Project: vThread Economic policymaking increasingly involves technology-based initiatives. vTHREAD (Techno-Historical Regional Economic Analysis Database) is a historical database of high tech companies and research tools to deepen our understandings of regional industrial specialization, growth, decline, and reinvention. THREAD includes approximately 60,000 public and private, nationally located high tech producers classified by a finely granulated taxonomy (licensed from CorpTech which also supplies the major company directory) in which 18 industry codes explode to 300 major product codes, and to 3000 minor product codes. THREAD is a database tool to ‘discover’ a region’s competitive advantage and to characterize a region’s underlying technology capabilities, deep craft skills, and cluster dynamics. It is a firm specific, bottom-up approach to conduct technology audits and technology roadmap exercises, to research skill needs, and to anticipate technology trends. The unique 15 year historical feature combined with 147 fields of the database also offers the capability to generate reports on company growth rates in employment and sales, evolution of product profile, technology capabilities, executives, and changes in company ownership (public/private, domestic/foreign). A mapping feature is a tool to identify technology mini-clusters and to characterize technology genealogy, industry churn measured by the entry and exit of firms in specific technologies and locations. Online publications that draw upon vTHREAD include “Discovering Regional Competitive Advantage: Massachusetts High Tech”, Business and Economic History On-Line, Vol. 2, 2004, pp. 1-30. http://www.thebhc.org/publications/BEHonline/2004/beh2004.html, “Lowell’s Industrial Regeneration: Dynamic Technological Capabilities” http://www.thebhc.org/publications/BEHonline/beh.html, 2003; and “Regional Specialization and Cluster Drivers: Medical Devices in Massachusetts”. Business and Economic History On-Line, Vol. 3, 2005, pp. 1-35. http://www.thebhc. org/publications/BEHonline/2005/beh2005.html . An earlier version in MassBenchmarks, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2006: 14-25. On-line at http://www.massbenchmarks.org/publications/issues/vol8i1/06v8i1. htm THREAD Report capabilities 1. Charts, tables, maps: Regional distribution of high tech companies by industry, product, size, and growth Changing composition of high tech companies by region Location quotients: enterprise, employment, and sales Fast growing firms and clusters by technology and region Clusters of high tech firms: size, evolution, and technology composition Exit and entry rates of firms by industry, region, and year Maps of high tech companies illustrating size and growth Operating units of foreign headquartered companies by region Export sales by region 2. Qualitative analysis: Indicators of regional core competence Characterization of mini-clusters by capability Industry churn charts, assessing enterprise entries and exits Company and technology genealogies by region Company family trees indicated by changes in executive employment Comparisons with official data on employment, sales, and growth Custom mapping Technology audit and roadmap reports Cluster dynamics reports 3. Summary paper and Massachusetts Slides vTHREAD description vTHREAD slide examples |