Alternative Ecosystems in Creative Cities: the role of universities and quintuple helixes in crowded creative ecosystems

This paper advances current debates on creative cities through a unique focus on the empirical dynamics of knowledge transfer and innovation in a creative city ecosystem. The application of a Helix Model to examine the relational and institutional functions of stakeholders in a creative city reveals a crowded and disrupted ecosystem, which undermines the university’s knowledge transfer function, Government’s investment and regulatory function, whilst introducing new stakeholders and investors. The paper also examines how and why some actors have emerged in the ecosystem and are crystallising into key stakeholders in the creative city. Using empirical observations from Leicester and Copenhagen as clear but distinct creative cities, the paper sets out a case for a Quintuple Helix as a model for understanding the creative city as an ecosystem, and raised some key questions about the future role of universities in creative cities around a new investment role.