This research focuses on geographically-defined economic regions in order to understand why some regions thrive while others stagnate. The key barrier to such research is the lack of detailed, time-series data at the individual, firm, and institutional level. Over the past 6 years, the researchers have acquired such data on over 4200 technology firms in the Research Triangle Park region of North Carolina and they are now able to examine the spatial and temporal relationships between economic entities and uncover the drivers of regional economic outcomes.
The researchers have developed a relational database and tool sets that enables the organization, curation, and search of this data. They are now extending this solution with a cyberinfrastructure that manages diverse types of economic data, aids in integration of newer data, and powers new approaches for analysis and visualization of geo-spatial-temporal data, while addressing privacy and security concerns. Through this new cyberinfrastructure, a community of interdisciplinary scholars are able to have access to the data and tools on regional economics. Likewise, policy makers and economic practitioners could have access to reporting tools that provide greater detail than is available today. Going forward, the developed cyberinfrastructure provides both a framework and needed solutions to power other regional research systems and thus further extend our knowledge of regional economics.
