Development of Algorithm to Measure Digital Potential of High-tech Industrial Cluster

Industry 4.0, which is aimed at the global introduction of cyber-physical systems into industry, has determined further development pathways for cluster systems; one of the pathways is digitalization of business processes, which enables cutting costs significantly, manufacturing a high-tech innovative product, reducing time for communication between all the participants in the industrial cluster, revealing new sources for project funding, simplifying human work via relevant software and robotics adopted in the industry. All these factors become more urgent in the framework of functioning high-tech industrial clusters, which have not evolved only from the protocluster to the innovative active industrial cluster, but overtook their rivals by using these innovative available tools of the digital economy. In this paper the authors have presented a range of the most applicable methods to measure the digital potential of the industrial cluster (in regard to quantity, quality and mixed research methods); they have reviewed the literature that reveal the concept "innovative potential" of an industry enterprise and a cluster; the authors have considered 13 stages of digital potential measurement for the industrial cluster, including the following: identification of measurement parameters, classification of parameters by 6 subpotentials, expert evaluation of parameters, tabulation of the obtained expert survey results, selection of most significant parameters, final preparation of groups of factors, determination of a scale and units of measure for every selected factor to evaluate, collection of information from accessible sources, reduction of the received data to a unified measurement system, calculation of an integral index based on the developed scales, final stage includes guideline development. On the basis of the presented stages the authors worked out a relevant measurement algorithm, novelty and peculiarity of which imply allowance for indicators that characterize cluster digitalization (i.e. digital potential) when calculating a final integral value.