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Prof. Michael Best

Professor Michael Best is professor emeritus and a director of the Center for Industrial Competitiveness at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. He is also senior associate in industrial organization at the Judge Business School, Cambridge University.

Michael Best, BoA member

Professor Best's research focuses on industrial clusters, technology management, competitive advantage, and regional growth. His 'capability and innovation' perspective on industrial growth is developed and illustrated with enterprise and regional case studies in two books, "The New Competitive Advantage: The Renewal of American Industry", Oxford University Press, 2001 and "The New Competition: Institutions of Industrial Restructuring", Harvard University Press, 1990, and a series of articles. The Capabilities and Innovation perspective was simultaneously shaped by and applied in enterprise modernization, technology management, and cluster development projects he has led in various industrial settings including London, Slovenia, India, Cyprus, Jamaica, Honduras, Moldova, Northern Ireland, and Malaysia as well as in Massachusetts. Presently, with Professor John Bradley, he is working on a project to integrate business organization into a disaggregated macroeconomic model of the Estonian economy for the Estonian Ministry of Finance.

As co-director of the Center for Industrial Competitiveness, Professor Best directs the vTHREAD (Techno-Historical Regional Economic Analysis Database) project, a historical database of over 60,000 U.S. based, high-tech companies. By incorporating historical data, vTHREAD is able to identify fast growing companies and technology 'clusters' or regionally specialized technology groups, to estimate location quotients, and to research industrial growth and change. The highly granulated, product specific classification system is a conceptual 'techno-scope', which reads product profiles to uncover company and region?s distinctive technological capabilities.

He was on the board of the New Product Development Corporation (a royalty based financial institution in Massachusetts) and is an editorial board member of Massachusetts Benchmarks: The Quarterly Review of Economic News and Insight, jointly published by the University of Massachusetts and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. He was the National Science Foundation evaluator for the Biodegradable Polymer Center, an Industry-University Cooperative Research Center.

You can also find news on his own website www.michaelhbest.com, including publications, research projects and conference participations.