forms of collaboration; policies that
leverage rural assets and address critical service or product gaps, novel strategies
for accessing financial capital; infusion of arts into aspects of community life; and
cultivation of networks that bridge entrepreneurs, organizations, and institutions.
The chapters illustrate how a number of innovation-related characteristics
relate to economic vibrancy in rural places such as a strong connection to the
arts, adaptive and sustainable use of natural resources, value-chain integrated
food systems, robust bridging social capital networks, creative leveraging of tech-
nology, and presence of innovation-focused entrepreneurs.
Through exploration of these and other topics, this book will provide insights
and best practices for rural community and economic development scholars and
practitioners seeking to strengthen the rural innovation ecosystem.

Charlie French, Ph.D. is a Program Leader/Extension Associate Professor,

Community & Economic Development at the University of New Hampshire
Cooperative Extension.
The Community Development Research
and Practice Series

The Heart of Community Engagement

Practitioner Stories from Across the Globe
Patricia A.Wilson

Culture, Community, and Development

Rhonda Phillips, Mark A. Brennan,Tingxuan Li

Community Capacity and Resilience in Latin America

Paul Lachapelle, Isabel Gutierrez-Montes, Cornelia Butler Flora

50 Years of Community Development Vol I

Norman Walzer, Rhonda Phillips and Robert Blair

50 Years of Community Development Vol II

Norman Walzer, Rhonda Phillips and Robert Blair

Community Owned Businesses

International Entrepreneurship, Finance, and Economic Development
Norman Walzer

International Community Development Practice

Charlie McConnell, Daniel Muia and Anna Clarke

Building Rural Community Resilience Through Innovation

and Entrepreneurship
Edited by Charlie French

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/

Community-Development-Research-and-Practice-Series/book-series/CDRP
BUILDING RURAL
COMMUNITY
RESILIENCE THROUGH
INNOVATION AND
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Edited by
Charlie French
Cover image: © Shutterstock
First published 2022
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Charlie French; individual
chapters, the contributors
The right of Charlie French to be identified as the author of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-032-01421-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-01420-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-17855-2 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003178552
Typeset in Bembo
by codeMantra
CONTENTS

List of Figures ix
List of Tables xi
List of Contributors xiii
Acknowledgments xxi
Foreword xxiii

1 Rural Innovation Redefined 1

Charlie French

2 The Geography of Rural Innovation and

Entrepreneurship in the United States 17
Stephan J. Goetz, Devon Meadowcroft and Yicheol Han

3 Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem to Catalyze

Innovation in Rural Places 31
Jared Reynolds

4 Exploring Innovation Creation in Rural Places

through Rural Establishments 49
John Mann and Steven Miller

5 Social Capital Building for Rural Innovation 63

Thomas S. Lyons

6 Rural Innovation at the Community Level 82

Cornelia Butler Flora
viii Contents

7 Embracing Uncertainty and Antifragility in Rural

Innovation and Entrepreneurship 91
Michael W.P. Fortunato and Theodore R. Alter

8 Digital Inclusion and Its Role in Fostering Innovation

and Entrepreneurship 117
Roberto Gallardo

9 Rural Flourishing through Artistic Imagination:

Unleashing the Advantages of Nonmetropolitan America 131
Timothy R. Wojan

10 Innovating with People Power: Bolstering Regional

Food Economies through Value Chain Coordination
Networks 153
Sarah Rocker and Jodee Smith

11 Rural Destination Management Innovation and

Collaboration in Appalachia 172
Daniel Eades and Douglas Arbogast

12 Nature-Based Economic Development: Innovating at

the Intersection of Nature & Main Street 196
Shannon Rogers, Molly Donovan, Cathryn Porter and
Geoffrey Sewake

13 Giving Rise to Innovation Ecosystems in Rural

Honduras: A Case Study of Sustainable Harvest
International 211
Egbert Ospina, Alexandra Croteau, Elliott Powell and Ricardo
Romero-Perezgrovas

Index 227
FIGURES

1.1 Community innovation ecosystem components 9

2.1 Patents granted per capita for nonmetropolitan counties 20
2.2 Average net change in establishments per 1,000
employees between 2014 and 2015 and 2015 and 2016 for
nonmetropolitan counties 22
2.3 X-Y scatterplot for counties in RUCC code 5 showing
establishment growth rate (2014–2016) and employment
growth rate (2014–2016) 24
2.4 Percentage of employees who are self-employed for
nonmetropolitan counties 26
2.5 Latent innovation values for nonmetropolitan counties 27
3.1 Components of an innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem 35
9.1 Arts avocation hotspots (Index > 1.3209) Mapped at ZIP code level 140
10.1 Locations of four Indiana-based value chain coordinators and
their reported regions of work (Original Map Source: Indiana
Business Research Center) 162
10.2 Coordinator A—rural production coordinated for rural and
urban markets 165
10.3 Coordinator B’s production and market regions 166
11.1 Tucker County, WV destination management framework 185
12.1 Nature-based economic development matrix 199
13.1 Location of the four study communities in Yoro Department 213
13.2 Cirilo Alvarado from El Caliche, Honduras, and Dasha
Montcalm, an EARTH University intern from Costa Rica,
collaborated on the innovative project of using a plastic tank
to trap black soldier flies as a sustainable food source for chickens 218
13.3 Percentage of family income from paid employment 222
TABLES

4.1 Selected Innovation Measures in REIS By RUCC 52

4.2 Selected Innovation Measures by 2-Digit NAICS for Rural
and Urban Areas 54
4.3 Influence of Information and Knowledge Sources on Innovation 57
8.1 Innovation and Entrepreneur Metrics by County Type 121
8.2 Digital Inclusion Metrics by County Type 122
8.3 Innovation and Entrepreneurship Metrics by County Type,
Overall and Lowest Group 124
9.1 Odds Ratios Associated with a 1 Unit Change in Place and
Personal Characteristics 141
9.2 Regression of Average Number of Patents (2013–2015) on
Inventive Class Employment Indicates Average Contribution
of Each Additional Worker to Patent Production 142
9.3 Regression of the Arts Avocation Index on Place
Characteristics Identified in AABS Analysis 143
9.4 Instrumental Variable Regression of 2013–2015 Patent
Productivity on Arts Avocation Index, Patent Stock Control,
and Included Exogenous Regressors 144
10.1 Roles of Value Chain Coordination for Developing Local
Food Systems (Rocker, 2019) 154
10.2 Characteristics of Four Coordination Professionals in the
Indiana Network 161
12.1 Characteristics of Bristol, New Hampshire (RHIhub) 204
13.1 Percentage of Participants that Adopted Regenerative Techniques 219
13.2 Number of Families Introducing New Tree Species 220
CONTRIBUTORS

Theodore R. Alter is Professor of agricultural, environmental, and regional eco-

nomics in the Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education Department
at Penn State. He is co-director of Penn State’s Center for Economic and Com-
munity Development and is co-editor of the Entrepreneurship Research Journal. In
addition, he is an Adjunct Research Fellow in the Australian Center for Agricul-
ture and Law at The University of New England in Australia. Dr. Alter served
from 2012 to 2017 as one of the lead researchers for the institutional analysis
and community-led action initiative of the Invasive Animal Cooperative Re-
search Centre in Australia. The Victorian Rabbit Action Network, one of the
community-led action projects stemming from this initiative, recently received
the 2019 United Nations Public Service Award in recognition for its contribu-
tions to strengthening working relationships and shared responsibility among
citizens and communities, industry, and government. His research, teaching,
and community engagement work focus on community and rural development,
resource and environmental economics, community engagement in natural re-
source management, entrepreneurship, behavioral and public sector economics,
the practice of public scholarship and civic engagement in higher education,
and the political economy of democracy. His work includes the study of public
and collective choice, democracy, and innovation, and how paradigms of public
discourse have shaped complex societal issues from technology and communica-
tions development to entrepreneurship and public-private partnerships.

Douglas Arbogast is West Virginia University Extension Service’s Rural

Tourism Specialist. He conducts research and delivers training on rural tour-
ism development in destinations across the state and works collaboratively with
WVU faculty and students to promote the sustainable development of tour-
ism in West Virginia. His research interests include rural tourism, sustainable
xiv Contributors

tourism development, tourism planning, tourism management, and regional

competitiveness.

Alexandra Croteau works on opportunities for others to grow and develop.

Currently serving within the George Washington University’s Office for Study
Abroad, she supports international education opportunities for undergraduate
students. As an educator, she has taught in Peru and Costa Rica and incorporates
her education experience in the evaluation of programs. Alexandra has a B.S. in
Secondary Education Mathematics from the University of Vermont and an M.A.
in International Education with specialization in research methodologies from
George Washington University.

Molly Donovan is a Community Economic Development State Specialist with

the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension. Molly works with
community volunteers and local leaders to build their capacity for decision-
making and change. Her work is focused on community resiliency, revitalizing
main street, business retention and community engagement. She is an expert
in community development practice and program development. Molly holds a
Master’s degree in Urban Planning from the University at Buffalo, was a Com-
munity Renaissance Fellow at Yale University, and has a B.A. in political science
and urban studies from Canisius College. She has worked in the field of commu-
nity development for over 25 years with experience in New Hampshire, Ohio,
Michigan, and New York.

Daniel Eades is an Associate Professor and Extension Specialist with West Vir-
ginia University, working in the areas of rural economics and rural development.
His research and teaching employ asset-based and data-driven analysis to engage
and guide local leaders and community stakeholders in regional economic devel-
opment decision-making and local planning efforts. Daniel received his B.S. in
Environmental Studies from Shepherd University, and Master’s in Agricultural
and Resource Economics from West Virginia University. He is currently pursu-
ing his Ph.D. in Human and Community Development.

Charlie French leads the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension’s

Division of Community and Economic Development, whose work is focused on
empowering communities to engage the public in local decision-making around
a range of issues, including economic development, downtown revitalization,
and entrepreneurial development. His current work is focused on helping com-
munities build energy resilience leveraging new technologies and innovations.
He brings his experience into the classroom as Associate Professor in UNH’s
Carsey School of Public Policy, where he teaches courses in community and
rural development. Charlie has a B.A. in Geography from Dartmouth College,
an M.A. in Regional Planning from Western Illinois University, and a Ph.D. in
Natural Resources Policy from the University of New Hampshire.
 Contributors xv

Cornelia Butler Flora is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor in the Department

of Sociology at Iowa State University, where she served 15 years as Director
of the North Central Regional Center for Rural Development. She is a Re-
search Professor at Kansas State University, where she served as Director of the
Population Research Laboratory. Other positions include Program Director for
Agriculture and Rural Development for the Andean Region and Southern Cone
in Latin America for the Ford Foundation and Chair of the Department of Soci-
ology at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. She has published 13
books, with a 14th co-authored book in preparation. She has served as President
of the Rural Sociological Society, the Agriculture, Food and Human Values
Society, and the Community Development Society. Her B.A. degree is from the
University of California at Berkeley and her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees are from
Cornell University.

Michael W.P. Fortunato is an internationally published scholar, researcher,

author, entrepreneur, community developer, educator, public speaker, and
innovator, and CFO and Founding Partner of Creative Insight Community
Development (CICD). Since 2005, Michael’s research and practice have focused
on developing better strategies to revitalize rural communities and economies
and declining cities and towns through more effective collaborative action,
community-based entrepreneurship, grassroots and small-scale innovation, and
democratic community engagement. He has conducted research and outreach—
and been a featured trainer/expert—in well over 100 rural communities and
small towns on three continents; and is a frequent speaker at major conferences,
on radio shows, guest blogs, and educational/training seminars. Michael received
a Ph.D. in Rural Sociology and an M.S. in Community Economic Development
from Penn State University’s Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology,
and Education, where he still teaches Community and Economic Development
online. He is also the founder of Authentic Redevelopment, a development phi-
losophy for community revitalization and affordable housing creation through
cooperative action. It is Michael’s dream to see every community and region
reach their own fullest creative and lifestyle potential.

Roberto Gallardo leads the Purdue Center for Regional Development, which
works with regions and communities fostering collaboration and innovation. This
work is done through engagement, data analysis and visualization, and technical
assistance. His recent work focuses on digital exclusion and its impact in commu-
nity and economic development. Roberto has widely published on the topic of
broadband access and the digital divide. He has an undergraduate engineering de-
gree, a Master’s in Economic Development, and a Ph.D. in Public Policy and Ad-
ministration. He has worked with rural communities and regions for over 15 years.

Stephan J. Goetz is Professor of Agricultural and Regional Economics at Penn

State University and Director of the Northeast Regional Center for Rural
xvi Contributors

Development. He holds Ph.D. and M.Sc. degrees in Agricultural Economics

from Michigan State University and an undergraduate degree from the Univer-
sity of Guelph in Canada. His research focuses on the determinants and effects
of economic growth and development, with current applications of network sci-
ence principles to growth, resilience, and innovation. Dr. Goetz has published
or presented over 200 professional papers and is the senior co-editor of four
books, including Targeting Regional Economic Development (Routledge, 2009). He
is the principal investigator on external grants valued at over $15 million. He has
served as President of the North American Regional Science Council and was a
member of the Board of Directors of the Center for Rural Pennsylvania for 21
years.

Yicheol Han (한이철) is a Researcher in the Department of Agricultural &

Rural Development Research at Korea Rural Economic Institute, South Ko-
rea. His research spans many disciplines and practices, from spatial planning in
rural areas and development policy to complex network analysis. His published
journal articles are about regional development, economic resilience, and net-
work analysis for local economies. He earned a Ph.D. (engineering) in the
College of Agriculture and Life Science at the Seoul National University, and
the main topic of his dissertation is an analysis of social phenomena through
network theory.

Thomas S. Lyons is the Clarence E. Harris Chair of Excellence in Entrepre-

neurship and Professor of Marketing & Entrepreneurship in the Gary W. Rollins
College of Business at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. His research
interests are entrepreneurship skills measurement and development, the relation-
ship between entrepreneurship and community economic development, and so-
cial entrepreneurship. He is the co-author of 13 books and numerous articles and
papers on these subjects, has edited a three-volume set on social entrepreneur-
ship (Social Entrepreneurship: How Businesses Can Transform Society, 2012), and has
a 15th book under contract. In 2011, Dr. Lyons received the Ted K. Bradshaw
Outstanding Research Award from the Community Development Society. Dr.
Lyons is currently Co-Editor of the Entrepreneurship Research Journal. He is a prac-
ticing entrepreneur, who has co-founded two companies. He holds a Ph.D. in
Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

John Mann is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural, Food,

and Resource Economics at Michigan State University, an economist for MSU’s
Center for Economic Analysis, and a visiting scholar with the U.S. Department
of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. His research focus includes topics
related to rural innovation creation, rural economic development, and broad-
band in underserved regions. Additionally, he teaches finance and marketing
courses in AFRE. He revived his Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics at Oklahoma
State University in 2012.
 Contributors xvii

Devon Meadowcroft is an Extension Instructor for Mississippi State University,

based at the Delta Research and Extension Center. Her extension-based work
focuses on topics related to rural development and has published works on the
opioid epidemic in the rural United States. Devon also has prior experience
researching rural business innovation, specifically on how innovation impacts
economic outcomes for both firms and regions. Devon received her Ph.D. from
Oklahoma State University in Agricultural Economics. Prior to joining Mis-
sissippi State University, Devon was a postdoctoral researcher at the Northeast
Regional Center for Rural Development at Pennsylvania State University.

Steven Miller is the Director of the Center for Economic Analysis, as a unit
of the Michigan State University Product Center, where he specializes in eco-
nomic modeling for policy, environmental, economic impact assessments, and
program evaluations. His evaluation studies focus on approaches for evaluating
economic development, environmental and tax policies, as well as around public
funded programs on health, education, and environment. He has over 15 years
of experience developing econometric and simulation models for regional im-
pact simulation. Dr. Miller received his Ph.D. in Economics from Oklahoma
State University in 2005, with a focus on Urban-Regional Economics and
Econometrics.

Egbert Ospina is a recent graduate student from the George Washington Univer-
sity Graduate School of Education and Human Development. His research and
work focus on monitoring, evaluation, and learning for organizations that work
in international sustainable development. He focuses on assessing the impacts
of education and extension programs on self-sufficiency and empowerment. He
conducted the research on Sustainable Harvest International as his master’s thesis
project. Egbert has a B.A. in International Development and Economics from the
American University and an M.A. in International Education with a specializa-
tion in Monitoring and Evaluation from George Washington University.

Cathryn (Casey) Porter is the Community and Economic Development Pro-

gram Manager at the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension.
Casey works with communities to build their capacity to gather input, develop
strategies, and move to action, resulting in downtown revitalization, community
vibrancy, and a strengthened economy. She conducts research and implements
programs in the areas of main street revitalization, community engagement and
visioning, and community economic resilience. Casey has a B.S. in Environmen-
tal Studies with a concentration in community development from the University
of Vermont and an M.S. in Natural Resources with a focus on public participa-
tion in food systems decision-making from the University of New Hampshire.

Elliott Powell holds the Executive Director role at Sustainable Harvest Inter-
national (SHI), whose focus promotes working in partnership to create a just
xviii Contributors

and sustainable world through transformative farmer training that nourishes

communities and the earth. Elliott leads the organization’s operations, adminis-
tration, and implementation of its multi-year, multi-phase agroforestry-focused
extension program. He works directly with the board of directors and staff to set
strategic plans and shape SHI’s future work. Elliott holds a B.S. in Environmental
Management from Indiana University and an M.A. in Latin American Studies
from Tulane University.

Jared Reynolds is a Community and Economic Development Field Specialist

at the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension. He works with
communities and organizations to build vibrant and innovative local economies
by supporting entrepreneurs, revitalizing main streets, leveraging recreation, and
improving quality of life. Jared is the co-founder and President of Making Mat-
ters NH and the Concord Makerspace, an innovation space that supports artists
and entrepreneurs by providing them with affordable equipment, workspace,
education, and collaboration. He also started several events and programs includ-
ing 1 Million Cups Central NH, Twin State Innovation, and the Community
Changemaker Challenge to support and connect entrepreneurs and help to build
New Hampshire’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. Before joining Extension, Jared
worked in community health in rural Alaska, served as a Peace Corps volunteer
in Morocco, and worked in economic development in the Midwest. He is a
graduate of the University of New Hampshire and holds graduate degrees from
the University of Chicago in Public Policy and Social Service Administration.

Sarah Rocker is a research associate with the Northeast Regional Center for Ru-
ral Development. Her interests lie at the intersection of food systems, agricultural
change, and development. She holds a Ph.D. in Rural Sociology from Penn State
University, and her research is focused on regional food value chain coordination
as a strategy to connect food and agricultural stakeholders and strengthen local
and regional food economies. She holds a Master’s degree in Public Administra-
tion with a focus on food policy from the Evergreen State College and a Master
of Arts from the University of Colorado. Sarah has a diverse background of
applied work in food production, farmers’ market development, cooperative res-
taurant/retail management, and food policy and public planning. She is a former
co-founding board member of the Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive,
a national non-profit committed to empowering students to create cooperatively
run food businesses on college campuses.

Shannon Rogers serves as State Specialist of Nature-based Economic Devel-

opment for the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension. She is
also an Associate Extension Professor at UNH teaching in the Environmental &
Resource Economics program. She has published widely in the field of ecologi-
cal economics, with a focus on ecosystem services and the nature economy. She
holds visiting faculty appointments at Plymouth State and Dartmouth College
 Contributors xix

and is a Senior Fellow in the Environmental Leadership Program. Rogers is on

the Board of Granite Outdoor Alliance and graduated with a B.A. from Dart-
mouth College, an M.S. and a Ph.D. from the University of New Hampshire,
and completed her postdoctoral research with the U.S. Army Corps of Engi-
neers’ Institute for Water Resources.

Ricardo Romero-Perezgrovas is the Program Manager for the International Tree

Foundation, an NGO based in Oxford, United Kingdom, founded in 1922. He
has worked on a broad range of topics, including climate change adaptation and
mitigation, agroforestry, tropical soils, clean biomass cooking, rural water sys-
tems, appropriate technology, and community seed banks. The common thread
throughout this work is his engagement with a diverse array of stakeholders in
collaborative efforts to regenerate the environment while improving the liveli-
hoods of people in rural communities. Previously, he served as Program Impact
Manager for Sustainable Harvest International. His recent research is focused on
social and technical innovations that regenerate natural systems while providing
economic opportunities and a better quality of life for rural households. Ricardo
is a member of the Steering Committee of the Latin American Working Group
for Regeneration International, a member of the Advisory Committee of Re-
generation Belize, and a collaborator for the Centre for Research and Develop-
ment of Renewable Energy at EARTH University in Costa Rica.

Geoffrey Sewake is an entrepreneur, brewer, food service and community en-

gagement professional with a diverse set of experiences. He serves as the Com-
munity Development Coordinator for the Town of Hardwick, Vermont, during
the day and is CEO, Managing Member, and brewer at a small Vermont Brewery
by night. Formerly, Geoff served as community and Economic Development
Field Specialist for the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension,
where he provided support to state-wide programs, including the NH First Im-
pressions, a program he co-developed. Before Extension, Geoffrey had a number
of unique professional experiences, including managing the community outreach
for the City of Los Angeles’ Pilot Multifamily Recycling Program, assisting in
the draft of investment derivatives at Morgan Stanley, and copy-editing language
on the Bing: Jay-Z Decoded project at Droga5. Geoffrey holds a B.A. from the
University of Colorado in Geography and Environmental Studies, and a J.D. and
Masters of Environmental Law and Policy from the Vermont Law School.

Jodee Smith directs the community engagement efforts for the Sustainable Food
Systems Science research group at Indiana University. She has been active in
research, education, and outreach in the Indiana Food System for ten years in
multiple capacities including farming, extension, research, and implementation
projects. Jodee leads the Indiana Value Chain Network and Food Council Net-
work and utilizes an asset-based approach to support community-led initiatives
to build more equitable and robust local and regional food systems. Jodee earned
xx Contributors

a B.A. in Botany from the University of Montana and an M.S. in Plant Biology
from the University of California, Davis.

Timothy R. Wojan earned his Ph.D. in Applied and Community Economics

from the University of Wisconsin and has devoted his career to developing hard
empirical tests of nebulous phenomena thought to be associated with economic
prosperity. This work has examined the determinants and impact of the creative
class in rural areas, the role of the arts in innovation and economic growth, meth-
ods to derive statistical verdicts from null findings, methods to produce reliable
estimates of incremental and more far-ranging innovation, and most recently
the study of radical innovation by high-tech start-ups. His research has been
published in Research Policy, Journal of Economic Geography, PLoS ONE, Regional
Studies, and the American Journal of Agricultural Economics and presented in venues
such as the OECD and Harvard Business School. Tim is currently an ORISE
Established Scientist Fellow at the National Center for Science and Engineering
Statistics within the National Science Foundation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the result of two years of work contributed by over 30 dedicated
scholars and practitioners committed to building economic vitality and resil-
ience in rural places in the United States and beyond. The nucleus of the book
was seeded through a generous fellowship awarded to Charlie French by the
Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development (NERCRD) at Penn State
University. The fellowship facilitated the scoping of the book, and NERCRD
provided invaluable backbone support by helping to frame the content, con-
tribute chapters, and edit content. Particular thanks go to Stephan Goetz and
Kristen Devlin at NERCRD, whose steadfast support galvanized this research
project into a full-blown book compilation. Additional thanks go to the Uni-
versity of New Hampshire Extension for its financial and moral support for this
large undertaking. We would be remiss if we didn’t recognize the many volun-
teer chapter reviewers who enriched the quality of the content with their dili-
gent reading and constructive comments to authors. Chapter reviewers include
David Foote (UNH), Dev Dutta (UNH), Sarah Rocker (NERCRD), Nancy
Franz (Iowa State), Kristen Devlin (Penn State/NERCRD), and Jada Lindblom
(UNH). We are also grateful for our colleagues at Routledge/Taylor & Francis—
Kate Schell, Sean Speers, and Jyotsna Gurung for their excellent editorial work
and guidance—and Dr. Rhonda Phillips, Purdue University, who serves as the
Series Editor of this Community Development Research and Practice Series.
Lastly, we appreciate you, the reader, for your interest in rural innovation and
entrepreneurship and for your continued work to support and raise awareness of
innovation in rural places.
FOREWORD
Building Rural Community Resilience Through
Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Mark D. Partridge, The Ohio State University

