The Locus Model

The Locus Model is a new theoretical framework for understanding economic activity.

By organizing and ordering the components of an economy according to their functional roles, the Locus Model enables a deeper understanding of the moving parts of the global economy.

Locus defines an economic system as any system that produces a product, whether it be a worker, a company, or an industry. Locus has studied the components common to all economic systems, identifying an essential set of parts that exists in all economic systems. By identifying and cataloging patterns, Locus has developed a model of the activities and resources that exist in all economic systems, as well as the relations that exist between multiple systems. This model is used to analyze the composition of industries and companies.

Functional Classification

Traditional industry and occupational classification systems in business and economics, such as SIC, NAICS, GICS, and SOC, have been built on rigid hierarchical structures.

By contrast, nothing is rigid in the Functional Classification System (FCS), Locus’s new multifaceted economic classification system.  

Based on the Locus Model, FCS assigns economic entities a barcode, with each field in the barcode corresponding to a specific attribute of the classified entity. FCS applies a unified framework to classify both companies and occupations.

Unlike existing hierarchical classification systems, Locus-enabled groupings are dynamic.

Users can search for, identify, and relate business and economic information using any of the functional coordinates in the barcode as the key index variables. A risk manager assessing South American markets will not look at the economy the same way as a policymaker studying a policy’s impact on South Carolina small businesses, so Locus doesn’t adopt a one-size-fits-all approach. Locus allows researchers, policymakers, investors, entrepreneurs, and anybody interested in economic data to sort, splice, and analyze data in previously impossible ways.