Rural businesses in the UK are leaving at least £340 million in untapped economic potential on the table each year, held back by poor information networks and limited access to digital tools. This matters because rural areas face specific structural problems that urban centres do not: small, dispersed populations, narrow and uneven information channels, and restricted access to digitally-based knowledge. High levels of business aspiration fail to translate into practice, and existing entrepreneurship does not fully generate wealth. The University of Aberdeen’s Rural Digital Economy Research Hub will tackle this gap by designing digital solutions in direct partnership with rural communities, businesses, and policymakers. If successful, the hub could transform how rural economies function. Digital working tools—developed with user feedback from the start—could help tourism, healthcare, conservation, and enterprise sectors share good practice, reach wider markets, and create larger pools of expertise. The result would be more economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable rural areas across the UK, with new wealth, employment, and social opportunities emerging from the same natural and human capital that already exists.
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There is considerable untapped economic potential in rural areas of the UK. In England alone this is estimated to be worth at least 340 million per year. Burgess (2008) gives as principal reasons for this that high levels of rural business aspiration do not find their way into practice, and that existing entrepreneurship does not fully reach its potential in wealth creation. He urges that Government recognise that key ways of realising this potential are to initiate new forms of information networks for the transfer of knowledge, the sharing of good practice, and engagement with wider markets, policy-making processes, and for the creation of larger 'masses' of expertise. By the creation of a Rural Digital Economy Hub at the University of Aberdeen we propose to take up this key challenge for policy and to employ digital technology to realise this untapped rural economic potential, through themes and projects targeted at key economic activities in the rural UK. Rural areas have specific characteristics that create particular problems for these types of activities: for example, small and often dispersed populations; narrow and uneven channels of information flow, including often relatively restricted access to digitally-based information; and rapid change in population structures and economic activity bases.Digital technology will play a major role in releasing untapped potential in the economies of rural areas in the UK. By using innovative flexible ways of 'digital working', rural businesses and communities can build on their social, economic and environmental capital to generate new wealth, employment and social opportunities. Working with communities, businesses and policy-makers on initiatives in tourism, healthcare, accessibility, conservation of natural resources, and enterprise and culture as our partners, the University of Aberdeen's Rural Digital Economy Research Hub will use our extensive expertise in information technology applications, rural economy and society, to initiate innovative projects in rural communities and businesses across the UK.We will, from the outset, incorporate and act on feedback from our partners to design and refine digital solutions to business needs. We will, with partners, evaluate our work to maximise benefits for rural economies and for the policy sectors affecting the well-being of the UK's rural areas.Rural areas of the UK can, through the user-led application of digital technology in carefully designed ways, be more economically, socially and environmentally sustainable: we will harness our expertise with rural partners to realise this ambition. ReferenceBurgess, S., 2008, England's rural areas - steps to release their economic potential. Commission for Rural Communities, Cheltenham.
Christopher Mellish (Co-Investigator)Claire Wallace (Co-Investigator)Colin Hunter (Co-Investigator)David Godden (Co-Investigator)Gorry Fairhurst (Co-Investigator)John Farrington (Co-Investigator)John Nelson (Co-Investigator)Peter Edwards (Principal Investigator)Peter Murchie (Co-Investigator)Philip Wilson (Co-Investigator)Rene Van Der Wal (Co-Investigator)Tim Norman (Co-Investigator)
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