BOSTON -- Harvard University's Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, led by noted scholar, author, and economic advisor Michael E. Porter, today announced a powerful economic analysis tool that is helping companies and industry groups as well as cities and states boost their competitiveness in the global marketplace.

"The conventional wisdom has been that companies largely determine their own success, and that economic development is the job of the government," said Professor Porter. "But our data provides striking evidence that a company's local business environment has a powerful influence its performance, and that boosting a region's competitiveness requires active cooperation between business, government, universities, and an array of other local institutions. Economic development must move beyond tax incentives and improving infrastructure to include boosting innovative capacity and cluster development."

The Cluster Mapping Project (CMP) tool synthesizes vast amounts of changing economic data and measures of innovation for every region in the U.S. to produce detailed profiles of the overall performance of regions and the strengths and weaknesses of the regions' clusters of industries. Clusters are geographic concentrations of companies, suppliers, specialized service providers, and supporting institutions such as universities and trade associations in a particular field. Information technology in Silicon Valley, life sciences in New Jersey, and money management in Boston are examples of clusters.

"The Cluster Mapping Project has broad potential for helping industry and government to foster regional clusters of innovation," said Deborah Wince-Smith, president of the Council on Competitiveness, a Washington D.C.-based think tank whose membership is comprised of CEOs, university presidents, and labor leaders. "The Council's work in this area, in partnership with Michael Porter, has found that every region can leverage its own unique assets - particularly its knowledge and talent base - to create greater prosperity. Regions with successful clusters enjoy higher average wages, productivity, rates of business formation, and innovation."

CMP is an outgrowth of research at the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness aimed at finding objective, quantitative measures to compare regional economies over time and to understand the critical drivers of their prosperity. Defining clusters using consistently based statistical methods, and comparing cluster positions across regions, allows a more detailed understanding of the composition of regional economies and their competitive position. The 41 clusters in which regions compete include financial services, biopharmaceuticals, apparel, information technology, transportation and logistics, and tourism.

For any region in the U.S., CMP can compare overall economic and patenting performance to other regions, identify the most important clusters in the economy, and measure their relative performance over time. CMP data provides a way to understand the underlying drivers of a region's mix of jobs, relative wages, employment growth, formation of new firms, and patenting performance.

CMP has already been widely used to shape strategies for individual companies and clusters, for states such as Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, and for regions as diverse as Atlanta, Pittsburgh, North Carolina's Research Triangle, San Diego, and Wichita.

CMP is available through the web site of the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at www.isc.hbs.edu. The site offers a large body of data free for all registered users.

It also offers a second level of data access which includes more detailed cluster profiles, historical time-series, and downloading capability for an annual subscription of $250 per year. The subscription fee helps to defray the substantial cost of collecting, analyzing, and updating the Cluster Mapping Project.