To Örebro University

Traditional theories, models, and methods often address a general view of the environment including sociocultural, technological, political, and economic factors. However, there is a lack in infrastructural attention in these concepts which this thesis intends to contribute with by analyzing how regional specific infrastructural variables can be aggregated to one comparative measure and what that measure’s scope of use could be in the market analysis? Hence, the purpose of this thesis is to contribute to the strategic planning process research with a supporting quantitative tool, based on statistical metrics, for determining the market potential.

This thesis has an inductive approach and is primary based on documentary secondary data and the strategic planning process is the main theory of concern when evaluating the possibilities of infrastructural assessment. As a complement, the infrastructural concerns in the economics are also dealt with.

The empirics are compiled and calculated in a manner which allows an indexing and the finalized result is presented as an Infrastructural Status Index (InfraStat Index). Some of the utilities of this index are that it can be a complementary part of the PEST- and SWOT-models and a supporting tool in companies’ strategic planning processes. The index has both business and macroeconomic scopes of use and one of the summarizing conclusions is that further research within this concept should incorporate more variables in order to retrieve a more comprehensive result.