Rural communities face unprecedented and daunting challenges, whether they

be the result of a global pandemic, wildfires, floods, a recession, loss of a major
industry, or restructuring of the regional economy. Further exacerbating the
plight of rural places is climate change, highlighting the need for economic de-
velopment. Given the many challenges facing rural communities, this book—
Building Rural Community Resilience Through Innovation and Entrepreneurship—is a
timely addition to the growing work on how rural places can thrive.
The challenges facing rural places reflect both persistent and long-term trends,
as well as new or emerging threats such as climate change and land degradation.
Let us briefly turn to the historic challenges and trends to provide the context for
the need to adopt the systems of supports for innovation and entrepreneurship
that are espoused in this book. Since the 1920s and 1930s, rural America has faced
unremitting economic restructuring of its key industries. Foremost, labor-saving
technological change radically altered agriculture and other primary-sector in-
dustries in rural America. Agriculture, which accounted over one-third of U.S.
total employment in 1900, barely accounts for 1% of total employment today.
Similarly, coal mining employment fell by over 95% in the last century, primarily
due to mechanization. The typical story that is echoed in rural places is that the
industries that built rural America and supported the expansion of cities in the
early 20th century are no longer relevant today.
Just how has economic development responded to the structural changes
facing rural America? Early efforts to revive rural places typically entailed a
“doubling-down” of effort, whether that was through increased promotion of a
town’s historic assets or ramping up farm and food-related activities. Likewise,
the path to saving a coal-country town was to dig more coal, regardless of the
environmental costs or the demands placed on labor to increase production. Such
strategies invariably failed. Simply put, attempts to increase employment in an
xxiv Foreword

industry that is rapidly shedding jobs have not proven to be a viable road to cre-
ating employment over the long term.
Another common economic development strategy dating back to the late
1930s is industry recruiting, or “smokestack chasing,” which entails the use of
tax breaks and other subsidies to lure industry. Such efforts are often referred to
as a race to the bottom, as each community competes to offer the most attractive
package to said industry. Typically, for communities that are successful with their
recruitment, the gains from new jobs created are offset by lost tax revenues and/
or reduced ability to provide public services.
Rather, the last 30 years of rural economic development research suggest that
the most sustainable route to community economic prosperity is to draw upon a
community’s existing assets and resources. Rural communities facing economic
challenges are best served by leveraging the capacity of their residents, busi-
nesses, and local institutions. The most sustainable way for rural communities to
thrive and enhance their resiliency to unpredictable events is for local residents
to launch new enterprises or expand existing business. In doing so, the profits
stay local and the likelihood that firms will relocate to Asia or other parts of the
world is reduced. Skeptics who are not persuaded by this argument should visit
places like Holmes County, Ohio, which does not have a major community with
a town center, let alone proximity to a highway or larger cities. Yet, Holmes
County has somehow managed to thrive as a cluster of small rural manufacturers
that produce for niche markets. These small manufacturers have managed to turn
what appeared to be a near hopeless case into a relatively stable and prosperous
county. They did it by leveraging their local assets, resources, and talent.
Of course, it should be noted that innovation goes hand-in-hand with entre-
preneurship. Innovation leads to new products that expand niche markets and
new processes that lower prices. A common public misconception is that inno-
vation must be “high-tech” and mainly occur in growing metropolitan areas
like Silicon Valley. Such misconceptions have led to countless failed efforts. For
example, rural communities that have sought to attract “high-tech” firms, even
though the town lacks the basic resources to support them, typically ended up
expending scarce resources without success. And communities that focused on
retraining displaced workers such as farmers or loggers to become computer cod-
ers found that the skillsets didn’t match. The reality is that innovation is nuanced
and there is no quick fix, which might explain why so many innovations are
informal and not even patented.
Effective rural economic development is about understanding psychology.
The first step is for rural communities to realize that their best asset is themselves
and that they too can be entrepreneurial and innovative. And once an entrepre-
neurial community emerges, it can be self-sustaining, leading to growth that
does not need constant government handouts.
Indeed, Building Rural Community Resilience Through Innovation and Entrepre-
neurship comes at an excellent time when climate change, a global pandemic, and
never-ending economic restructuring represent some of the biggest threats ever
 Foreword xxv

experienced by rural America. The collection of authors that contributed to this

book are key thought leaders in modern rural development. As such, they pro-
vide the best tools for helping rural places move forward. Every rural economic
development practitioner would benefit from reading this volume.
1
RURAL INNOVATION REDEFINED
Charlie French

Introduction
Communities across rural America face a plethora of socioeconomic forces that
have contributed to their social and economic decline over the past several dec-
ades. Places once dependent on agriculture, forestry, and mining—as well as
certain manufacturing subsectors like paper production—have been impacted
by global economic forces such as cross-border trade, downward pressures on
wages, and workforce automation (Ziliak, 2019). These and other factors have
contributed to job losses in sectors that once predominated rural areas, resulting
in population decline in many rural regions.
Transformations impacting rural America were greatly exacerbated by the
Great Recession, as many of the jobs that were shed between 2007 and 2009 did
not return. Adding to the plight of rural places is a global pandemic. While it is
unclear what the long-term economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic will
be on rural America, it will likely permanently reshape communities: the types
of business and industry that survive and thrive in rural places, their sociode-
mographic makeup, how people access human and social services, and what op-
portunities abound for people of all ages (Mueller, Burow, Pofahl, Merdjanoff &
Farrell, 2020).
Compounding these challenges is the fact that the median age is seven years
higher in rural America as compared to metropolitan areas. This is attributed
in part to brain drain, as rural youth are more likely to leave their communities
post high school in search of opportunity than their more urban counterparts
(Segel, Ross, Edwards, Braun & Davis, 2020). On the other end of the age spec-
trum, many older rural workers, as well as retirees with limited incomes, find
themselves unable to leave their community or region due to lack of resources
and social and familial networks in places where they might otherwise move to.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178552-1
2 Charlie French

This can put additional strain on their families, who often end up taking care
of them, and it pushes to the brink the system of social and human support for
aging rural residents.
Beyond the sociodemographic and economic challenges, rural America also
faces human health and health care-related challenges. Epidemics like obesity, di-
abetes, and substance misuse hit people in rural places disproportionately harder
than their urban and suburban counterparts. These issues are often exacerbated by
the relative lack of access to health services in rural communities, many of which
have lost their hospitals or health clinics due to consolidation in the health-care
industry. Even if health services do exist in rural places, many individuals and
families lack health insurance to pay for care (Cosby, McDoom-Echebiri, James,
Khandekar, Brown & Hanna, 2019). It does not help that many rural places are
situated in food deserts that have very limited access to affordable, healthy food.
These factors together can lead to poor health outcomes in rural places.
Lastly, a growing digital divide is contributing to stagnant economic growth
in large swaths of rural America. Although broadband access is expanding in
some rural places, it is overall not keeping pace with broadband expansion in
more urbanized places and there is a growing gap between rural and urban
with respect to affordable broadband access. With slower relative upload and
download speeds, rural places struggle to attract new enterprises, let alone retain
existing ones, in sectors such as financial and legal services, communications, in-
formation technology, health services, and advanced manufacturing. Lack of af-
fordable broadband access also limits learning opportunities for people of all ages
and further reduces the likelihood that young people in rural communities will
go on to college or gain the skills needed to secure good-paying jobs (Gallardo,
Whitacre, Kumar & Upendram, 2020). Yet, it is not merely lack of broadband
access that limits learning and career development opportunities but also lack of
digital literacy in many rural, broadband-underserved places regarding how to
use broadband and broadband-enabled applications.
Given the array of challenges facing rural places, it would be easy for state and
national political leaders to write off rural America as not worthy of investment
and instead focus resources and policies on urban and peri-urban areas. Yet, some
scholars believe that rural America is perhaps more relevant than it has ever been
since World War II. According to a recent Pew poll conducted after the start
of the COVID-19 pandemic, rural places are experiencing a recent population
influx as urban dwellers seek opportunities to settle in less crowded places, a re-
versal from decades of population decline. Young people and families appear to
be moving to internet-connected rural places, bringing with them a wealth of
talent, ideas, and new enterprises. While it is unclear if this trend will continue,
it has raised hope for many rural communities.
Furthermore, rural America continues to play a critical role to the growth and
sustenance of the country by continually adapting to economic social change: it
remains the breadbasket of the nation’s food supply, it supports a multitrillion
dollar recreation economy, it provides ecosystem services necessary for sustaining
 Rural Innovation Redefined 3

life like clean air and water, and it is home to around 60 million hearty residents.
Rural places across the United States have figured out how to adapt to continual
change and innovate in unexpected ways that make them more vibrant and at-
tractive to people and to businesses, as well as more resilient to social, economic,
and environmental change.
The question that has long intrigued rural scholars is what makes certain rural
places adaptive and resilient? Part of the answer to that question is innovation:
that creative milieu that is brought to life as people work together across sectors
to find creative solutions to problems and adapt to change. In this book, we
discuss the various forms of innovation, how they manifest themselves in rural
places, and how communities can cultivate a system of supports that enable in-
novation and entrepreneurship to thrive, ultimately leading to community resil-
ience (Thiede, Greiman, Weiler, Beda & Conroy, 2017).

Characterizing Rural Innovation

Throughout human history, rural places have undergone dramatic changes em-
anating from an array of events and phenomena such as the introduction of new
technologies, changing resource consumption patterns, ever-increasing global
interconnections, natural and human disasters, new discoveries, changing nat-
ural resource demands, and socioeconomic shocks. Despite the torrent of forces
continually exerting pressure on rural places, some have demonstrated their re-
silience time and time again by bouncing back from adversity.
A key attribute that distinguishes thriving rural places from those that run
the risk of becoming economically stagnant and lacking in vitality is their ability
to adapt to change and overcome adversity by working across sectors to lever-
age assets and resources in innovative ways to tackle problems and capitalize on
opportunities. Innovation is one of the most important ingredients to forging
resilient, thriving rural economies (Lichtenstein & Lyons, 2010). Without inno-
vation, rural communities lack the tools and resources to adapt to socioeconomic
forces of change or disruptive events and shocks such as the loss of an industry or
a natural disaster.
The term “innovation” is used in this text in a community context to re-
fer to the introduction of a new idea, method, technology, or system that adds
economic or social value to the people, institutions, organizations, or businesses
residing in a place such as a city, town, or region. We refer to this form of in-
novation as place-based innovation, as it occurs when people in a community
or a place draw from local resources, ideas, and talent—often borrowing from
solutions or ideas implanted in other places—to generate alternative approaches
to addressing community problems and capitalizing on opportunities (Maddock,
2010).
So much emphasis in the literature has been placed on innovation in the
business sector, but we assert that innovation can emanate from any sector in a
community or a geographic place. For instance, innovation may be introduced
4 Charlie French

by community decision-makers seeking to manage public works more effectively

and efficiently; by a nonprofit organization seeking to adapt its service delivery
model in a new way to reach underserved clients; a group of local residents seek-
ing more effective ways to engage people in community action, or by a social
entrepreneur seeking a groundbreaking approach to effecting societal change
around systemic issues like poverty and public health. Innovation can indeed
emerge from any individual or group of individuals working together to solve
a problem or create economic or social value. What brings innovation to life in
rural places is the system of supports that help communities, entrepreneurs, civic
and municipal leaders, and others come together to solve problems and add value
in new and creative ways. We refer to this system as the “Innovation Ecosystem,”
which will be discussed in depth in Chapter 3.
While the focus of this text is on innovation at the community scale, it draws
on the field of business innovation to characterize distinct forms of innovation
that impact rural places. The following are four types of innovation that manifest
in rural places:

• Sustaining innovations comprise a significant improvement(s) to a prod-

uct, service, or social enterprise to ensure that it is still relevant to those
benefitting from it such as a community’s or organization’s adoption of an
emerging web-based technology platform to enhance connections with
stakeholders.
• Incremental innovations entail gradual improvements to a product or
service over time such as continual changes to policies that incorporate web-
based tools for holding virtual public meetings to make them more accessi-
ble to the public.
• Disruptive innovations are those that introduce a new way of delivering
a product or service by incorporating a new technology such as the devel-
opment of a novel, ubiquitous, web-based platform for social networking.
• Radical innovation is what gives birth to a whole new way of solving
problems and providing value, often by creating a new market. An example
is the formation of Grameen Bank, which forged a new financial model for
providing critical microcredit to rural poor around the world.

