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This paper responds to an ongoing dialogue amongst policy makers and academics regarding how an urban innovation district can act as a cauldron and catalyser of innovative activities and drive urban regeneration and economic growth. A systematic review of the literature on district creation and thematic analysis is conducted on peer-reviewed articles in the business and management discipline, identifying 64 of the most relevant publications in the field and the topics of interest. A literature classification framework is developed, focusing on how urban innovation districts are conceptually framed and methodologically studied, with particular attention to the strategies and theoretical foundations that inform their development. The literature is classified into three major categories based on the main focus of each article: ‘Policy’, ‘Place’ and key ‘Actors’ who drive the development of a district. From the analysis, it is argued that relational proximity, local interaction and synergistic relationships are essential components in enhancing knowledge spillover and innovation creation in urban innovation districts. However, relatively few articles are published on the interactions between key Actors, and the dynamics underlying these interactions. Our main contributions are the development of an inductively derived framework that organises the literature into three categories and highlights dominant conceptual and methodological patterns; and the identification of prominent research gaps across these categories, accompanied by methodological and implementation-oriented suggestions to inform future scholarly and practical work.
Clancy et al. (Wed,) studied this question.