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Introduction
Industry Cluster Explorer is a software project developed by the Taiwan Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at National Chengchi University (NCCU) in Taipei. It is a dashboard designed to interactively visualize industry cluster data, allowing researchers and policymakers to easily surface and consume insights relating to regional economic productivity.
This project is led by and based on research conducted by Dr. Janet Tan at NCCU. It has benefited from gracious institutional and methodological support provided by the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard Business School.
An industry cluster is a geographic agglomeration of related industries and nearby upstream suppliers, downstream purchasers, industry associations, government agencies, and educational institutions. Economic research has indicated that there is a tight relationship between the presence of strong industry clusters and regional economic productivity. Industry clusters may be classified as "traded" or "local," depending on the size of the geographic market that they serve.
Substantial attention has been given to the theory of industry clusters since its exposition by Professor Michael Porter at Harvard Business School. Today, HBS leads the global MOC Affiliate Network -- of which NCCU is a proud member -- to study and teach high-impact microeconomic phenomena such as industry clusters.
For more information on the theory of industry clusters, see:
- Porter, Michael E. "Clusters and the New Economics of Competition." Harvard Business Review 76, no. 6 (November–December 1998): 77–90.
- U.S. Cluster Mapping website
- HBS Institute for Strategy and Competitveness website
Industry Cluster Explorer is written with the R programming language, using the Shiny web framework. These technologies were chosen after considering the relative tradeoffs between maximizing user experience by having a strong UI on the front-end, and maximizing collaboration opportunities by having a streamlined and widely-adopted set of tools on the back-end. Thanks to its wide adoption by statisticians and data scientists, the R language ecosystem strikes a strong balance between these priorities.
The design philosophy behind Industry Cluster Explorer is heavily influenced by the software extensions, coding style, and data science workflow promoted by Hadley Wickham and RStudio.
Please consult lead developer Seward Lee (sewardlee337@gmail.com) for collaboration opportunities.