Lastly, we incorporate a fifth distinctive form of innovation that bears relevance

to rural places: social innovation. Social innovation refers to the process by
which civic, social, environmental, and other leaders work across sectors to de-
velop solutions to systemic issues such as poverty, homelessness, inequities in
education, or climate change. The goal of social innovation is to meet human
and social needs more effectively than existing solutions. Furthermore, social
innovation can occur at any scale, from local to global. An example of social in-
novation is how the Mayor of a struggling upstate New York town created a new
financial mechanism to enable people to invest in—and ultimately own a stake
in—revitalizing Main Street buildings. This model of community capital helped
 Rural Innovation Redefined 5

to revive the community. We argue that social innovations like this are prevalent
in rural communities, simply because rural places are continually challenged to
adapt to socioeconomic and other forces of change.
While there are no doubt examples of disruptive and radical innovation in
rural places—particularly considering that electrification, telephony, and mech-
anized agriculture are three groundbreaking innovations that helped shape rural
America in the last century—the contributions to this book focus largely on sus-
taining, incremental, and social innovations because they often go underrecog-
nized and underappreciated. Yet, they are critical to rural community vitality.
Sustaining, incremental, and social innovations in rural places may come about as
a result of new forms of collaboration; adaptive policies that leverage rural assets
and address critical service or product gaps; novel strategies for accessing finan-
cial capital; creative infusion of the arts into diverse aspects of community life; or
the cultivation of knowledge and resource networks that bridge entrepreneurs,
organizations, and institutions.

Debunking the Myth that Rural Places Don’t Innovate

What distinguishes this book from other scholarly works on innovation is our
primary focus on rural places. We do so because the vast majority of scholarly
literature focuses on innovation in and around urban places with dense clustering
of firms that facilitates knowledge spillover, greater relative access to financial
capital, large relative pools of educated or skilled labor, presence of postsecond-
ary research institutions, and strong public support for research and development.
Moreover, the body of research on innovation as an economic driver tends to
focus on disruptive and radical innovation—the rare breakthrough innovations
that have relatively large economic impacts—but fails to characterize the smaller-
scale, often subtle forms of innovation that occur frequently in rural places.
The so-called “innovation gap” between rural and urban places—the notion
that the per capita rate and volume of innovations emanating from urban places
exceeds that of rural places—is partly skewed because the specific indices of
innovation commonly measured and cited in the literature by think tanks and
academic institutions are at a scale that is not conducive to rural places such as
venture capital investment, rate of commercialization of intellectual property,
rates of job creation in emerging industry sectors, and number of patents. By and
large, rural places do not have access to the scale of resources or infrastructure
needed to enable the above activities, at least at the same level as urban places.
Thus, there is an inherent measurement bias towards urban places that have the
infrastructure and resources to spawn disruptive and radical innovation. The re-
sulting picture is one that fails to recognize the unique forms of innovation that
take place in rural places.
Yet, rural places do innovate, and many are thriving as a result. In fact, a
number of innovation-related characteristics and practices correlate to economic
vibrancy in rural places such as the positive relationship between the presence
6 Charlie French

of art-focused institutions and local economic performance (Wojan & Nichols,

2018), higher relative economic performance in rural places that leverage rec-
reational assets (García-Sánchez, Siles & Vázquez-Méndez, 2019), and linkages
between economic vibrancy and the presence of value chain integrated food
systems in rural places (Barrett, Reardon, Swinnen & Zilberman, 2019).
That is not to say that all rural places across America have been able to success-
fully leverage innovation to thrive and remain resilient. The economic reality
is that many rural communities—even those with effective leadership and crea-
tive and engaged individuals, businesses, and institutions—continue to struggle
because of factors that are out of their control such as national trade policies,
geography, and the onset of human and natural disasters. Likewise, it would be
inaccurate to say that there is not an innovation gap between rural and urban
places. Overall, urban and suburban places economically outperform rural places
with respect to wages, number of jobs created, goods produced, and many other
key economic indices. We simply argue that the innovations that take place in
rural places often go unnoticed, albeit they are important to the resiliency of
rural places and the people living there. Furthermore, with challenges like pol-
lution, congestion, housing affordability, and an increasing ability for people to
work remotely, it is highly likely that rural places will continue to play an impor-
tant function in the foreseeable future.

The Link between Innovation, Entrepreneurship,

and Rural Resiliency
Innovation does not occur in a vacuum in rural places. It begins with an indi-
vidual or a group that has the foresight to conceive of an idea, product or service
that addresses a compelling problem or need facing rural communities. Whether
the innovation has potential for deployment is contingent upon an agent to turn
that idea into a tangible solution: hence the need for the entrepreneur. Entre-
preneurs and entrepreneurial institutions are the ones that take the innovation
the last mile, often at considerable financial or other risk (Lichtenstein & Lyons,
2010). Without entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurial institutions, innovations are
mere ideas.
We define entrepreneurship as the process by which individuals, or a group of
individuals, provide value to people by providing them with a product, service,
or experience or by solving a problem such as homelessness. Entrepreneurs, by
and large, rely on innovation to spur new or more effective ways of providing
value to customers or constituents. As such, entrepreneurship and the process of
innovation are inextricably linked. Furthermore, entrepreneurship can emanate
from any sector or cut across sectors: government, institutions, organizations,
businesses, and/or individuals ( Johannisson & Nilsson, 1989).
While one hallmark of a successful entrepreneur is their ability to incor-
porate innovation into the development and implementation of an idea, it is
important to note that not all entrepreneurs are inherently innovation driven
 Rural Innovation Redefined 7

(Blundel, Lockett & Wang, 2017). Replicative entrepreneurs, for instance, seek
to implement business or service models that already exist for a given product
or service in an existing market such as a Mexican restaurant or flower shop.
Provided that there is a market for a given product or service, certain enterprises
can theoretically be replicated anywhere. In the context of a rural communities
and institutions, replicative entrepreneurship might entail the adoption of tele-
medicine or telepsychiatry by a rural health association in the absence of medical
facilities to increase access to critical services. Or it might entail a community
leveraging existing broadband infrastructure to expand high-speed internet ac-
cess to underserved businesses and residents. The model of implementation al-
ready exists and can be adopted from other places.
That is not to say that replicative entrepreneurs are not innovative or do not
incorporate innovation, as they may indeed incorporate innovation into various
aspects of their enterprise and their processes. Rather, the distinction is that rep-
licative entrepreneurs are not solely driven by innovation.
Innovative entrepreneurs, on the other hand, rely on new ideas, creative
thinking, technology solutions, prototyping, and customer-focused iteration to
develop new products, services, and societal benefits, or deliver them in new
ways that meet the changing needs of customers. From a business perspective,
innovative entrepreneurship is an important driver to the creation of new jobs
and is critical to the growth of the economy. It can also have its downsides. In the
context of business and industry, innovative entrepreneurship is a primary source
of creative destruction, whereby the formation of new industries can potentially
eliminate sectors of the economy that existed prior to the introduction of the
disruptive innovation, thus potentially resulting in job losses. Furthermore, if not
managed well, disruptive innovations can lead to unintended consequences such
as the demise of important industries or services once critical to rural places, or
it can lead to socioeconomic inequities if access to the innovation is restricted
to certain segments of the population such as those with high purchasing power
(Aghion, Akcigit, Deaton & Roulet, 2016).
With these caveats aside, innovative entrepreneurship can be harnessed in
positive ways and has led to rural communities and businesses finding creative
solutions to pressing problems and adapting to change. As an example, during
March-April 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced many Main Street restau-
rants to limit their indoor seating spaces to maintain social distancing. This put
major financial stress on restaurants dependent on turnover and many were forced
to close. It also placed economic strain on communities dependent on the service
sector. Yet, in some communities, restaurant owners and managers were able to
work with municipal and state leaders to find creative ways of expanding dining
spaces such as by modifying local ordinances to allow for temporary outdoor
seating on municipal property, setting aside parking and street frontage for curb-
side pickup, or by allocating public resources to pay restaurants to prepare food
kits for community kitchens. Communities also found creative ways of utilizing
web-based technologies that enabled crowdsourcing up-to-date information on
8 Charlie French

where and how to access food, including from restaurants, grocery stores, farm
stands, and food pantries.
The point is both replicative and innovative entrepreneurship help rural com-
munities build resilience: the ability of a place to bounce back after a threat or
shock such as a destructive storm event, the loss of a major industry, or a pan-
demic. In the context of rural places, the term community resilience character-
izes how nimbly a place can adapt to change. Resilience does not necessarily
mean that a community will bounce back to the exact state that it was in prior to
the shock or event, or that all the negative impacts will be completely mitigated.
Rather, resilient communities find ways to rebuild strength, often incorporating
innovative solutions to solve problems or emerge from the crisis in a manner that
leverages assets (Aldrich & Meyer, 2015). One example is how a Maine town
repurposed its abandoned papermill—once the town’s main economic engine—
into an aquaculture production site, or how an Illinois farming town redesigned
and rebuilt its main street after it was destroyed by a tornado, ultimately ena-
bling it to attract more visitors and accommodate new enterprises that otherwise
would not have emerged.
In sum, resilient communities have several characteristics in common that
enable them to adapt to change. Foremost, they are willing to work across sectors
towards a common purpose. Second, they leverage people, ideas, and resources in
innovative ways that enable them to tackle problems and capitalize on opportu-
nities. Most important, they maintain the infrastructure, systems, and processes
necessary for fostering entrepreneurship and innovation at the community scale.
In addition to physical infrastructures such as business incubators and high-speed
internet, they also maintain “soft” infrastructures that are critical to fostering en-
trepreneurship and innovation. Those include educational institutions that teach
problem-solving, supportive local government institutions that create effective
policies and programs, engaged community volunteers that work to improve
the community and support local business, and well-networked institutions and
organizations that coordinate education, technical assistance, financing, mentor-
ing, and peer networking (Roundy, Brockman & Bradshaw, 2017). These sys-
tems, structures, and processes all together comprise the innovation ecosystem.

The Innovation Ecosystem

Some rural places have been more resilient than others in the wake of major so-
cial and economic changes because they were able to weave together the various
stakeholders and resources necessary to stimulate innovation. Communities that
focus on fostering an innovation ecosystem—as opposed to grasping for single
solutions such as providing costly incentives to catalyze economic growth—are
better able to weather shocks such as devastating storm events, loss of a ma-
jor industry, or even a global pandemic. Much like a resilient ecological eco-
system rebounds from a natural disturbance, an innovation ecosystem enables
communities to restore balance after a shock or disruptive event. The ecosystem
 Rural Innovation Redefined 9

FIGURE 1.1 Community innovation ecosystem components.

components necessary to support innovation and resiliency are diverse, inte-

grated, and span multiple sectors and levels of geography (see Figure 1.1).
Key values that facilitate an innovation ecosystem—and ultimately strengthen
a community’s ability to adapt to change—are as follows:

• Ability to leverage community assets by working across sectors (e.g., busi-

nesses, educational institutions, and government)
• Focus on cultivating human capital (e.g., education and training)
• Commitment to cultural norms of openness (e.g., willingness to explore
new ideas)
• An eye towards leveraging local and regional assets (e.g., natural and cultural
amenities)
• A problem-focused mentality that is market- and value-driven
• Strong networks that enable people to connect and share ideas and solutions
10 Charlie French

Furthermore, the types of solutions that an innovation ecosystem spawns need

not reside solely within the business sector. They span sectors and therefore lead
to collaborative solutions to a wide range of problems facing communities, from
lack of key infrastructures such as public transportation and broadband access to
systemic issues such as substance misuse among young people. Communities that
exemplify the above characteristics are not guaranteed to thrive, since factors
such as geography, demographic change, and globalization can have an overpow-
ering influence, but they are more resilient because they plan for the future, they
seek to empower and mobilize the collective assets of the community or region,
and they are open to change and to trying new things. Most important, they
have institutions, businesses, and citizens that come together to find collective
solutions to current challenges and capitalize on future opportunities.
Examples of rural communities that have focused on building an innovation
ecosystem include a coastal Maine town that fell into decline following the clo-
sure of its seafood cannery, but was able to forge a new vision and recreate itself
into a tourist destination and a regional hub for the arts; a small Vermont town
that was struggling to sustain its farms in the wake of a dairy crisis, but managed
to turn itself around by shifting its focus from commodity agriculture to devel-
oping high-quality, value-added products by sharing resources and integrating
the value chains for products ranging from cheese to baked goods; and an Pacific
Northwest town that depopulated after the decline of its timber industry, but
found novel ways of attracting overnight visitors, in spite of limited lodging op-
tions such as by developing and leveraging Air BnB rental properties.
The point is, without an innovation ecosystem, rural communities are overly
dependent individuals to craft solutions to challenges. More than likely, sustain-
able solutions to the more complex challenges facing communities do not lie
within the reach of any one individual. They require people to come together
and leverage the network of assets and resources that every community main-
tains. That can only happen if there is a structure to weave together all the sup-
ports available to a community.

