Economics: National Ocean Watch (ENOW) provides time-series data on the ocean and Great Lakes economy, which includes six economic sectors dependent on the oceans and Great Lakes: living resources, marine construction, marine transportation, offshore mineral resources, ship and boat building, and tourism and recreation. Use the ENOW Explorer to view and interact with ENOW data for your state or county without having to download the data set.  

Michael E. Porter launched the new U.S. Cluster Mapping tool on September 29, 2014 in Minneapolis as part of a two-day conference called Mapping the Midwest’s Future, held by the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. The conference hosted over 150 business leaders, policymakers, economic development officials and academics from twelve Midwest states and four Canadian provinces. The Humphrey School of Public Affairs has compiled a full listing of presentations from the conference, with documentation where available.

On October 2, 2014, members of the core U.S. Cluster Mapping project team demoed the new website to members of SelectUSA, which is the U.S. government program that promotes & facilitates FDI & business investment in the United States.

On September 29, 2014, Professor Mercedes Delgado from Temple University's Fox School of Business and Professor Scott Stern from MIT Sloan School of Management delivered a presentation at Mapping the Midwest's Future, a conference held in Minneapolis and hosted by the University of Minnesota that officially launched the new U.S. Cluster Mapping tool. Their presentation focused on the underlying research and methodology behind cluster mapping, and the relevance of clusters to economic development, resilience from recessions, innovation, and improved regional economic performance.

In keeping with the objectives outlined in its 2012 Technology Innovation Roadmap, EPA aims to encourage technological innovation by supporting the development of clusters focused on environmental technology. This report reviews existing literature on industry clusters by Porter, Smilor, Gibson, Kozmetsky, Phillips, and others to summarize the prerequisites for the successful creation of a technology innovation cluster and promote the practices that will sustain it.

Small businesses are core to America’s economic competitiveness. Not only do they employ half of the nation’s private sector workforce – about 120 million people – but since 1995 they have created approximately two‐thirds of the net new jobs in our country. Yet in recent years, small businesses have been slow to recover from a recession and credit crisis that hit them especially hard. This lag has prompted the question, “Is there a credit gap in small business lending?”  

A growing number of states are recognizing the importance of evaluating their economic development tax incentives. For example, lawmakers in Indiana, Mississippi, and Rhode Island have recently enacted legislation to ensure their states take three key steps to regularly review and analyze these programs.

This paper advances the understanding of foreign direct investment (FDI)—that is to say, the U.S operations of foreign companies—in U.S. metro areas in three ways. First, it provides a framing of what FDI is and why it matters for the United States and its regions. Then it presents new data on jobs in foreign-owned establishments (FOEs) across the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas between 1991 and 2011. It concludes with a discussion of what policymakers and practitioners can do to maximize the amount, quality, and economic benefits of FDI into the United States.

Cluster theory and its application and cluster-based economic development policy, have been in the forefront of regional economic development theory and practice during the past decade. Cluster theory suggests that firms that are part of a geographically defined cluster benefit from being a part of that cluster and that these benefits result in growth in economic output for the region. It is important for policy makers and practitioners to understand how and in what ways they do so and what actions they can take to enhance economic growth through generating additional cluster benefits.

This paper takes a close look at the reasons, procedures, and results of cluster identification methods. Despite being a popular research topic in strategy, economics, and sociology, geographic clusters are often studied with little consideration given to the underlying economic activities, the unique cluster boundaries, or the appropriate benchmark of economic concentration. Our goal is to increase awareness of the complexities behind cluster identification, and to provide concrete insights and methodologies applicable to various empirical settings.