Behind the Scenes: Placemaking and Preferential Circulation in the Making of an Innovative Micro-Cluster (Off-Off-Broadway, 1958-1976)

Etienne Capron () and Raphaël Suire ()
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Etienne Capron: DRM - MLAB - Dauphine Recherches en Management - MLAB - DRM - Dauphine Recherches en Management - Université Paris Dauphine-PSL - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Raphaël Suire: LEMNA - Laboratoire d'économie et de management de Nantes Atlantique - Nantes Univ - IAE Nantes - Nantes Université - Institut d'Administration des Entreprises - Nantes - Nantes Université - pôle Sociétés - Nantes Univ - Nantes Université, Nantes Univ - IAE Nantes - Nantes Université - Institut d'Administration des Entreprises - Nantes - Nantes Université - pôle Sociétés - Nantes Univ - Nantes Université, MARSOUIN - Môle Armoricain de Recherche sur la SOciété de l'information et des usages d'INternet - UR - Université de Rennes - UBS - Université de Bretagne Sud - ENSAI - Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Analyse de l'Information [Bruz] - Groupe ENSAE-ENSAI - Groupe des Écoles Nationales d'Économie et Statistique - UBO EPE - Université de Brest - IMT - Institut Mines-Télécom [Paris] - UR2 - Université de Rennes 2 - UBL - Université Bretagne Loire - IMT Atlantique - IMT Atlantique - IMT - Institut Mines-Télécom [Paris]

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Abstract: While the geography of innovation is often studied at the level of city-regions, main conclusions provide only a partial account of the dynamics unfolding within cities. In this article, we examine how a set of proximate organizational sites located within a city comes to foster innovation. Specifically, we study how the placemaking practices of the entrepreneurs who originate these sites shape the localized landscape of resources that innovators mobilize to innovate. Drawing on the historical case of the Off-Off-Broadway theater (1958-1976), we show that these distributed, independent practices embedded an array of non-redundant resources within a small geographical area and, by fostering the patterning of innovators' attendance across proximate venues, cohered into an innovative micro-cluster. Our findings suggest that entrepreneurs who originate such organizational sites play an active role in infrastructuring innovation within cities, with implications for how we understand the spatial organization of innovation.

Keywords: place; innovation; entrepreneurship; placemaking; Off-Off-Broadway (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-09-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent and nep-sbm
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Published in AIMS - GT Innovation 2026, Sep 2026, Grenoble, France

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