Table of contents
Businesses are becoming incrementally competitive and technology savvy. With the advent of computational methods and location based services, much of our data is implicitly location based. Successful businesses must adapt themselves to new techniques and methods that allow market exploration to take place, and to maximize the opportunities to gain competitive advantage over clients in high demand markets.
Spatial analysis and Geographic Information Systems play an utmost important role for this success. However, many of the available commercial software are expensive, and the learning curve is steep to gain a competitive advantage with few resources available. This leads to start ups, small businesses, and even other organizations outside of the technological sector not to know how to address the many tools available. The “geo-competition” doesn’t give them the chance to continue to prosper.
In this book I demonstrate how business geographical analysis can be applied only by means of open source solutions. Open source software is becoming an important part of our technological advance. It is free, available for everyone with a few clicks of a button, and it offers fast and relevant solutions for integrating GIS and spatial analysis.
By exploring QGIS, R and Geoda, in this book you will learn all about making your business more competitive and intelligent. You will learn how to create great maps and visualization of stores, but also analyze competitors and cease market opportunities. You will gain skills in advanced spatial analysis that allow to delimit market territories, understand location preferences, integrate consumer behaviors and better assess your competitors and all of this, for free without the burdens and costs of commercial software.
I'm a tenured Associate Professor at the Departmennt of Geography and Environmental Studies and Graduate Program Director of the Masters of Spatial Analysis at Ryerson University. I'm also the current acting President of the Canadian Regional Science Association.
In the last ten years, I've published over hundred and fifty scientific contributions and I was distinguished by Ryerson University in 2015 and in 2021 for the Dean's SRC Award at Ryerson. In 2012, I was nominated "Rising Star" by the Regional Science Association International. Between 2015 and 2018, I held the pro-bono position of Vice-President of the Research Centre for Spatial and Organizational Dynamics (CIEO), a Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology classified centre as Very Good.
I focus on using spatial analysis methods, and complex system modelling approaches as well as Geographic Information Systems and Science to understand regional dynamics and integrate a better understanding of policy and the anthropocene. He acts consistently as reviewer for top journals in the field, and is a member of several editorial boards of international journals.
He has participated in over 3.75 million dollars in project funding in the last five years as principal investigator and co-investigator. Presently, he is completing a monography for Springer on the topic of the changes and challenges of southern Europe.
A plethora of books have been published on GIS and spatial analysis. Now that we are in this pandemic together, it is time to allow small businesses to explore Geographic Information Systems, in a systematic way that reduces their investment in services that enable to use these techniques. GIS for Business Analyics attempts to be an online primer to support the decision making and spatial learning for retail and business analysis. Like many of you, I’ve read many books on the topic of GIS and I am always surprised that the materials on retail, business, and marketing are not often applied, and while showcasing examples found in the field, only a limited amount of materials take a hands-on approach.
In this book, I have set out the basis for allowing you to learn applied tools for Business and retail GIS. It is an open initiative that I will keep free throughout the pandemic, hoping that you can learn from it and integrate these techniques in the practical aspects of your business. I aim to make it an invaluable reading to every budding entrepreneur and those already in business. My hope is that through this primer you will be able to: (i) use GIS efficiently, (ii) understand market segments and the decisions for your customers, (iii) learn as a student tools that are useful in your carreers in marketing, retail, and business decision making, (iv) become interested in spatial technologies and contribute to an ever-growing field.