Imagination is a requisite for innovation that is rarely acknowledged by innovation economists. Artistic imagination provides an empirical toehold for testing whether the richness of nonrational thought processes fuels innovation. Turns out that high-tech startups in neighborhoods with lots of amateur arts activity apply for and are awarded more patents.
The human ability to act on our imagination of possible futures is the indispensable input to human progress. And yet, imagination is seemingly banished from any serious discussion of innovation, entrepreneurship, or development.
This gaping blindspot has been noted by entrepreneurship and innovation scholars such as William Baumol, Edmund Phelps, and James March. But pointing to the elephant in the room has largely been ignored. March claims that any theory of innovation or entrepreneurship is incomplete if it does not address the generation of novelty. How to address the generation of novelty in innovation research is largely left to the reader. Hints of a useful place to start include slack (having sufficient time and resources for exploration and experimentation), hubris (bold confidence needed to take on significant risks and depart from established practices), and optimism (belief that something better than the status quo is possible).
One way to operationalize those hints is to identify activities we can observe that reward those same characteristics. The arts immediately suggest themselves—failing to generate novelty recasts any wannabe artist as an entertainer or craftsperson.
Root-Bernstein’s anecdotal evidence that the stimulation of the artistic imagination through arts activity spills over to the generation of novelty in other domains is compelling. The majority of Nobel Laureates pursue arts avocations, being 30 times more likely to do so than the general population and 3 times more likely than members of the National Academy of Sciences. However, pursuing the arts in their spare time may merely be an indicator of much greater capacity relative to less august individuals, not necessarily a contributor to sparks of scientific genius.
“Arts Avocations and the Leonardo Effect: Does Artistic Imagination Fuel Innovation?” published in the Journal of Cultural Economic investigates whether the connection between amateur arts activity and innovation applies more generally. The population studied is R&D-performing microbusinesses with one to nine employees that comprise the tip of the spear of the innovation economy. An Arts Avocation Index constructed from billions of hits from geo-located devices to websites catering to amateur artists provides information on the level of amateur arts activity at the Zip Code level. The dependent variables are whether a patent was applied for and whether a patent was awarded.
A strong association between the Arts Avocation Index and patenting would not necessarily provide evidence of a Leonardo Effect as a third factor such as the presence of universities might be the true source of both patenting success and amateur arts activity. County-level random effects are used to control for possible confounds. If universities, or the presence of venture capital firms, or a concentration of high-tech employment in a county is consistently associated with a higher probability of patenting throughout the sample, then this will be captured in the random effects parameter.
The magnitude of the estimated Leonardo Effect is large. R&D-performing microbusinesses in Zip Codes with lots of amateur arts activity (95th percentile) are close to 3 times more likely to be awarded a patent than their peers in Zip Codes with little amateur arts activity (5th percentile). The Leonardo Effect when applying for a patent is even larger. Microbusinesses in neighborhoods with lots of amateur artists are nearly 5 times more likely to apply for a patent than those located in amateur arts deserts.
So how large is the Leonardo Effect relative to a widely recognized source of innovation? Since innovation can be defined as the combination of seemingly unrelated ideas, one should expect that startups founded by entrepreneurial teams coming from diverse disciplinary backgrounds should be more innovative than teams coming from the same discipline. The data support this conjecture. A maximally diverse ownership team would be 6.6 to 8.3 times more likely to be awarded or apply for a patent, respectively. The Leonardo Effect is 56% as large using either dependent variable.
Comforting that the rational explanation for innovation is larger than the more speculative explanation. Somewhat disconcerting that a proxy for the widely ignored input of imagination to innovation is half as large.
References
Baumol, W. (2010). The microtheory of innovative entrepreneurship. Princeton University Press.
March, J. G. (2011). The ambiguities of experience. Cornell University Press.
Phelps, E. S. (2013). Mass flourishing: How grassroots innovation created jobs, challenge, and change. Princeton University Press.
Root-Berstein, R., Allen, L., Beach, L., Bhadula, R., Fast, J., Hosey, C., Kremkow, B., Lapp, J., Lone, K., Pawelec, K., Podufaly, A., Russ, C., Tennant, L., Vrtis, E., & Weinlander, S. (2008). Arts foster scientific success: Avocations of nobel, national academy, royal society, and sigma xi members. Journal of Psychology of Science and Technology, 1(2), 51–63.
About the article
Wojan, T.R. (2025). Arts avocations and the ‘Leonardo effect’: Does artistic imagination fuel innovation? Journal of Cultural Economics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-025-09553-1
About the author
Timothy Wojan conducted this research as an Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) Established Scientist Fellow at the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) within the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). ORISE is managed by Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) under Department of Energy (DOE) contract number DE-SC0014664. The ideas and opinions expressed in the article and summary are the author’s and should not be attributed to NCSES, NSF, ORISE, ORAU, or DOE.
About the image
Rjcastillo Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Sculpture by Leonardo Da Vinci, a work that synthesizes the essence of the artistic and intellectual values of the Renaissance. Highlighting his fruitful creation in various fields of culture, science, arts, engineering, philosophy, painting and sculpture, among other disciplines. The exhibition is located in the Aeronautical and Space Museum, Chile.
