As Chief Data Scientist at Kinnek, I’m interested not only in how the platform impacts small businesses, but how small business dynamics on Kinnek relate to the broader economy as well.
Kinnek’s role as a purchasing platform for small businesses gives us a rare view into the dynamics of small business demand. Long known as key indicators of economic health, SMBs represent over 50% of the working population and have generated over 65% of net new jobs since 1995.
This led us to look at measures of activity on the Kinnek platform as indicators of small business vitality across the country. The map below shows Kinnek’s take on the states where small businesses seem to be strongest. We used ‘hunger’ as our primary measure. That is, small business requests for products adjusted for state population.Vermont, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, and Virginia were the hungriest of states in Q3 of 2014 according to our metrics. This has a strong intersection with other measures of states with the speediest growth rates.
As more and more businesses continue to use Kinnek to find suppliers and manage their purchasing, we’ll get a clearer picture of how this activity correlates with other economic indicators. A full list of the top 10 hungriest states is below:
Hungriest States on Kinnek
1. Vermont
2. Oregon
3. Washington
4. Colorado
5. Virgina
6. Montana
7. New Hampshire
8 North Dakota
9. Hawaii
10. Maine
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