Industrial Networks
In the past where you where in the hierarchy was important whether that hierarchy was as an individual in a company or a business in a supply chain or even a whole industry. Now what matters is where you are in the network.
Fabriam, in conjunction with the Business School at Newcastle University has been developing a new method for discerning and understanding ‘what goes on’ in the region with respect to the rich interaction of knowledge and trading relationships that exist amongst firms and other organisations.
How does it work?
We acquire a very large number of URLs (web addresses) and ‘spider’ these for text anywhere on the individual website. A spider is a piece of software that automatically retrieves textual information from a website according to a set of predefined rules. All this text is then brought into a local database and indexed so that it can be quickly searched and linked back the organisation where the text originally came from. For example if we want to know what organisations in a region are involved in say ‘defence’ we can find this very quickly if that word exists anywhere on any website.
A second part of the capability is that concerned with connections between firms and again internet technologies can help. The figure below shows the relationships between firms and others involved in some way in subsea engineering. This has been drawn entirely from internet derived information.
How is this useful?
For people charged with regional economic development
The method gives a very detailed picture not available by other means of the visibility of even very small firms, how they interact for trade and knowledge exchange and how they may contribute to more than one market segment where the notion of ‘related variety’ readily becomes apparent. For example, firms engaged in the offshore segment were also involved in one or more other areas such as marine, subsea, defence or environmental engineering. A common factor appears to be an ability to project manage medium/high complexity engineering design and manufactures for hostile environments.
For Companies and Inward Investors
Gain a unique insight into a regional supply network.
- Who knows what?
- What is their relationship to others?
- Where are they located?
- Who are hubs and authorities (movers and shakers) in your industry or the ones you did not know existed.
- How do you rate in the network?
For a discussion on how we might help you contact John Williams on 0191 293 7000