Rural micro-enterprise and SME analytics and collaborative knowledge management of growth and export factors in Northern Ostrobothnia (KasvuDATA)

In cooperation with business support services, we will identify past and future development trends and bottlenecks as well as the best practices.

Background: Finland's population and economy have been concentrating to urban and regional centers for a long time. Economic polarization between regions is challenging the welfare society. In rural areas, there are both growing and declining regions. Small businesses have high potential for innovation and growth, and their impact on the regional economy is particularly pronounced in rural areas. Business support organizations need the best practices and an accurate picture of business development and current situation to assess, identify and develop new and growing companies.

Goals: In the KasvuDATA project, we will produce data-driven analyses of  business growth, sectoral development patterns, employability and exports of SMEs and micro-enterprises in rural Northern Ostrobothnia. We will analyze the data together with the business services of the rural areas of Northern Ostrobothnia. With the most accurate data possible, we will show each business service the central changes in their area and compare them with the overall picture of Northern Ostrobothnia. Together with the business services, we will identify development trends, bottlenecks and best practices and synthesize data-driven knowledge for development of new business services.

Implementation: The KasvuDATA project combines the national business register based economic and export (goods and services) databases with the regional data using statistical and spatial methods. We will identify the growth and development factors of rural enterprises using statistical, spatial and geospatial methods. With the analytics, we will compare the enterprise development patterns with the data on RDI, population, infrastructure (transport, logistics and ICT), especially in rural areas of Northern Ostrobothnia, and explore the possibilities to take into account the effectiveness of business support as part of the analyses.

Co-learning communication: The produced knowledge base will be jointly analyzed in co-learning scenario workshops with the business services in the different regions of Northern Ostrobothnia. The new insights and jointly developed knowledge will be communicated to the partners throughout the project. The most relevant information will be incorporated into an interactive web service (such as Finnish website www.oulu.fi/my_tilastot/).