Southampton: City excels for digital innovation, survey shows

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TBM Team

Southampton has the fifth most active data innovation community in the UK, and comes 16th across all technology sectors measured, according to a new UK Tech Innovation Index published by the Open Data Institute and the Digital Catapult

This is despite Southampton having a relatively small population of under 365,000 compared with leading cities such as London and Manchester.

Southampton came in the top 20 in every category, and also ranks 9th in Internet of Things innovation.

The UK Tech Innovation Index, shows the most active innovation communities in the UK by industry sector, captured in an online interactive map.

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.

Jeni Tennison, CEO at the Open Data Institute, said: “This new research reveals that innovation around data isn’t a London-based phenomenon, with the current methodology highlighting active communities in Edinburgh, Manchester, Brighton and Southampton. Using real-time data to identify clusters should help inform innovation policy, where it’s especially important to respond to how things are, rather than how they were, as well as the behaviour of businesses and jobseekers. Developing measures like this in the open also helps to increase our understanding about what drives innovation and which activities create real impact. I’m looking forward to seeing Tom’s work being discussed, adapted and built on.”

Dr Jeremy Silver, CEO at the Digital Catapult said: “This research confirms and subverts wide-held views on the UK tech industry. While London continues to be a heavyweight player on the global tech stage – innovation is by no means confined to the capital. We’re seeing high potential clusters of innovation across the UK, linked to opportunities identified within the tech sector or aligned to universities or dominant regional industries. Our own Digital Catapult regional centres reflect this too."

TBM Team