A new UK Tech Innovation Index is available today which shows that Wales and the South West of England have significant strengths across a range of sectors including AI and Data, Clean Growth, Advanced Manufacturing and Ageing Society. It also illustrates for the first time a significant overlap of activity clusters between the regions, with Bristol, Cardiff and Newport showing especially strong links to each other.
The index, available today, shows the most active innovation communities in the UK by categories, captured in an online map. It goes beyond standard pre-determined geographies, enabling it to reveal previously unseen vital business and academic links across cities and county boundaries, and demonstrating that innovation communities are often made up of groups of cities or conurbations.
Wales and the South West of England tend to produce significantly overlapping clusters across the whole index. The cluster around Bristol, Cardiff and Newport ranks 5th overall representing 5% of all activity in the UK, with a strong contribution from business activity. In the individual sectors, this cluster tends to reduce in size and thus fall outside the top 5, although Smart Cities and Mobility is a relatively strong area, ranking 10th with 4.6% of activity in the UK.
Outside of this cluster, however, both the South West and Wales score relatively poorly with Bournemouth, Exeter, Swansea, Plymouth, Aberystwyth all forming part of only a few lower ranking clusters that don’t make the top 10 in any categories.
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% |
This new index has also been developed using not just business activity, but the influence, specialisms and location of universities and other academic institutions, and the concentration of events and networking opportunities in an area.
It uses machine learning to classify millions of data points that capture sector-specific functional clusters, showing the true picture of innovation in the UK today. It will be updated every month as new data is collected. The results of the analysis are published as open data for others to reuse, providing the most open and useful record yet of innovation communities.
The index is published by Data City (thedatacity.com), with support from the Open Data Institute (ODI). The project is part of the ODI’s innovation programme, a three-year, £6m programme to support and build upon the UK’s strengths in data and data analytics, funded by Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency.
