The Role of Libraries in Supporting Innovation and Creative Industries: A Narrative and Conceptual Review

Libraries are increasingly recognized as strategic institutions that support innovation, creativity, and knowledge-based economic development. This study presents a narrative and conceptual review of scholarship on the role of libraries in supporting innovation and creative industries. Using a purposive rather than exhaustive search, the review examines a corpus of 26 peer-reviewed studies published between 2010 and 2025. Across the reviewed studies, libraries are represented as increasingly active knowledge institutions supporting innovation through technological infrastructure, digital services, makerspaces, collaborative environments, entrepreneurship support, and community engagement. Within this purposively selected corpus, public-library contexts and qualitative or case-based approaches are substantially represented, while fewer included studies address academic-library contributions to entrepreneurship, research commercialization, and knowledge transfer. These patterns describe the reviewed set and are not intended as prevalence estimates for the wider literature. The principal contribution is a structured synthesis and organization of existing knowledge: the review identifies recurring themes, clarifies relationships among previously separated strands of scholarship, highlights unresolved questions, and develops a future research agenda. An integrative library-specific framework is offered as a conceptual organizing device that brings these strands into a common input–process–outcome structure; it is not presented as a novel or empirically validated theory.