Background  

As economies globalize, attention among industrial-world policy-makers has focused increasingly on supporting economic innovation – keeping their economies at the cutting edge, as older industries and products commoditize and move offshore.

Objectives            

The I.E. project will provide policymakers with tools to benchmark regions against comparable other regions (cities, states, regional markets), using a large collection of data sets embedded in a scalable database, accessible online. Subsequently, researchers can analyze the data, to investigate leading indicators of innovation, and causal relationships.

Initial project deliverables include:

•  Regional innovation benchmarking, at high granularity, using flexibly-identified regions and multiple comparators

• ·Policy benchmarking, showing the longer-term impact of policy shifts

• ·Industry or cluster level benchmarking, comparing innovation within a selected industry for different geographical regions

• ·International benchmarking, a longer-term objective that will require additional effort. Results from the project are specifically designed to help policymakers focus on barriers identified in specific regions, and to help them adopt best practice.

 What makes this project different?  Five key advances:

• Interactive tools, not static reports. Online tools allow massively enhanced access to data.

• Current, not dated. Data sets will be continuously updated.

• Highly flexible. Users select base region, comparators, industries, and even data sets.

• Low marginal cost. Costs per comparison will be an order of magnitude lower

• Extendable. Users can add their own data sets.

• Bigger data collection. More data sets means more metrics, and in turn more verification

Project timeline

Phase I – proof of concept. 6-9 months. Initial data collection; software development; pilot region analysis

Phase II – beta testing. 12-18 months. Substantial additional data collection; additional beta test sites, users, and reports; substantially completed software development

Project team        

Led by Dr.Robin Gaster, North Atlantic Research and lead researcher on National Academy of Science SBIR project. Proof of concept pilot site team led by Prof. David Audretch, U.Indiana