Students Praised for Innovative Cluster-Mapping Research
What happens when five Endicott College students from different majors come together to present their innovative cluster-mapping research at the fourth annual North Shore Technology Council’s (NSTC) “The State of Technology on the North Shore” event at the Wylie Inn & Conference Center?
You have very impressed industry leaders and influential businesspeople.
“This is some of the latest information that is available to analyze an area like the North Shore,” says Jeff Kaplan, managing director of THINKstrategies, founder of the Cloud Computing Showplace, and event moderator. “If you look at these students’ backgrounds and bios, this group epitomizes today’s working group in terms of areas of expertise and it has been fun to watch how they collaborate.”
Gary Rosen, corporate vice president and general manager of Varian Semiconductor Equipment Business Unit, Applied Materials, Inc., says, “I was listening and learning throughout the presentation, and then the takeaways really resonated with me.” Those takeaways included Massachusetts being fifth in patent growth, third in innovation, first in bachelor’s degree or higher completion, and second in venture capital, as well as the amount of robotics community members across the state.
Featured panelist Rich Bryden, director of information products at the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness (ISC) at Harvard University, adds: “Endicott is creating majors that are exactly tied in to these sectors that are unlikely to dissipate anytime soon, so that strengthens this cluster environment as well.”
The five Endicott presenters were junior Chase Andrews (marketing major), sophomore Haley Noel (bioengineering major), senior Ben Sawyer (sport management major), senior Michael Scherer (business management major), and junior Ian Schmidt (biology & biotechnology major). To help attendees understand “the tech hub north of Boston”—what it is, where it’s heading, and how it compares to other hubs—they presented research using cluster-mapping tools developed by ISC.
“Endicott is creating majors that are exactly tied in to these sectors that are unlikely to dissipate anytime soon, so that strengthens this cluster environment as well.”
Scherer, an NSTC veteran, opened the students’ presentation with more information on clusters, which are a regional concentration of local related industries. Information technology, as described by Schmidt, unifies the clusters of aerospace and defense, communications, distribution and e-commerce, lighting, and medical devices.
How does the North Shore compare to other clusters like Research Triangle, N.C., Austin, Texas, and Minneapolis? Says Noel, “The North Shore is unique because we have 42 percent traded clusters, which is what makes an area more resilient, and that is a higher percentage of traded clusters than in any of the other areas we looked at.”
As Sawyer pointed out in his portion, the team used LinkedIn Sales Navigator to analyze company data. They also utilized the average price of commercial real estate in the areas—58.18 per sq/ft. in Boston, $35.25 in Austin, $26.03 on the North Shore, $23.31 in Research Triangle, and $15.24 in Minneapolis.
In conclusion, Andrews says, “Massachusetts outperforms every region we compared it to.” This includes the robotics community all over the North Shore and Boston, which have “more traded clusters than Austin and Minneapolis combined.” Massachusetts also has the highest percentage of employment in traded clusters.
“Our area, the North Shore and the greater tech cluster north of Boston, is a hotbed for new technology development and commercialization,” says David Bertoni, president of the NSTC and founder of consulting firm MarketSp@ce. “This Endicott College research project begins to tell the data’s tale of which sectors and technology clusters are emerging in our region.”
To learn more about collaborative efforts happening at Endicott, visit endicott.edu.