Phil Jones, Wired Sussex Managing Director and Coast to Capital Board member said:
"The results of the new Tech Innovation Index demonstrate that Brighton is one of the leading digital cities in the UK and home to a growing and thriving tech sector. Our ambition is for Brighton to build on its reputation as a hotbed for digital talent, a tech hub for businesses and a centre for innovation. The Digital Catapult Centre Brighton, led by Coast to Capital, is at the heart of this ambition and offers a way for creative and tech start-ups and small and medium enterprises to develop and share digital innovations, working with each other, as well as universities and large businesses."
The research was undertaken as a first step to gain a clearer picture of the UK innovation landscape, to help inform business and public sector decision-making around investment and growth.
Data on tech events, conferences and meetups from a range of sources have been brought together with data such as academic publications, local skills measures, business startup rates, and research and development spending. Together these shed new light on where British innovation is flourishing. The rankings show how active the innovation community is in 36 of the largest UK cities, across seven key industrial sectors:
- Data
- Manufacturing
- Artificial Intelligence
- Health
- Internet of Things
- Machine learning
- Virtual Reality
The rankings show that:
- Tech innovation is unsurprisingly strong in London. However innovation is not limited to the South East: there are highly active hubs across the country, including Edinburgh, Reading, Cardiff and Liverpool.
- In many places, innovation is aligned with local industries. For example, Aberdeen, with its strong offshore engineering industries, and Coventry and Birmingham with their strong car industries, are today very strong in manufacturing innovation.
- Larger cities such as London, Manchester, and Glasgow have strong innovation ecosystems across all measured sectors.
- Smaller cities often have a few areas of particular strength, such as Internet of Things in Reading, and Manufacturing in Aberdeen and Coventry.
Tom Forth, Head of Data at ODI Leeds, who led the project, explains how it is different from other pieces of innovation research:
"Our approach to measuring innovation pioneers new ways of picking out the early signs that new industrial clusters are emerging. Our results are largely as expected, with large cities such as London, Manchester, and Glasgow performing strongly in all areas and well-known overachievers such as Edinburgh, Cambridge, and Brighton punching well above their weight.
"Interestingly, our techniques seem to spot early signs of more focused excellence. In Reading and Liverpool we see real strength in Internet of Things. Leeds does very well in Health. And in Aberdeen and Coventry, Manufacturing is notably strong. There are early signs of other clusters emerging in other new fields, right across the country. The data behind these rankings is improving all the time, as more tech events are held, and more scientific papers are published. We hope that by sharing our research at this early stage we can learn from others and improve our techniques even more quickly."
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