HBS Professor’s Research Helps Create Mapping Tool

Research by Michael E. Porter, Harvard’s Bishop William Lawrence University Professor, based at Harvard Business School, has helped to create a new tool used to provide detailed data on the presence of “clusters” and the profiles of regional economies throughout the United States.

It also features a unique listing of initiatives, government agencies, and other entities engaged in cluster-based economic development, enabling public officials, policy makers, businesses, and other organizations to gain actionable insights supporting fact-driven policy decisions that can foster regional economic growth and competitiveness.

Professor Porter formally launched the tool on Monday, September 29, as part of a two-day conference called Mapping the Midwest’s Future, which will be held at and in conjunction with the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs in Minneapolis.

The new tool was developed by the U.S. Cluster Mapping Project at Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness. Partners included researchers at MIT’s Entrepreneurship Center, Temple University and a range of regional partners across the U.S.

Cluster mapping allows for new perspectives on economies and the competitive landscape at the country, state and local levels. The information in the tool illustrates, for example, that the Midwest, generally regarded as the country’s “breadbasket” due to its abundance of farmland, pastureland, and agricultural operations, is now actually a hotbed of production technology and heavy machinery.

In addition, the tool makes possible the kind of regional and private-sector led efforts that are also at the core of the Harvard Business School U.S. Competitiveness Project (USCP), a multifaceted, multi-faculty, long-term effort codirected by Professor Porter that aims to understand and improve the competitiveness of the United States.

The U.S. Cluster Mapping Project is part of the USCP’s extensive research agenda in areas such as human capital, innovation, manufacturing, entrepreneurship, company location choices, K-12 education, infrastructure, tax policy, and environmental sustainability.

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