The Cluster Mapping database is built in the intersection of regions and sectors in Europe. By combining the two dimensions of geography and industry we can statistically trace regional agglomerations of employment, defined as statistical regional clusters, across Europe.

The geographical dimension is operationalised through 259 regions, predominantly NUTS 2 regions, which EU has defined to subdivide member countries for statistical purposes. We use NUTS 1 regions for Belgium, Greece, Netherlands and Turkey so that the size of the regions both in terms of land area and employment are reasonably comparable. NUTS 1 is also used for Ireland due to data availability.

On the sectoral side we use employment data on the 4-digit industry level (and in a few cases 3-digit data). Unfortunately, we could not obtain comparable data on wages, value added, or productivity at the level of regions and detailed industries. Instead we have used Regional Innovation Statistics (not separated by cluster category) to differentiate between regional clusters in high innovation environments from clusters in low innovation environments. Added to this, we have used national export data classified by cluster category (not separated by region) to separate out regional clusters in high export national environments from clusters in low export national environments.

In total there are close to 10 000 cells (intersection of cluster category e.g. Automotive, and region e.g. Western Sweden) or regional clusters across the 32 countries in the Cluster Mapping database. To separate out really large and specialised regional clusters we assign one, two or three stars to the largest and most specialised clusters in Europe.

For more detailed information please visit the following sections:
- Creation of cluster definitions
- Data collection
- Data processing algorithms
- Evaluation of regional cluster strength
- Decription of performance indicators