Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Atlas

In December 2014, The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation awarded AVAIL with a grant to create an Entrepreneurial Landscape Analysis Tool that shows business climate change over time. This web-tool combines data sets with leading indicator potential overlaying information visually and geospatially - highlighting business type distributions, property value and income. This project visualizes nationally available datasets for understanding economic activity and job creation using the LEHD Quarterly Work Force Indicator (QWI), LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES), Zip & County Business Patterns, Quarterly Census of Earning and Wages (QCEW) and Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS). These data sets allow AVAIL to develop a number of interdependent visualizations to understand change in economic activity for Census Urban Areas and allow for comparison of American cities with each other and themselves across the 20 year span from 1992 to 2012. We will also use this data to look in detail at Urbanized Areas at the zip code and census tract levels to understand the spatial aspects of economic activity such as industry clustering and employment density. AVAIL will cross this broad analysis of Urbanized Areas with a business level analysis using publicly available data on entrepreneurial activity from Startup Genome and Crunchbase, as well as Longitudinal Data from the National Establishment Time Series (NETS) Database.