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More than half a century ago the French futurist Jean Fourastié (1907‐1990) presented an interesting view of society in the year 2000. His vision of the future has remained relatively unfamiliar in the Anglo‐Saxon world. However Fourastié’s “hypothesis” that the fundamental “laws of production and consumption” would lead to the rise of a service‐oriented society would seem largely to have come true. Fourastié’s vision is still relevant because it also warns policy‐makers not to allow themselves to be blinded by exaggerated expectations of the future. He states that the true task of the authorities is to focus on the training and guidance of entrepreneurs and citizens in the difficult transition process from the existing socio‐economic structure to the new.

The paper aims to explore to what extent policy makers can create a “creative city”, that is, an urban environment capable of generating creativity, innovation and thus economic growth.

The paper is set up as an interview with Richard Florida and his mentor Jane Jacobs, two of today's most famous specialists on urban development.

The main conclusion from the double interview is that a creative city cannot be built from scratch; however, both Florida and Jacobs argue that it is still possible to build for the creative city.

The paper documents the viewpoints of just two urban specialists whose original views, however, have influenced and will influence the debate on creative cities.

The interviewees in this paper offer illuminating insights and practical clues for policy makers wanting to contribute to the development of a creative city.

This is the first double interview with Florida and Jacobs offering policy advice in the field of creative cities. The paper also shows that the views of both authors are complementary.

This article seeks to explore the usefulness of city marketing as a method to attract new residents and firms from a geographical perspective.

To answer the research question, the paper reviews relevant theoretical concepts, empirical data on migration flows and Dutch case examples.

A geographical approach towards city marketing makes clear that residents and firms show spatial self‐preference and do not easily move. This insight questions the usefulness of cold city marketing aimed at attracting newcomers.

The article is largely based on Dutch migration data and cases. More detailed research on other countries is needed to be able to generalize.

Local authorities should shift their focus from cold to warm city marketing: they should invest in existing residents and firms rather than in newcomers. To operationalise this approach, the literature on relationship marketing might be helpful.

City marketing is mostly aimed at attracting new investors, residents or visitors. This geography‐based paper sheds a new light on the topic and provides empirical support to take into account a city's existing population in city marketing.

The recent failure to deliver the Lisbon agenda has led to much soul-searching within Europe (cf. The Sapir Group, 2005). This failure has enlarged the gulf between the limited number of successful knowledge regions, and those regions for whom globalisation has brought further anxiety, job losses and economic restructuring. More recent Lisbon-inspired policies have therefore attempted to build linkages between successful ‘knowledge islands’ and other, outlying and peripheral places, so that all these areas can benefit from concentrations of European knowledge and innovativeness.

This paper analyses firms, which survived in a collapsed regional cluster. The target is to analyze whether the principles for enduring success identified researching success factors of very old firms also apply in such an environment.

The authors conduct a series of contrasting case studies, embedded in cluster theory and enduring success research.

Firms survived with very different strategies and levels of outsourcing. However, surviving firms were congruently very conservative in their finances and in innovation behavior. Risk aversion and an early detachment from the declining cluster were found as success patterns for survival.

Owing to the disappearance of most other firms in the cluster, it was not possible to evaluate their unsuccessful strategies, which means that they cannot be excluded for sure if failed firms applied similar tactics than the surviving firms. This study is focused on one cluster in one industry. Future research could feel encouraged to test the enduring success principles on large scale, multi‐industry surveys.

The conclusions from this research stress the merits of a conservative approach to corporate management, which contrasts with a more risk‐taking attitude managers may feel tempted to take in order to satisfy some (financial) stakeholders.

The “conservatism hypothesis” discussed in this research complements the discussion on corporate ethics.

This paper adds to existing enduring success literature by applying it to the extremely challenging environment of a declining industry. It contributes to cluster theory, in particular to cluster life cycle research.

By using three key factors – namely, funding, stakeholders, and legitimacy – this study seeks to analyse the successful entrepreneurial experiences of a non‐profit small to medium‐sized enterprise: the Taiwan EBook Supply Cooperative Limited (TEBSCo).

The paper takes the form of a case study.

From a legitimacy perspective, TEBSCo is the only registered organisation facilitating e‐book consortia in Taiwan. From a stakeholder perspective, TEBSCo is managed by a board of directors, who are elected from the member representatives. In addition to creating value for its members, TEBSCo also creates value for non‐members and vendors. Its major funding is from annual membership fees. TEBSCo's innovation process, as a collective entrepreneurial activity in a non‐profit SME, creates intangible as well as tangible value. The successful experiences of TEBSCo can be used as examples for new entrants.

TEBSCo is the only registered organisation facilitating e‐book consortia in Taiwan. The successful experiences of TEBSCo can be used as examples for new entrants, and shows a new form of entrepreneurial activity.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the direct and indirect impacts of social organization in promoting Chinese economic growth. It adopts empirical research to test the correlated hypotheses, and tries to put forward some policy suggestions.

Social organizations are measured by four indicators in this paper. It proposes five hypotheses about the impact of social organization on economic growth and builds an economic growth model including social organization. The ordinary least squares and stepwise regression methods are conducted to estimate the economic growth model with the data from 1999 to 2015.

Through the empirical analysis, it finds that the added value of social organization, human capital, investment and government budget expenditure affect economic growth significantly. The number of social organization at the end of each year has a positive significant effect on entrepreneurship, while the added value and growth rate of it have a negative effect on it. The numbers of social organization and full-time employee have significant effect on number to workers in the labor force. Only the number of social organization has positive significant effect on public education.

This paper conducts an empirical study on the impact of social organization on economic growth in China and fills a gap of the role of social organization on the economy in developing countries. The results provide referenced information for public policy-making.