Industrial Strategy and Competitiveness Research Using Innovative Data Analytics

Taltech School of Business and Governance, Department of Business Administration offers 4-year PhD position in digitalization and organizations.

As recently as a few decades ago, the main elements of any given industry value chain tended to be co-located (agglomerated) fairly closely geographically. The globalisation and advancement of ICTs has made international communications and logistics, the management of the remote business units, and the relocation (off-shoring) of individual elements of value chains inherently easier. With greater specialisation and the massive increase in the trade of manufactured intermediate goods, successful economic development has also become increasingly dependent on both imported technologies and subsequently emerging production capabilities along with broader global industry and market dynamics. Industry value chains (clusters) are increasingly analysed in broader cross-border settings or, depending on the characteristics of the particular industry, possibly as global value chains (GVCs). Business models of companies have also greatly changed and ICTs are seen as key driver of business model innovation.

It is also expected that a significant part of the usual research modalities that are needed for competitiveness studies will be rethought within the next 5-10 years; and those research actors and industrialists, who are better equipped to benefit from open and big data, and data science will be also able gain significant, close to real-time insights for industrial strategy.

The objective of the research project is to develop research methods, with a particular focus on advanced data analytics skills to be exploited to conduct improved analysis of GVCs and clusters, and to identify and analyse the impact of relevant public policies.

As part of the CatChain project (“Catching-Up along the global value chain: business models, determinants and policy implications in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution”, 2018-2022), fully funded short term research trips (in total up to 12 months) to Seoul National University (South Korea), University of Malaya (Malaysia), University of Campinas (Brazil) and to our other strategic research partners, are available and highly encouraged. 

The researcher will be also part of the H2020 project “Industrial Strategy and Competitiveness Studies at TalTech” (2020-2023), co-ordinated by the supervisor. This project develops strategic partnership between TalTech as the beneficiary, and Bocconi University (Italy), Aalto University (Finland) and NESTA (United Kingdom).

Qualifications
The applicants should fulfil the following requirements:

• Master’s degree in economics or policy/governance studies or ICT
• Very good command of English
• Very good qualitative and quantitative (such as R) research skills