The discussion on creative industries has largely centred around urban areas, thanks in no small part to the work of Richard Florida's bestselling 'Rise of the Creative Class'.

More recently however, the hick-infested godforsaken rural hinterlands around the world are starting to assert themselves and forcing their way into the creative industry act. From the Rocky mountain states to the vast Australian outback, rural regions are refusing to be left out of the policy discussions. Why should they? After all, don't some of the world's best known artistic and creative names choose to live in the beautiful back of beyond? Simply put, the assumption that you had to be a metropolis of at least 250,000 or preferably 1,000,000 to have a viable creative industry scene is an eminently woolly one.

Arguably the world's most famous jazz festival takes place in a tiny wee town up in the Alps. The Swiss town of Montreux has a population of barely 21,000 souls and they speak a weird incomprehensible French dialect into the bargain. And while the world famous Oscars is hosted in the congested chaos that is Los Angeles, the Sundance Festival (its much cooler sibling) is organised from the Utah wilderness. The population of Sundance, Utah tops out at a whopping 1,161. And that is right after the weekly post bus comes through, I kid you not.

Sundancers are more endangered than Bengalese tigers, and yet, year after year, they manage to pull off what has become the hippest celluloid show on earth. This example clearly demonstrates that in today's value-focused world economy, it is the talent and not just the numbers that count.