We are the industry cluster organization for polymers and advanced materials in Northeast Ohio — the densest polymer manufacturing region in the United States, and home to one of its federally designated Tech Hubs.
This is where we publish the software and data work behind that effort: the analyses, the tools that make them, and the methods that make them checkable.
Numbers about a region get repeated long after anyone can say where they came from. We hold ourselves to a different standard: every figure we publish names its source, its exact filter values, and the script that fetched it — and every published sentence is backed by a re-runnable assertion that fails loudly when the underlying data moves. When we get something wrong, the correction is dated and public.
If you find an error, we want it. Open an issue on the relevant repository.
This organization was created in August 2026 and the first repositories are in preparation. Nothing here is published yet — when it is, it will arrive with its methods attached rather than ahead of them.
| planned | what it will be |
|---|---|
| evidence-room | Data journalism on the regional polymer economy — employment, wages, patents, research reach, talent — with full sources, exact filter values, and a re-runnable claims harness |
| catena | A chemistry game about polymer chains, already playable at picinnovation.org/catena |
| pic-charts | Our publication-grade charting package, indebted to the Urban Institute's data visualization style guidance |
| pic-geo | The canonical county definitions of the cluster footprint, so anyone can reconcile our figures |
Also planned: an SBIR/STTR award map, an atlas of polymer degree programs and research groups, a curated list of public data sources for measuring a materials economy, and conference and cluster-health tooling.
The Polymer Industry Cluster is convened by the Greater Akron Chamber and works with industry, universities, and startups across a twelve-county footprint. Main site: polymerindustrycluster.org · Innovation programs: picinnovation.org
Analyses here are working research by PIC staff. They are not official statistics, and their limitations are stated on every page.