North of England’s innovation strengths revealed in tech index

The North of England has significant strengths across a range of sectors including AI and data, clean growth, advanced manufacturing, smart cities and mobility and ageing society, according to a UK Tech Innovation Index released today.

The index shows the most active innovation communities in the UK by categories and aims to go beyond standard pre-determined geographies, enabling it to reveal previously unseen vital business and academic links across cities and county boundaries.

It also demonstrates that innovation communities are often made up of groups of cities or conurbations.

The North West does well across all categories with Manchester and Burnley forming a strong cluster in AI and data (second) and clean growth (fourth) and second in Advanced Manufacturing with a wider cluster including East and West Lancashire and Cheshire.

Manchester alone ranks fourth for ageing society and also comes third overall across all five industries with Burnley and Stoke, representing 6.4% of the UK ecosystem.

Yorkshire and Humber’s main strengths are in advanced manufacturing and smart cities and mobility (both fourth) with a large region-wide cluster comprising Leeds, Sheffield, Bradford, Barnsley, Huddersfield and Wakefield for advanced manufacturing and also including York and Doncaster for smart cities.

The top 10 overall clusters across all sectors are shown below, including the percentage of activity in the UK as a whole.

Top 10

Rank Cluster Region(s) Percentage
1 London, Luton Greater London, East 21.5%
2 Birmingham, Coventry West Midlands 7.3%
3 Manchester, Stoke, Burnley North West, West Midlands 6.4%
4 Reading, Aldershot, Slough South East 5.0%
5 Bristol, Cardiff, Newport South West, Wales 5.0%
6 Oxford, Northampton, Milton Keynes South East 4.7%
7 Leicester, Nottingham East Midlands 4.7%
8 Leeds, Sheffield, Bradford, Barnsley, Huddersfield, Wakefield Yorkshire and the Humber 4.7%
9 Romford, Dartford Greater London, South East 4.0%
10 Edinburgh, Dundee Scotland 3.9%

The index is published by Data City with support from the Open Data Institute (ODI). The project is part of the ODI’s innovation programme, a three-year, £6m scheme to support and build upon the UK’s strengths in data and data analytics, funded by Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency.

Tom Forth, co-founder and head of data at The Data City, who led the project, explains how it is different from other pieces of innovation research.

“With this index, we are providing an evidence base for better-informed decisions within the UK government and beyond, and are sharing many of our methods and documenting the datasets we use so that others can benefit from them.

“Our new approach covers more of the UK, and by using many times more data points we have found and measured more clusters of innovation, and more of them away from cities. With millions of rows of data, and thousands more rows being added every week, we no longer classify businesses and events by hand, we use machine-learning techniques instead. We are also explaining what would be possible if more data were available to us in the future, in the hope that it will be.”

“We believe this information will help private investors looking to invest in companies, existing businesses looking to expand, national government departments looking to assign investment and local and regional governments looking to assign funding locally or make a case for inward investment to their regions.”

Read Forth’s blog.

Jeni Tennison, CEO at the Open Data Institute, said: “This new index gives a bird’s eye view of innovation networks across the UK in 2018, providing not only an interactive online tool but regularly updated open datasets that others can use and explore.

“The index can be used to inform policy makers, investors and businesses about innovation across the UK, showing where there are active tech communities in different sectors, and where there are gaps. It also demonstrates how new sources of data can be brought together to cast a different light on innovation in the UK. By making the methodology and data open, we hope others can build on this work.”

 

 

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