Synthesis and Conclusion

Rural communities across America face a plethora of socioeconomic forces of
change that are forcing them to adapt. Places once dependent on agriculture, for-
est products, mineral mining, and manufacturing have experienced global trans-
formations that have resulted in job losses, and ultimately, population decline.
To add to these stressors, rural places overall are aging, they have relatively poor
access to health services, and they maintain inadequate infrastructure—let alone
skilled workers—to compete fully in today’s global economy. Thus, it should
come as no surprise that when there is a major shock to the social and economic
system, such as the great recession of 2007–2009 or the COVID-19 pandemic,
rural communities are disproportionately negatively impacted.
 Rural Innovation Redefined 11

In spite of these dynamics, some rural communities have been extraordinar-

ily resilient in the face of major social and economic changes because they have
cultivated an innovation ecosystem: the system of supports that enable commu-
nities, entrepreneurs, civic and municipal leaders, and others come together to
solve problems and add value in new and creative ways. Much like a natural eco-
system, an innovation ecosystem has certain characteristics that give it resiliency
and enable it to adapt to change. Characteristics of resilient communities with an
innovation ecosystem include embracing of diversity, which increases the path-
ways for a community to adapt to a change or shock to the system; cultivation of
networks and social capital, whereby connections amongst diverse stakeholders
lead to greater ability to leverage resources and ideas; cultivation of relationships,
which enables disparate partners to work towards common goals; supportive
institutions, which contribute human, financial, political, and knowledge capital
to support solutions and entrepreneurs; and forward-thinking political leaders
who are willing to try new things and remove policy barriers to enable ideas to
take root.
Innovation has been undervalued and appreciated in rural places, largely be-
cause traditional measures of innovation fail to characterize the various forms of
innovation that occur in rural communities. As such, the purpose of this book
is to elucidate the processes by which innovation occurs in rural communities,
where it is taking place, and examples of how rural communities have leveraged
community capitals to adapt to change and address community challenges. The
book will close with a set of best practices that rural communities and regions
can draw from to cultivate innovation ecosystems. The fact is that rural places do
innovate and there has never been a more important time to recognize the role
of innovation as rural communities seek to rebuild their economies in the wake
of COVID-19.

Chapter Overview
The goal of this edited volume is to provide diverse scholarly perspectives on in-
novation in rural places and its connection to entrepreneurship and community
resilience. Drawing from empirical analyses, case studies, and a synthesis of best
practices, chapter authors explore various forms and facets of innovation with the
goal of characterizing how innovation manifests itself in rural places and how it
contributes to entrepreneurial development and resilience. Geographically, this
compilation focuses on places that lie outside of urban and urban-adjacent areas,
given the dearth of scholarly literature dedicated to innovation in rural places.
The book is divided into three sections. The first section seeks to define ru-
ral innovation and lays the context for where innovation is occurring and what
components lead to an effective innovation ecosystem. Section 2 focuses on the
dynamics of rural innovation, specifically looking at the process of innovation
creation in rural places, the role of social capital, and innovation in the face of
12 Charlie French

uncertainty. The final section of this book explores how specific innovation-
related characteristics relate to rural economic vibrancy such as a strong connec-
tion to the arts, adaptive and sustainable use of natural resources, value-chain
integrated food systems, robust bridging social capital networks, creative leverag-
ing of technology, and presence of innovation-focused entrepreneurs. Through
exploration of these and other topics, we hope this book will provide insights and
best practices for rural community and economic development scholars, local
and state community leaders, extension educators, and economic development
practitioners seeking to strengthen the rural innovation ecosystem. This first
chapter lays the context, and the remaining chapters are summarized here.
In Chapter 2, Goetz, Meadowcraft, and Han explore county-level measures
of innovation often overlooked in rural places, as conventional measures of inno-
vation are urban centric, suggesting that only large cities foster new ideas. They
look at “hidden innovation,” which is the effect of knowledge spillover on firms,
which can lead businesses to make incremental improvements to their business,
as well as products and processes. Their measures suggest innovation is wide-
spread in rural places, though not well documented in the scholarly literature.
They lay forth new aspects of innovation that decision-makers should consider
and how they can support it.
In Chapter 3, Reynolds discusses the components of an innovation ecosystem:
the resources, physical infrastructure, institutions, policies, capital, and other
supports critical to helping people transform ideas into action. Because entre-
preneurs in rural areas often face challenges getting their ideas off the ground,
this chapter seeks to identify existing barriers, challenges, benefits, opportunities
to innovation and entrepreneurship and how rural places can weave together
people, programs, and resources to make it easier for entrepreneurs and inno-
vators to get their ideas off the ground and cultivate small businesses and social
ventures that provide value and solve community problems.
In Chapter 4, Mann and Miller explore many of the assumptions underlying
how innovation occurs in rural places and how government policies may not ac-
curately reflect rural firms or the regions in which rural firms operate. Data from
the Rural Establishment Innovation Survey (REIS) are used to reveal important
distinctions between rural and urban firms such as the intellectual property (IP)
strategies used and the types of industries in which the firms operate and develop
innovations. This chapter also looks more closely at innovation creation through
the lens of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The goal
is to improve our understanding and framework regarding rural innovation, and
thus, inform rural-focused polices that could catalyze innovation in rural places.
In Chapter 5, Lyons discusses the critical importance of networks and social
capital in enabling rural entrepreneurs to reach beyond their local communities
for the resources they need to thrive and grow. Rural places typically have relative
geographical isolation, a dearth of financial capital, fewer venture development
organizations, a lower-skilled workforce, and underpopulation. As such, they
rely on creating and maintaining networks to overcome these challenges. This
 Rural Innovation Redefined 13

chapter will explore bridging (versus bonding) social capital, and its advantages
to fostering entrepreneurship. It will examine the ways in which bridging social
capital is built and maintained within the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
In Chapter 6, Flora explores rural communities’ creative and innovative use
of local assets or capitals—specifically natural, cultural, human, social, political,
financial, and built capital—to address poverty that often goes underrecognized
in rural communities, thus leading to greater economic security for the most
economically vulnerable rural residents. In particular, Flora explores the poten-
tial of local food systems as a vehicle for unleashing rural assets in a manner that
not only helps sustain rural farmers struggling to make a living but also provides
jobs and needed resources to community residents.
In Chapter 7, Alter and Fortunato discuss one potential, albeit significant,
negative connotation of innovation on rural communities, which is risk. While
it is understood that risk is essential to return, a great deal of effort is given to
reducing risk through the institutionalization of economic action; from system-
atizing innovation processes to creating universal “best practices” for success.
Some of these best practices and efforts can have the unintended consequence of
exposing communities to black swan events: rare events with outsized, totally
unexpected outcomes. As such, Alter and Fortunato discuss how communities
can organize themselves to benefit from, rather than suffer from, uncertainty and
disorder by embracing shocks and stressors as the necessary fuel for productive
and creative new ideas. They refer to this concept as antifragility—those charac-
teristics of a system that increase a place’s ability to thrive in the face of stressors
and shocks—which stands in stark contrast to the idea of resilience.
In Chapter 8, Gallardo posits that rural communities are innovative and, more
importantly, have the same or even greater capacity to innovate as urban and sub-
urban places. He demonstrates how an enhanced capacity to innovate can be un-
leashed as sophisticated, digital age applications and mindsets expand. The digital
age offers new opportunities and challenges, particularly for rural communities.
However, for innovation to fully lead to prosperity in rural places, a series of bar-
riers have to be overcome, which are: (1) lack of awareness of the digital age; (2)
the need to address digital parity issues (around connectivity, mindset, and skills);
and (3) digital inclusion or exclusion. This chapter will discuss these barriers in
an effort to identify opportunities for unleashing the true innovative potential of
rural communities in this nascent digital age.
In Chapter 9, Wojan draws important linkages between the arts, creativity,
and economic resilience in rural places by investigating the possible role that im-
agination plays in rural innovation. The predominant thought has been that the
concentration of scientific and engineering resources makes large cities the privi-
leged location for innovative activities, relegating rural places with less capability
for producing new knowledge to routine manufacturing, logistics, service provi-
sion, and the production of food and fiber. Wojan draws on empirical evidence to
illustrate an alternative view of how rural innovation is conceived, assessed, and
fostered. This alternative view, espoused by John Dewey, is that innovation is
14 Charlie French

dependent on two essential inputs: science and imagination. Science is required

for a firm grounding in what is, while imagination is required to envision the
full realm of future possibilities. Wojan explores the role of imagination—and
what he refers to as “imaginariums”—as the creative spark that stimulates the
innovation process in rural places.
In Chapter 10, Rocker and Smith elucidate the importance of “social” infra-
structure to support and coordinate regional, values-based food supply chains
and regional economies. In particular they focus on the role of value chain co-
ordination, which includes market matchmaking, convening stakeholders, and
providing technical assistance to emerging and existing businesses in local food
chains. A case study of Indiana, which developed a statewide value chain coor-
dination network, illustrates a novel organizing framework for bringing together
value chain coordination professionals who are developing the capacities of pro-
ducers and food businesses in various regions across the state. Rocker and Smith
conclude with examples and considerations for future development of value
chain coordination networks as a place-based development strategy that could be
applied to other regions and sectors beyond food.
In Chapter 11, Arbogast and Eades discuss the innovative responses of three
West Virginia communities to the challenges of destination management and
the successes and challenges rural Destination Management Organizations
(DMOs) face as they seek to balance economic development, sustainable tour-
ism, and residents’ quality of life. They argue that DMOs and Convention and
Visitor Bureaus play a key role in cultivating innovative solutions to rural tour-
ism challenges. They also demonstrate how university outreach initiatives can
help DMOs develop innovative responses to tourism development issues in their
community, with particular attention paid to Cooperative Extension’s role in
co-creating knowledge with rural DMOs, sharing research and best practices,
and translating tacit knowledge and learned experiences to explicit knowledge
that can be shared within the state and across the nation.
In Chapter 12, Rogers, Donovan, Porter, and Sewake discuss how rural com-
munities that are rich in natural assets can leverage those assets in innovative
ways to generate local economic activity and created community vibrancy con-
nected to economic centers. They share a case study of a rural New Hampshire
community that trained community volunteers, mapped local assets, and devel-
oped an action plan to build connectivity between the area’s natural assets and
the town’s Main Street. The program catalyzed a series of projects and actions
that have contributed to the town’s vibrancy.
In Chapter 13, Romero-Perezgrovas, Ospina, Croteau, and Powell provide
an international context by illustrating how Sustainable Harvest International
(SHI)—a development organization focused on Central America— simultaneously
addresses rural poverty and climate through the creation of local innovation
ecosystems in rural, Honduran communities where the environmental crisis
and lack of economic opportunity are intertwined. The authors provide a case
 Rural Innovation Redefined 15

study from the Yoro District of Honduras to illustrate how SHI’s long-term,
participant-centered training program has helped rural farming families sustain
their livelihoods while also stewarding the environment through regenerative
agriculture, an innovative adaptation to changing environmental conditions
aimed at meeting and sustaining human needs. Participating families have each
incorporated new regenerative agriculture techniques, doubled their conserva-
tion initiatives, and accessed local finance. Outcomes resulting from these actions
include enhanced well-being, better access to life-sustaining resources, and en-
hanced ecosystem integrity.
In Chapter 3, Reynolds outlines the characteristics and best practices that
communities need to develop and incorporate to foster innovation and entre-
preneurship. Such characteristics and practices include an emphasis on weaving
together a network of people and resources to solve problems, creative leverag-
ing of financial capital, strong linkages with educational institutions, forward-
thinking political leaders who are open to new ways of doing business, and an
inclusive and community-engaged approach to solving problems. Communities
that effectively leverage their assets and weave together the network of supports
and resources are more readily capable of innovating and adapting to change,
thus making them more resilient. As such, this closing chapter will outline the
characteristics and practices that communities need to develop and implement to
foster innovation and entrepreneurship.

