Background

Small businesses have difficulty in choosing suitable locations and evaluating their economic development plan due to a lack of resources and budgets. In this case, an economic development plan is needed to bridge the information gap between small businesses and the market. US Ignite and partners have been working on a new economic development research framework, Smart Monitor for Accelerating Regional Transformation (SMART). This has provided a great opportunity to enable local policies to support smart development decisions and the City of Portland has been identified as a start point.

Problem Statement

The research question we tried to answer is that if we can provide information that the small business owners need in order to help them make better site selection decisions. This project aims at helping small business owners decide where (at the granularity of GeoID) their business locations could be, based on the main industry type of the area, demographic data like population density, user review polarity and sentiment, employment rate and traffic data. In order to achieve this purpose, we have developed a decision support model (a recommendation system) that aggregates information and highlights a range of potential location choices when small business owners select their business type through a scoring method as the single metric. Ideally, this model will help small business owners to think through these parameters and will present aggregated data in an easily understandable way through an interactive map and multiple graphs.

Hypothesis

If small businesses had access to a free, accessible open-source tool that uses data aggregated by city and federal agencies combined with real-time data from sensors, demographic data and traffic data, they would have more information supporting them to make better decisions on choosing the right location for their business.