How to define a digital company?

Open Innovations and The Data City have been working on the 2024 version of techUK’s Local Digital Index. I’ve been working with Luke at Open Innovations to select, extract and visualise data. We’ll have more to share soon, keep your eyes peeled!

We’d like to understand the regional trends for digital companies across the UK. To do this we first have to define what ‘digital’ companies are.

‘Digital’ is all encompassing. Every company has some exposure to digital technology. Does that mean all companies are digital companies? Probably not.

We’re not alone in the challenge of defining terms like this. We supported DSIT in defining the Data Driven Market earlier this year.

“Data driven companies are not defined by a formal Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code. It is difficult to capture data driven companies (DDCs) partly due to the intangible nature of data.” ~ DSIT

DSIT made use of The Data City’s Real Time Industrial Classifications (RTICs) and a keyword approach to identify companies that are using a data driven approach to running their business. For the Local Digital Index, we will similarly use a selection of RTICs to define ‘digital’ companies.

Based on The Data City’s work with techUK in the past, we have a good idea on how we would define this. To be specific: we believe digital companies are those whose primary input is digital.

You can find more detail on the RTICs that we have included below and for a full description of these sectors, you can see their landing pages here.

How would you define the digital sector?