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Aldrich, D. P., & Meyer, M. A. (2015). Social capital and community resilience. American
Behavioral Scientist, 59(2), 254–269.
Barrett, C., Reardon, T., Swinnen, J., & Zilberman, D. (2019). Structural transformation
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Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, Cornell University.
Blundel, R., Lockett, N., & Wang, C. (2017). Exploring entrepreneurship. Newbury Park,
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Hanna, H. L. (2019). Growth and persistence of place-based mortality in the United
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job productivity: a look at county-level data. The Annals of Regional Science, 66(1), 1–24.
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development. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 1(1), 3–19.
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Mueller, J. T., McConnell, K., Burow, P. B., Pofahl, K., Merdjanoff, A. A., & Farrell,
J. (2020). Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on rural America. Proceedings of the
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Roundy, P. T., Brockman, B. K., & Bradshaw, M. (2017). The resilience of entrepreneur-
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illustrate the divide between rural and urban America. The Conversation. Retrieved
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illustrate%20the%20divide%20between%20rural%20and%20urban%20America.pdf
Wojan, T. R., & Nichols, B. (2018). Design, innovation, and rural creative places: are the
arts the cherry on top, or the secret sauce? PLoS One, 13(2), e0192962.
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34, 100–128.
2
THE GEOGRAPHY OF
RURAL INNOVATION AND
ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN THE
UNITED STATES
Stephan J. Goetz, Devon Meadowcroft and Yicheol Han

Introduction and Overview

Together with growth in capital and labor stocks, innovation is critical to the
long-term increases in economic productivity that are at the heart of rising stand-
ards of living in any nation. Conventional wisdom suggests that new ideas are
primarily spawned in large cities or metropolitan areas when in fact even rural
places that are not typically viewed as innovative also can be home to new ideas
and insights, as well as significant entrepreneurial energy. These less obvious or
hidden forms of innovation and entrepreneurship can also benefit rural workers
and communities, but new and broader ways of thinking about innovation and
entrepreneurship are required, if they are to be better understood and fostered
to the benefit of rural residents. In particular, rural businesses sometimes make
incremental but strategic improvements to the goods or services they provide,
and these can be critical to keeping the businesses profitable and resilient. These
improvements based on innovative or entrepreneurial thinking can be just as
important to the vitality of rural areas as to major metropolitan cities.
This chapter explores and documents these broader measures of innovation,
beyond those reported by agencies such as the National Science Foundation
(NSF), while also showing where they occur across the nation. As such, the chap-
ter provides a context for subsequent chapters that seek to understand how rural
innovation and entrepreneurship can be enhanced in different communities.
Rural counties generally lag behind urban areas on the typical NSF-type
measures of innovation such as patents, research and development expenditures
and Science and Engineering workforce. Yet these NSF measures are narrowly
conceived and ignore more general types of innovation, a number of which also
occur in rural areas (Wojan & Parker, 2017). Innovation or innovative entrepre-
neurship covers a broad range of activities, extending from marginal changes to

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178552-2
18 Stephan J. Goetz et al.

existing goods and services to fundamentally new products that spawn entire
new industries, including software development as in the case of Microsoft’s Bill
Gates, or electronic payment systems, as in the case of PayPal and Jeff Bezos.
Not all types of entrepreneurship are thus necessarily genuinely innovative—for
example, some authors distinguish between innovative vs. replicative entrepre-
neurship (e.g., Baumol, 2010). Even simple or replicative innovation is essential,
however, to the extent that it allows existing business to survive and even flour-
ish and grow when they otherwise would not.
The United States has a history of producing genuinely new goods and ser-
vices in rural areas (e.g., Loveridge, 2006); these are products that have not ex-
isted before and can potentially spawn completely new industries. Often their
production sites eventually move to more urbanized counties to benefit from
scale economies by accessing deeper markets such as those for skilled labor. Li
et al. (2016) examine locations of the fastest growing firms by total revenue, as
reported by INC5000 magazine, and find that such firms also are found in ru-
ral counties, although their overall share is declining over time. Rapid revenue
growth can be a key indicator of innovation as it suggests a new product, process,
or service that is capturing a growing market share.
In general, firm growth and related indicators of entrepreneurship can serve as
measures of innovation that are occurring even in rural areas. One such indicator
is the presence of performing arts institutions, which Wojan and Nichols (2018)
have found to be positively related to local economic growth via a hypothe-
sized link through innovation and related underlying creative processes. More
recently, Goetz and Han (2020) developed a measure of hidden innovation that is
based on proximity spillovers in production and process innovation among firms
and found that such innovation also occurs in rural communities. This kind of
innovation occurs when ideas and insights are generated and exchanged among
business owners and workers, and when these flows then give rise to new ways
of producing or selling a product or service. At its core, the measure is based on
the notion that insights are sparked primarily when individuals talk with others,
rather than working by themselves. We elaborate on this measure below.
In this chapter, we map and describe the geography of the specific and related
types of innovation that are occurring in rural U.S. counties to provide an em-
pirical context for the book. These types of innovation include patent activity as
a conventional measure of innovation that is tracked by the federal government;
growth in firms or establishments per existing population as a measure of eco-
nomic vibrancy and, indirectly, economic innovativeness; self-employment rates
as a measure of how entrepreneurially driven the local workforce is; and, finally,
hidden or latent innovation, which is a new measure that was only recently de-
veloped. We also examine the relationship between rural innovation activity and
other predetermined county characteristics, such as the USDA/ERS amenity
index and the rural urban continuum code. In general, we hypothesize to see
less innovation in more remote areas depending on the measure used, but we
also expect a pattern whereby innovation does occur even in some rural areas;
 The Geography of Rural Innovation 19

for example, rural areas with higher levels of natural amenities or those adjacent
to metro areas, are expected to demonstrate more innovation activity than those
not meeting these criteria, to the extent that they are able to attract footloose
creative class workers.

Measuring Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Researchers have considered different measures of entrepreneurship and inno-
vation, sometimes facing challenges distinguishing between the two (e.g., Mo-
toyama, 2019). Perhaps the most common measure of creative innovation is
that of patenting activity. Yet, as Wojan and Nichols (2018) and Goetz and Han
(2020) point out, not all patents are truly innovative, and not all innovations are
inherently patentable. Thus, patents are, at best, one proxy measure of innova-
tion, albeit a commonly used one.
A key feature of patents is that whoever is seeking a new one has to cite re-
lated work that has preceded his or her own; this creates interesting patenting
networks of authors. An important phenomenon with patent citations, first iden-
tified by Jaffe et al. (1993), is the importance of proximity. Authors of patents are
more likely to cite other authors who are nearby than authors across the country,
thus leading to important density and agglomeration effects. The United States is
a global leader in per capita patent-granting activity, although other nations are
catching up, and this is commonly pointed to as one of the reasons for this na-
tion’s strong performance in terms of productivity-enhanced economic growth
and associated rising standards of living over time.
A commonly used measure of entrepreneurship, with implicit consideration
of innovation, is new firm or business formation in a community. This idea
gained broader recognition with the groundbreaking book, Entrepreneurship, Ge-
ography, and American Economic Growth, by Acs and Armington (2006). In addition
to presenting a comprehensive treatment of where entrepreneurship was occur-
ring across the United States, in the form of establishment growth, these authors
made an important contribution by spawning a broad set of studies examining
how entrepreneurship contributes to subsequent local economic growth (e.g.,
Rupasingha & Goetz, 2013; Shrestha et al., 2007). A key drawback of this study,
for present purposes, is that the Acs and Armington (2006) study uses labor
market areas as the unit of observation rather than counties. As such, it does not
shed any light on rural and urban differences, as we endeavor to do here. In other
words, we use a conceptually similar measure but apply it to counties rather than
labor market areas.
Other studies have focused on self-employment as a measure of entrepreneur-
ship (e.g., Goetz & Rupasingha, 2009), largely because the data were readily
available and found to be good proxies for the measure as well as for innovation.
More refined studies also consider differences in male- and female-originated
self-employment (e.g., Patrick et al., 2016). Importantly, these studies have doc-
umented that local economic growth in terms of both employment and jobs
20 Stephan J. Goetz et al.

increased with a more robust self-employed sector. The latter also tended to be
more resilient to the impacts of the 2008 Great Recession (Han & Goetz, 2019)
as well as less vulnerable to international trade shocks (Liang & Goetz, 2016).
Most recently, Goetz and Han (2020) explored the possibility that latent or
hidden innovation, which is by definition difficult to measure, in fact exists in
many rural communities. They find that such activity does exist, and we report
the data below in a map. Moreover, they find their measure to be associated in
a statistically significant and positive manner with subsequent income and job
growth in local economies; it is highly correlated at the county level with pat-
enting activity, a human capital and knowledge creation index, as well as with
a business dynamic index (see Appendix B and C in their paper). In the next
section we discuss our four selected measures in more detail while also providing
maps to provide a sense of how these measures are dispersed across space.

The Geography of Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Patent Activity
We start with the number of patents granted. While the highest rates not sur-
prisingly are found in urban or metro areas, where they average 279.4/capita
100,000, it is surprising to find that patenting activity also occurs in more rural
counties across the nation, including especially in the nation’s heartland. High
rates are also granted in selected New England counties as well as in the Rocky
Mountain states (Figure 2.1).
Despite this overall positive picture shown in the map, it is also true that pat-
enting activity declines with distance from urban areas as well as with declining
overall population size. In this context the USDA ERS’s Rural Urban Contin-
uum Code is a useful measure of rurality that is also correlated with declining

FIGURE 2.1 Patents granted per capita for nonmetropolitan counties.

Source: Authors using US Patent and Trade Office data.
 The Geography of Rural Innovation 21

population density and greater agricultural activity. Codes 4, 6, and 8 are coun-
ties with successively smaller populations that are adjacent to metro areas and
thus benefit from urban spillovers, while code 5, 7, and 9 counties are the same in
terms of population size that are not adjacent to metro areas. In the RUCC code
4 counties, patents were granted at a rate more than 3 times higher than was the
case in RUCC code 9 counties: for each of the county types, shown in square
brackets, the rates per 100,000 population are 163.0 [4]; 114.5 [5]; 84.6 [6]; 76.1
[7]; 80.0 [8]; and 48.3 [9]. Alternatively, the least amount of patenting activity
occurs in the smallest rural counties that are also not adjacent to a metropolitan
area.
This finding is consistent with the common perception that rural areas are
less innovative than urban areas, and this is truer for areas that are most remote
and have the smallest populations. The declining trend of patenting activity in
more rural communities is also consistent with the fact that R&D spending also
is lower in those communities, and the generally smaller research infrastructure
both in terms of labs and scientific facilities as well as the share of scientists in
the local workforce. Using patents as a measure of innovation is consistent with
the idea of having clusters or agglomerations of research activities, with mutu-
ally beneficial spillovers of ideas among scientists, for example, through casual
interactions around water coolers but also at scientific conferences. As we have
argued, while patenting activity is important as a measure of innovation, it is
only one option.

Net Change in Establishments Per Employee

Following in the spirit of Acs and Armington [AA] (2006), we next examine
the net change in establishments per 1,000 employees as a measure of county
entrepreneurship and innovation. Specifically, this is aggregate net change in
establishments averaged over the years 2014–2015 and 2015–2016 (to obtain a
more representative picture) per 1,000 employees [in 2015 and 2016], respec-
tively. While AA used confidential LEEM data to examine gross firm formation
(see p. 12, ff ), which tracks new business startups, business survival and expan-
sion, we instead use the net change in total establishments from the U.S. Census
County Business Patterns, as these can be accessed with fewer restrictions. Our
use of publicly available secondary data also facilitates replication of this work.
This firm formation measure we use is not without problems, in that the net
change in establishments could simply reflect the splitting up of one firm into
two or more smaller firms, which may or may not represent entrepreneurial vigor
within a community. As this is a rate per 1,000 workers in the industry, the net
formation rate would drop even if the net change in total establishments remains
constant as the number of employees in a county grows. On the other hand, the
measure is intuitively appealing in that it can be interpreted as the net number
of new establishments that arise from an existing workforce (i.e., the employ-
ees). This is sometimes referred to as an ecological model of entrepreneurship
22 Stephan J. Goetz et al.

