The role of human capital in shaping cross-national innovative and economic performance is well-understood. But human capital is an indirect measure of skill, based on educational attainment. We introduce and test a more direct measure of skill, based on work that is actually performed, measured by occupation. Empirical studies have shown that such occupational “classes” play an important role in regional economic performance, outperforming human capital in some cases. We employ a measure of occupational skill (the Creative Class) and examine its relation to cross-national innovative and economic performance. We explicitly compare this measure to conventional measures of human capital (based on educational attainment) through formal models of economic performance for 55–78 countries, using 3 measures of innovative and economic performance – innovation (patents), productivity (total factor productivity), and economic output (GDP per capita). The results confirm the hypothesis, indicating that our occupation-based Creative Class measure closely is associated with all three measures of innovative and economic performance and also that it consistently performs better than human capital in these models.