Welcome to my Industry Network Maps Blog

Hi there,

I've just started up this blog to encourage conversation around what I am calling Industry Network Maps (INMs). Basically an INM is a network representation of a market place within a particular industry sector, be it manufacturing, finance, health, biotechnology, IT etc.. My interest in INMs has arisen out of my PhD research work, where I had built an INM of the global information technology sector in order to measure a firm's corporate social capital, using social network analysis techniques. The data for INMs can be "mined" from any source that you can access. The nodes usually represent firms or organisations. The links represent any association or links between firms. They may be alliances, joint ventures, sub-contracts, co-ownership and the like. This will often be dictated by the data that you can access. For my global IT INM I text mined thousands of business articles and journals over a four year period. I have done others using pre-existing data base sources.

My idea for INMs is to develop them as a market research source. My experience has shown that the INMs expose some hidden information that cannot easily be interpreted using traditional data warehouse methods. We also have the science of social network analysis to add some science to their analysis.

I have put some examples up on our web site: www.optimice.com.au

I'd be interested to hear what you think.