FIGURE 2.2 Average net change in establishments per 1,000 employees between 2014
and 2015 and 2015 and 2016 for nonmetropolitan counties.
Source: Authors using US County Business Patterns data.

(Audretsch et al., 2019; Manolova et al., 2017). It also reinforces the idea that
a greater number (or cluster) of firms is associated with more competition (and
possibly collaboration) and thus more pressure on firms to innovate in order to
survive (citation).
Even more importantly, the measure is highly appropriate for communities
experiencing rapid population change, as is the case for many rural areas. Estab-
lishment growth over time could just reflect population (and worker) growth.
Measuring the number of firms per worker as the denominator should more
accurately capture underlying innovativeness and entrepreneurial energy within
a county (Figure 2.2).
Many high-growth or innovative counties are visible on this map, especially
in the Central Plains states which have a long history of outmigration but also in
the high amenity areas of the Rocky Mountains (Wyoming, Idaho, Montana).
Remarkably, a number of these remote counties—also classified as Frontier and
Remote Areas by the ERS—are home to one or more artistic and performing
institutions (Wojan & Nichols, 2018, Fig. 1). The same is true of the rapidly
growing frontal mountain range of Colorado, which also stands out in the map
with rapid establishment growth relative to employees. In addition, however,
there are pockets of counties with high growth throughout the Northeast as well
as the Southeast Census areas. As suggested in the legend, the maximum value
for this firm formation is 171 net establishments created per 1,000 workers.
Importantly, however, many counties experienced net declines in the number
of establishments, suggesting a shrinking local economy and a lack of dynamic
entrepreneurship or growth. Such declines are generally associated with popu-
lation outmigration caused by declining overall employment opportunities, as-
sociated with the consolidation of economic activity, as well as innovation and
 The Geography of Rural Innovation 23

entrepreneurship, in metropolitan areas. A key task for researchers is sorting out

why some rural areas continue to flourish while others decline, and what if any-
thing can or should be done about it.
More specifically, the relationship between new firm or establishment and
employment growth is important and closely related to whether innovation and
entrepreneurship ultimately lead to new job growth, including jobs that are well
paid. One way of assessing this relationship is to graph the two variables against
one another. This will show whether a given increase in new firms is associated
with a large or small increase in new employment, and vice versa; note that we
discuss this as an association and not necessarily causation.
AA also plot the relationship between their firm formation rate and employ-
ment growth at the Labor Market Area level (Figure 1.3, page 17). They find a
tightly clustered relationship, indicating a very close fit of a line through the data
points, whereby a higher rate of employment growth is strongly associated with a
higher rate of firm formation (with an R-square value of 0.58). They also show a
much wider range in employment growth, from about -5% to 48%, compared to
firm formation where the rate is between 2% and 10%. In other words, the range
in variation of job growth is much greater than the range of variation in firm
growth in their data set. Or, a relatively small increase in new firms in a labor
market can be associated with a relatively large range in employment increases.
With our county-level data, and using the rate of change in establishments
rather than new firm formations, we obtain a weaker relationship or fit of the
data to the line through the points (an R-square value of only 10%). We also find
the differences in employment growth rates across counties are only about twice
as large as the establishment growth rates, where in the case of AA the differences
were much greater, at about five times for job growth vs. firm start-ups. This
means that a given range of net establishment growth rates is associated with
a similar range in the rate of employment growth rates (in the case of AA, the
latter was much greater). Our data points also are very tightly clustered around
the origin (0,0) of the graph, showing less variation. It is also important to note
that many of our data points reflect either a loss of establishments, a loss of em-
ployment, or both. In general, LMAs, which are centered on metro areas, tend
to be more robust in terms of economic growth, as well as entrepreneurship and
innovation.
A more refined analysis by RUCC indicates that the relationship between
establishment growth and employment growth is always stronger in metro-
nonadjacent rural counties than is true in metro-adjacent rural counties. We
show this below for the RUCC = 5 counties, where the R-square value is highest
of all the RUCC codes, with a value of 24.9%. This suggests that not being adja-
cent to a metro county somehow insulates the rural county from metro spillover
effects, so that the relationship between employment growth and establishment
growth is stronger. Or counties that are adjacent to metro areas benefit more
from economic growth in those metro areas than from new firm formations with
the counties themselves. Another interpretation of this finding is that investing in
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PARTY ***
THE SEARCH PARTY
BY

G. A. BIRMINGHAM
AUTHOR OF “SPANISH GOLD,” “LALAGE’S LOVERS,”
“THE SIMPKINS PLOT,” ETC.

HODDER & STOUGHTON

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
THE SEARCH PARTY
 CHAPTER I

D R. O’GRADY, Dr. Lucius O’Grady, was the medical officer of the

Poor Law Union of Clonmore, which is in Western Connacht. The
office is not like that of resident magistrate or bank manager. It does
not necessarily confer on its holder the right of entry to the highest
society. Therefore, Dr. O’Grady was not invited to dinner, luncheon,
or even afternoon tea by Lord Manton at that season of the year
when Clonmore Castle was full of visitors. Lady Flavia Canning, Lord
Manton’s daughter, who was married to a London barrister of some
distinction, and moved in smart society, did not appreciate Dr.
O’Grady. Nor did those nephews and nieces of the deceased Lady
Manton who found it convenient to spend a part of each summer at
Clonmore Castle. They were not the sort of people who would
associate with a dispensary doctor, unless, indeed, he had possessed
a motor car. And Dr. O’Grady, for reasons which became obvious
later on, did not keep a motor car.

On the other hand, he was a frequent guest at the Castle during

those early summer months when Lord Manton was alone. In April
and May, for instance, and in June, Dr. O’Grady dined once, twice, or
even three times a week at Clonmore Castle. The old earl liked him
because he found him amusing; and Dr. O’Grady had a feeling for his
host as nearly approaching respect as it was in his nature to
entertain for any man. This respect was not of the kind which every
elderly earl would have appreciated. The doctor was constitutionally
incapable of understanding the innate majesty of a peerage, and
had not the smallest veneration for grey hairs in man or woman. Nor
was he inclined to bow before any moral superiority in Lord Manton.
In fact, Lord Manton, though grown too old for the lavish wildness of
his earlier years, made no pretence at morality or dignity of any
kind. What Dr. O’Grady respected and liked in him was a certain
cynical frankness, a hinted contempt for all ordinary standards of
respectability. This suited well enough the doctor’s own volatile
indifference to anything which threatened to bore him.
When Lord Manton returned to Clonmore in May, 1905, after his
usual visit to his daughter in Grosvenor Street, he at once asked Dr.
O’Grady to dinner. There was on this occasion a special reason for
the invitation, though doubtless it would have been given and
accepted without any reason. Lord Manton wanted to know all that
could be known about a new tenant who had taken Rosivera for six
months. Rosivera, long used as a dower house by Lord Manton’s
ancestors, was not an easy place to let. It stood eight miles from the
village of Clonmore, on the shore of a small land-locked bay. It was
a singularly unattractive building, rectangular, grey, four storeys
high, and lit by small ineffective windows. There was no shooting
connected with it nor any fishing of the kind appreciated by a
sportsman. There were, it was believed, small flat fish to be caught
in the bay, but no one thought it worth while to pursue these
creatures earnestly. Occasionally an adventurous Englishman,
cherishing some romantic idea of the west of Ireland, rented the
house for August and September. Occasionally a wealthy Dublin
doctor brought his family there for six weeks. None of these tenants
ever came a second time. The place was too solitary for the social,
too ugly for the amateurs of the picturesque, utterly dull for the
sportsman, and had not even the saving grace of an appeal to the
romantic. The mother and grandmother of Lord Manton had died
there, but in the odour of moderate sanctity. Their ghosts wandered
down no corridors. Indeed, no ghosts could have haunted, no
tradition attached itself to a house with the shape and appearance of
Rosivera.

There was, therefore, something interesting and curious in the fact

that a tenant had taken the place for six months and had settled
down there early in March, a time of year at which even a hermit,
vowed to a life entirely devoid of incident, might have hesitated to
fix his cell at Rosivera.

“The first thing that struck me as queer about the man,” said Lord
Manton, after dinner, “was his name. Did you ever hear of anybody
called Red? Scarlett, of course, is comparatively common.”
“So is Black,” said Dr. O’Grady, “and Brown, and Grey, and White.
I’ve heard of Pink, and I once met a man called Blue, but he spelt it
‘ew.’”

“Guy Theodore Red is this man’s name. Guy and Theodore are all
right, of course, but Red——!”

“Is he safe for the rent, do you think?”

“He has paid the whole six months in advance,” said Lord Manton,
“and he never asked a question about the drains. He’s the only
tenant I ever heard of who didn’t make himself ridiculous about
drains.”

“He hasn’t got typhoid yet,” said Dr. O’Grady. “If he’s the kind of man
who pays six months’ rent in advance and asks no questions, I hope
he soon will.”

“Unfortunately for you he seems to have neither wife nor children.”

“No, nor as much as a maid-servant,” said Dr. O’Grady. “And from

the look of him, I’d say he was a tough old cock himself, the sort of
man a microbe would hesitate about attacking.”

“You’ve seen him, then?”

“I happened to be standing at Jimmy O’Loughlin’s door the day he

drove through in his motor car.”

“You would be, of course.”

“But I’ve never seen him since. Nobody has. He has a servant, an
Englishman, I’m told, who comes into the village every second day
in the motor, and buys what’s wanted for the house at Jimmy
O’Loughlin’s.”

“Jimmy makes a good thing out of that, I expect,” said Lord Manton.
“Believe you me, he does. Jimmy’s the boy who knows how to
charge, and these people don’t seem to care what they pay.”

“I hear he has two friends with him.”

“He has, foreigners, both of them. Jimmy O’Loughlin says they can’t
either of them speak English. It was Jimmy who carted their things
down to Rosivera from the station, so of course he’d know.”

“Byrne told me that,” said Lord Manton, chuckling as he spoke.

“There seems to have been some queer things to be carted.”

The conversation turned on Mr. Red’s belongings, the personal

luggage which the English servant had brought in the train, the
packing-cases which had followed the next day and on many
subsequent days. Byrne, it appeared, had also met Mr. Red and his
party on their arrival; but, then, Byrne had a legitimate excuse
wherewith to cover his curiosity. He was Lord Manton’s steward, and
it was his business to put the new tenant in possession of Rosivera.
He had given a full report of Mr. Red, the foreign friends and the
English servant, to Lord Manton. He had described the packing-cases
which, day after day, were carted from the railway station by Jimmy
O’Loughlin. They were, according to Byrne, of unusual size and great
weight. There were altogether twenty-five of them. It was Byrne’s
opinion that they contained pianos. The station-master, who had to
drag them out of the train, agreed with him. Jimmy O’Loughlin and
his man, who had ample opportunities of examining them on the
way to Rosivera, thought they were full of machinery, possibly steam
engines, or as they expressed it, “the makings of some of them
motor cars.”

“No man,” said Lord Manton, commenting on this information, “even

if his name happens to be Red, can possibly want twenty-five grand
pianos in Rosivera.”

“Unless he came down here with the intention of composing an

opera,” said Dr. O’Grady.
“Even then—three, four, anything up to six I could understand, but
twenty-five! No opera could require that. As for those cases
containing steam engines or bits of motor cars, what on earth could
a manufacturer of such things be doing at Rosivera?”

“My own belief,” said Dr. O’Grady, “is that the man is an artist—a
sculptor, engaged in the production of a statue of unusual size.”

“With blocks of marble in the packing-cases?”

“Yes, and the two foreigners for models. They look like models. One
of them had a long black beard, and the other was a big man, well
over six foot, blond, seemed to be a Norwegian; not that I ever saw
a Norwegian to my knowledge, but this fellow looked like the kind of
man a Norwegian ought to be.”

“It will be a pretty big statue,” said Lord Manton, “if it absorbs
twenty-five blocks of marble, each the size of a grand piano.”

“He looked like an artist,” said Dr. O’Grady; “he had a pointed beard,
and a wild expression in his eye.”

“A genius escaped from somewhere, perhaps.”

