Most conversations about innovation happen in cities. Rural Innovations argues, gently, that they shouldn’t.
This site is a public library of academic research, news coverage, organizations, and events on rural innovation — the work of building, adapting, and rethinking how things get done in places where the population is thin, the geography is large, and the assumptions of metropolitan policy don’t always apply. The aim is simple: anyone studying or working on rural innovation should be able to find what they need without searching ten databases and a hundred organizational websites.
What’s here
Four kinds of content. Peer-reviewed academic articles from the past 30 years. News and media coverage. Organizations doing the work — universities, nonprofits, networks, agencies. Events worldwide where this community gathers. Each entry includes a short plain-language summary, links to the original source, and consistent metadata so the library can be filtered and searched.
You’ll also find a glossary of key terms, a map of who’s working where, a funding directory for ongoing programs, and a chat assistant scoped to the library — ask it about rural broadband or quadruple-helix models or anything else within the field, and it will answer using only the entries we’ve curated.
What we add, and how
New entries are added weekly. We don’t host any content — everything links out to the original publisher. We dedupe, prioritise geographic diversity, and write a short summary for each entry. When the topic isn’t in the library yet, the chat assistant will say so honestly.
Who runs this
Rural Innovations is run by Gordon More, Executive Director of Southeast Techhub in southeast Saskatchewan. Southeast Techhub is itself a rural innovation and commercialization platform — helping translate applied research, energy innovation, and entrepreneurship into market-ready ventures across rural Western Canada. Gord helped found the organization and continues to lead it.
Most of his professional life has been spent doing innovation work rather than writing about it. He’s a founder by background — he co-founded and scaled a technology company from inception into a multinational operation across Canada, the United States, and Australia — and now spends his time in the messier middle ground where post-secondary research, public and private capital, and rural community priorities meet. Rural Innovations is the library he wished existed when he was looking for one.
He is currently a graduate student at Royal Roads University researching innovation ecosystems and systems-level change, an MIT xPRO Innovation Acceleration alumnus, and was recognised in 2026 as one of Western Canada’s twenty most impactful leaders in economic development.
This site isn’t affiliated with any institution. The opinions in summaries and editorial choices are his own; the underlying research belongs to its authors.
Get in touch
Suggestions for resources, corrections, partnership ideas, or just to compare notes on rural innovation work? Email gord@ruralinnovations.org.
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