EAGER: PBI: Industry Agglomeration and Innovation-Driven Economic Growth: A Framework for Data, Metrics, and Evaluation

Place-based economic development approaches have a strong potential for revitalizing lagging regional economies. Successful strategies, however, will need to consider the decision-making of private sector entities, including firms, workers, entrepreneurs, and innovators. To complement existing work on the geography of innovation, this project aims to understand clustering patterns among firms in different industries and how proximate technology infrastructure coupled with geographic clustering can affect job growth, job quality, and social and economic opportunity in a regional economy. The project will use high-quality data on establishments, employment, and payroll for almost 1,000 industries to measure industry concentration patterns in tech- and innovation-driven industries. These data will document the degree of geographic concentration in specific sectors and trends over time, providing local and regional policymakers and practitioners with an understanding of the difficulty of creating new centers of tech- and innovation-driven industry activity. These data will be augmented with information on characteristics of jobs, workers, and living wages to provide insight into the benefits of successfully creating and scaling new centers of tech activity. Overall, the project will generate nearly 75 million data points illuminating agglomeration dynamics and their evolution over time and space. This will be highly relevant to regional economic development practitioners and policymakers tasked with scaling tech-based industries over the following decades. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.