“He very well might be. Indeed, I’d say from the glimpse I had of
him that he’s worse than a genius. He had the eye of a mad gander.
But, of course, I only saw him the once, sitting in his motor, the day
he arrived. He hasn’t stirred out of Rosivera since, and, as I said
before, I haven’t been sent for to attend him for anything.”

“The queerest thing about him was the message he sent me,” said
Lord Manton. “By way of doing the civil thing, I told Byrne to say
that I should make a point of calling on him as soon as I got home.”

“And he sent you word that he’d be thankful if you’d stay away and
not bother him. I heard all about that. Byrne was furious. That is
just one of the things which makes me feel sure he’s a genius.
Nobody except a genius or a socialist would have sent a message of
that kind to you; and he clearly isn’t a socialist. If he was, he
couldn’t afford to pay six months’ rent in advance for Rosivera.”

Dr. O’Grady spoke confidently. He was not personally acquainted

with any of the numerous men of genius in Ireland, but he had read
about them in newspapers and was aware that they differed in many
respects from other men. No ordinary man, that is to say, no one
who is perfectly sane, would refuse to receive a visit from an earl.
Mr. Red had refused, and so, since he was not a socialist, he must
be a genius. The reasoning was perfectly convincing.

“I expect,” said Lord Manton, “that his statue, in spite of its immense
size, will be a melancholy object to look at. Rosivera is the most
depressing place I know. It was built to serve as a dower house by
my grandfather, and he evidently chose the site and the style of
architecture with a view to making his widow feel really sorry he was
dead. If I had a wife whom I disliked intensely I should try to die at
once so that she should have as long a time as possible to live at
Rosivera.”

“I wouldn’t care to spend a winter alone there,” said Dr. O’Grady,

“and I’m a man of fairly cheerful disposition.”

“I suppose there’s a lot of talk about Red in the village?”

“There was at first; but the people are getting a bit sick of him now.
It’s a long time since he’s done anything the least exciting. About a
fortnight after he came he sent a telegram which had the whole
place fizzing for awhile.”

Telegrams in the west of Ireland, are, of course, public property. So

are postcards and the contents of the parcels carried by his
Majesty’s mails. Lord Manton, whose taste for the details of local
gossip was strongly developed, asked what Mr. Red’s telegram was
about.
“That’s what nobody could tell,” said Dr. O’Grady. “It began with four
letters, A.M.B.A., and then came a lot of figures. Father Moroney
worked at it for the best part of two hours, with the help of a Latin
dictionary, but he could make no more out of it than I could myself.”

“Cipher,” said Lord Manton; “probably quite a simple cipher if you’d

known how to go about reading it.”

“At the end of the week, another packing-case arrived, carriage paid
from London. It was as big as any of the first lot. Byrne and I went
up to the station to see it before Jimmy O’Loughlin carted it down to
Rosivera. He seemed to think that it was another piano. Since then
nothing of any sort has happened, and the people have pretty well
given over talking about the man.”

Lord Manton yawned. Like the other inhabitants of Clonmore he was

beginning to get tired of Mr. Red and his affairs. A stranger is only
interesting when there are things about him which can be found out.
If his affairs are public property he becomes commonplace and dull.
If, on the other hand, it is manifestly impossible to discover anything
about him, if he sends his telegrams in cipher, employs a remarkably
taciturn servant to do his marketing, and never appears in public
himself, he becomes in time quite as tiresome as the man who has
no secrets at all.

“Any other news about the place?” asked Lord Manton. “You needn’t
mention Jimmy O’Loughlin’s wife’s baby. Byrne told me about it.”

“It’s the tenth,” said Dr. O’Grady, “the tenth boy.”

“So I believe.”

“Well, there’s nothing else, except the election of the inspector of

sheep dipping. I needn’t tell you that there’s been plenty of talk
about that.”
“So I gathered,” said Lord Manton, “from the number of candidates
for the post who wrote to me asking me to back them up. I think
there were eleven of them.”

“I hear that you supported Patsy Devlin, the smith. He’s a drunken
blackguard.”

“That’s why I wrote him the letter of recommendation. There’s a lot

of stupid talk nowadays about the landlords having lost all their
power in the country. It’s not a bit true. They have plenty of power,
more than they ever had, if they only knew how to use it. All I have
to do if I want a particular man not to be appointed to anything is to
write a strong letter in his favour to the Board of Guardians or the
County Council, or whatever body is doing the particular job that
happens to be on hand at the time. The League comes down on my
man at once and he hasn’t the ghost of a chance. That’s the beauty
of being thoroughly unpopular. Three years ago you were made
dispensary doctor here chiefly because I used all my influence on
behalf of the other two candidates. They were both men with bad
records. It was just the same in this sheep-dipping business. I didn’t
care who was appointed so long as it wasn’t Patsy Devlin. I
managed the labourers’ cottages on the same principle. There were
two different pieces of land where I particularly objected to their
building cottages. I offered them those two without waiting to be
asked. Of course, they wouldn’t have them, insisted in fact on
getting another bit of land altogether, thinking they were annoying
me. I was delighted. That’s the way to manage things nowadays.”

“Do you suppose,” said Dr. O’Grady, “that if I wrote to Mr. Red saying
I sincerely hoped he wouldn’t get typhoid for a fortnight, because I
wanted to go away for a holiday—do you suppose he’d get it to spite
me?”

“That’s the worst of men in your profession. You’re always wanting

everybody to be ill. It’s most unchristian.”
“I want Red to get typhoid,” said Dr. O’Grady, “because he’s the only
man in the neighbourhood except yourself who would pay me for
curing him.”
 CHAPTER II

D R. O’GRADY spoke the simple truth when he said that the people
of Clonmore had ceased to take any interest in Mr. Red and his
household. The election of an inspector of sheep dipping, a man
from their own midst to a post with a salary attached to it, was a far
more exciting thing than the eccentricity of a chance stranger. When
the election was over a new and more thrilling matter engaged their
attention. Mr. Red was entirely forgotten. The monotonous regularity
of the visits of the silent English servant to Jimmy O’Loughlin’s shop
no longer attracted attention. The equally monotonous regularity of
his cash payments for the goods he took away with him was
extremely satisfactory to Jimmy O’Loughlin, but gave absolutely no
occasion for gossip. The man who makes debts and does not pay
them is vastly more interesting to his neighbours than the morbidly
honest individual who will not owe a penny.

Dr. O’Grady owed a good deal, and just at the time of Lord Manton’s
return to Clonmore, his money difficulties reached the point at which
they began to attract public attention. Like most good-humoured
and easy-going men, Dr. O’Grady lived beyond his income. There
was a good deal of excuse for him. He enjoyed, as dispensary
doctor, a salary of £120 a year. He received from Lord Manton an
additional £30 for looking after the health of the gardeners, grooms,
indoor servants and others employed about Clonmore Castle. He
would have been paid extra guineas for attending Lord Manton
himself if the old gentleman had ever been ill. He could count with
tolerable certainty on two pounds a year for ushering into the world
young O’Loughlins. Nobody else in his district ever paid him
anything.

It is unquestionably possible to live on £152 a year. Many men,

curates for instance, live on less; face the world in tolerably clean
collars and succeed in looking as if they generally had enough to
eat. But Dr. O’Grady was not the kind of man who enjoys small
economies, and he had certain expensive tastes. He liked to have a
good horse between the shafts of a smart trap when he went his
rounds. He liked to see the animal’s coat glossy and the harness
shining. He preferred good whisky to bad, and smoked tobacco at
10s. 6d. a pound. He was particular about the cut of his clothes and
had a fine taste in striped and spotted waistcoats. He also—quite
privately, for in the west of Ireland no one would admit that he
threw away his money wantonly—bought a few books every year.
The consequence was inevitable. Dr. O’Grady got into debt. At first,
indeed for more than two years, his debts, though they increased
rapidly, did not cause any uneasiness to his creditors. Then a
suspicious tailor began to press rudely for the payment of a long
account. Other tradesmen, all of them strangers who did not know
Dr. O’Grady personally, followed the tailor’s example. A Dublin
gentleman of large fortune and philanthropic tastes, a Mr. Lorraine
Vavasour, having somehow heard of these embarrassments, offered
to lend Dr. O’Grady any sum from £10 to £1000 privately, without
security, and on the understanding that repayment should be made
quite at the borrower’s convenience.

There was an agreeable settlement with the tailor who lost Dr.
O’Grady’s custom for ever, and with several others. Life for a time
was pleasant and untroubled. Then Mr. Lorraine Vavasour began to
act unreasonably. His ideas of the payment of instalments turned out
to be anything but suitable to Dr. O’Grady’s convenience. The good
horse was sold at a loss. The competent groom was replaced for an
inferior and cheaper man. Mr. Lorraine Vavasour showed no signs of
being propitiated by these sacrifices. He continued to harass his
victim with a persistency which would have made most men
miserable and driven some men to excessive drinking. Dr. O’Grady
remained perfectly cheerful. He had the temperament of an
unconquerable optimist. He used even to show Mr. Vavasour’s worst
letters to Jimmy O’Loughlin, and make jokes about them. This, as it
turned out afterwards, was an unwise thing to do. Jimmy himself
had a long account against the doctor standing in his books.
After awhile the miserable screw which succeeded the good horse in
Dr. O’Grady’s stable was sold. The smart trap and harness were sold.
The incompetent substitute for the groom was dismissed. Dr.
O’Grady endeavoured to do his work with no better means of getting
about than a dilapidated bicycle. It was generally known that his
affairs had reached a crisis. His housekeeper left him and engaged a
solicitor to write letters in the hope of obtaining the wages due to
her. It seemed very unlikely that she would get them. Mr. Lorraine
Vavasour was before her with a claim which the furniture of Dr.
O’Grady’s house would certainly not satisfy. Jimmy O’Loughlin was
before her too. He would have been willing enough to wait for years,
and if left to himself would not have driven a friend to extremities
for the sake of a few pounds. But when he saw that Mr. Vavasour
meant to use all the resources of the law against Dr. O’Grady he
thought it a pity to let a complete stranger get the little there was to
get. He apologized to Dr. O’Grady and summoned him before the
County Court judge. The usual things happened. The end appeared
to be at hand, and the Board of Guardians began to discuss the
appointment of a new dispensary doctor.

It is very much to the credit of Dr. O’Grady that, under these

circumstances, he slept soundly at night in his solitary house; rose
cheerful in the morning and met his fellow-men with a smile on his
face. He continued to dine frequently at Clonmore Castle, and Lord
Manton noticed that his appetite improved instead of failing as his
troubles increased. In fact, Dr. O’Grady frequently went hungry at
this time, and Lord Manton’s dinners were almost the only solid
meals he got. Then, just before the bailiffs took possession of his
house a curious way of escape opened. It was at the beginning of
August. Dr. O’Grady spent the evening reading a new book about
germ plasm, pan-genesis, determinates, and other interesting things
connected with the study of heredity. He was obliged to go to bed
early because his lamp went out at ten o’clock and he had no oil
with which to refill it. Once in bed he went comfortably to sleep. At
two o’clock in the morning he was roused by a ponderous, measured
knocking at his door. He used the sort of language commonly
employed by doctors who are roused at unseemly hours. The
knocking continued, a series of heavy detached blows, struck slowly
at regular intervals. Dr. O’Grady got up, put his head out of the
window, and made the usual inquiry—

“Who the devil’s that? And what do you want?”

“It is I. Guy Theodore Red.”

Even then, freshly roused from sleep, Dr. O’Grady was struck by the
answer he received. Very few men, in search of a doctor at two
o’clock in the morning, are so particular about grammar as to say, “It
is I!” And the words were spoken in a solemn tone which seemed
quite congruous with the measured and stately manner in which the
door had been hammered. Dr. O’Grady put on a pair of trousers and
a shirt, ran downstairs and opened the door. Mr. Red stood rigid like
a soldier at attention on the doorstep. In the middle of the road was
the motor car in which the English servant used to drive into
Clonmore to do his marketing.

“Is it typhoid?” said Dr. O’Grady; “for if it is I ought to have been

sent for sooner.”

“No.”

“It can’t be a midwifery case in your house?”

“No.”

“You’re very uncommunicative,” said Dr. O’Grady. “What is it?”

“A gun accident.”

“Very well. Why couldn’t you have said so before? Wait a minute.”

Dr. O’Grady hurried into his surgery, collected a few instruments

likely to be useful, some lint, iodoform, and other things. He stuffed
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