Montréal’s Capacity for Creative Connectivity: Outlook & Opportunities

Regional economic growth is powered by creative people, who prefer places that are diverse, tolerant and
open to new ideas. Diversity increases the odds that a place will attract different types of creative people
with different skill sets and ideas. Places with diverse mixes of creative people are more likely to generate
new combinations. Furthermore, diversity and concentration work together to speed the fl ow of knowledge.
Greater and more diverse concentrations of creative capital in turn lead to higher rates of innovation, hightechnology
business formation, job generation and economic growth.
The Montréal region is ideally suited to exploit those opportunities. Among the 25 most populous metropolitan
areas in the U.S. and Canada, the Montréal region ranks third in average population density (behind the
Boston CMSA and New York CMSA). Among that same group of regions, the Montréal region has the second
greatest percentage of its workforce in the “super creative core” (Florida, 2002, p. 328). These two offer the
combination of density and diversity likely to result in signifi cant opportunities for the region.