Rural Innovation. Categories of innovative villages in the European rural context

Abstract

This paper is part of the PhD thesis on European rural depopulation, whose focus is to make visible the innovations that occur in this environment, and use them as an input to revitalize other towns. Measurement parameters in relation to rural innovation are scarce, so they are "built" following the steps: categorization, conceptualization, sizing, indicators and indices. The scope of this article is the categorization and conceptualization of rural innovations. Starting from the hypothesis "Knowing the individual strengths of innovative peoples, will allow their categorization", it is established as an objective to determine the categories of innovative peoples and know how many exist? As a result, five types of categories were found: culture, public management, recovery of built heritage, rural tourism and agricultural developments. From this new order in the rural world will be able to establish measurement parameters to formulate the pre-structure of an innovative rural village.

Keywords: rural depopulation, rural innovation, categories of rural innovation, conceptualization of rural innovations.