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 understanding 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

“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

Chapter 3, “Greater Boston’s Industrial Ecosystem: A Manufactory of Sectors”, of How Growth Really Happens illustrates the power of vTHREAD to discover the drivers of technological change in a regional innovation system.