No cappuccino required: how to develop functional peer to peer networks for rural creative businesses

One of the key challenges facing those charged with supporting the development and sustainability of rural creative businesses is how to achieve the benefits of the urban creative business clusters in the rural setting? Urban creative clustering provides a range of formal and informal benefits that include access to new business opportunities, the provision of support services, access to networks and collaboration opportunities.

A key quality of these clusters is prolific peer to peer activity. So much important interaction takes place in the pub or coffee shop. The ease at which a marketing and sales transactions can take place at a moments notice over a cappuccino in Hoxton is something that is difficult to reproduce in the rural setting. This is reflected by the fact that a common characteristic of many rural creative businesses is that the individuals involved were once located in urban environments and continue to work with, and invest time in sustaining the relationships they built up during their urban pasts (including periods of study).

One of the benefits provided by these urban peer to peer transactions is the way that the small or micro creative business can enjoy a bolt-on effect in which they can get business development outcomes with no investment made other than half an hour and the cost of the coffee. The cost of achieving the same outcome to the rural creative business can be much higher. It includes investing in constant networking activity just to keep up the level of visibility that often comes for free for businesses within urban clusters. The added time commitment and travel expenses that must be invested for such activity alone should not be under estimated, particularly given the speculative and potentially high risk nature of such activity. In the rural setting these additional costs become prohibitive.

To reduce this increased cost and risk it is essential that rural creative business development and support agencies consider the nature and characteristics of successful and sustained peer to peer interactions, regardless of whether they take place in the rural or urban environment:

1. They are peer to peer collaborations (e.g they do not involve a hired in expert that imparts wisdom and knowledge)
   
2. They are outcome orientated (e.g "lets meet for coffee to discuss a pitch I have been asked to respond to that you may want to come in on")
3. They have a co-dependence nature to them in which one party needs that bolt-on capacity, skills, knowledge or contacts provided by the other party
4. There is a clear business imperative and benefit to both parties underpinning the interaction
   

Therefore if those involved in supporting and developing rural creative business want to go some way towards making up for the lack of peer to peer access common to the urban cluster and reduce the risk factor when considering new models for developing these networks they should treat these 4 characteristics as requirements. If such activity can not achieve collaborative peer to peer relationships that are genuinely co-dependant, outcome orientated and address genuine business need for both parties then they are probably a waste of time and money. There will be a range of different ways that this challenge can be addressed but cappuccino is not required.