Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Business Geography

Business geography integrates geographic analysis, reasoning, and technology to improve business decisions. This ability to enhance business decisions distinguishes business geography from the traditional explanatory frameworks of economic and urban geography. Business geography, moreover, goes far beyond merely the application of geospatial technologies to business requirements. Business geography combines a keen understanding of geospatial technologies and business systems and operations, which together can significantly improve real-time, real-world business decisions.

Business geography has its roots in the traditional location analysis models and applications, mainly siting retail enterprises. These locational techniques emanated from analogue gravity modeling and transformed over the decades into more complex probabilistic expressions of distance-decay interactions of retail consumer demand. Of these advanced models, David Huff's is the most well-known. Although location analysts today incorporate geospatial technology, data sets, and analytic techniques, many analysts also continue to rely on their qualitative judgments honed from practitioner experiences of applying the science and art of business geography.

Business geography has evolved to provide solutions to complex spatial management objectives, including, for example, real-time spatial tracking of products from manufacture to consumer purchase, to containers, to vehicles, and to employees. These solutions move beyond barcodes to radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and satellite global positioning system (GPS) triangulation. Personal privacy concerns about RFID tags and a constant need for updated GPS data raise questions regarding these two tracking systems.

Private sector applications of spatial forecast modeling, geographic information systems (GISs), remote sensing, and geovisualization work is growing remarkably and is expected to overtake the government as the largest geospatial employment market by 2020. Early business adopters of these integrated “geographic management systems” in enterprises such as real estate, marketing, transportation, banking, insurance, and communications have realized substantial cost efficiencies.

Business Geography in Academia

The Association of American Geographers’ Web site (http://aag.org) explicitly enumerates professional positions that pertain to spatial analysis of shopping habits, regional sales characteristics, route delivery management, and real estate appraising. Yet most geography departments in the United States have not developed undergraduate or graduate curricula needed to position themselves and their students for the vigorous employment growth in the business sector. An analysis of the curricula of U.S. geography departments identified only five offering business geography programs. Several Canadian geography departments, following the strong European (particularly British) tradition, have robust business geography programs. Moreover, only five U.S. colleges of business have GIS courses in their curricula. Although the expansion of geotechnologies, particularly GIS, will produce up to $100 billion in the private sector in the near term, geography departments and colleges of business have not recognized the huge market in the U.S. economy for college graduates with a combination of geospatial skills and business knowledge. However, professional initiatives such as the globally recognized Certified Commercial Investment Manager (CCIM) program, with its rigorous geospatial real estate market analysis, will undoubtedly change the thinking in colleges of business regarding the analytical power of geotechnologies and the growing employment opportunities in business geography.

Business Geography Academic Curriculum

Most U.S. geography departments are located in academic colleges focusing on the liberal arts or science and have little affinity for business. Nevertheless, the following model suggested for a business geography undergraduate degree program, operating within each university's general education requirements and melding into a department's fundamental knowledge and skills framework, will guide geography students into the burgeoning business geography

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution