Over the last 2 and a half months, The Data City (TDC) and Open Innovations have been working with techUK to build the Local Digital Index for 2024. The Local Digital Index is live now.
In creating the index, techUK, The Data City and Open Innovations shared the following aims:
- To create an index that demonstrates the individual strengths of places, rather than pitting regions against each other.
- Use innovative data sources to address gaps in data around digital skills and innovation activity.
- Create a strong foundation of data infrastructure, allowing us to build on the strength of the tool in future years
Meeting these 3 aims drew on Open Innovations expertise in data infrastructure, visualisations and open data. The Data City’s expertise in sector classification allowed techUK to identify digital companies and The Data City data helped techUK fill gaps in official data.
Data infrastructure
To enable the 3-year plan, we’ve built data pipelines that will allow us to update the visualisations as new data becomes available. By capturing these processes in code, it ensures they are reproducible and therefore comparable between years.
One of the goals, and challenges, was to expand the data offering of the index. Open Innovations and The Data City have worked together to help visualise The Data City’s Real Time Industrial Classifications (RTICs) and data on skills from Lightcast.
Defining the digital sector
We wanted to understand regional trends for digital companies across the UK. But to do this, we first had to define what ‘digital’ companies are. However, “Digital” is a vague term. Most modern companies use computers and Microsoft Excel. But that doesn’t necessarily make them digital companies.
Therefore, we developed a new approach to define the digital sector, by using the detailed descriptions of what companies do from their websites rather than what Standard Industrial Classification code (SIC) they use. This is how The Data City creates its RTICs. By grouping several of these RTICs together, we were able to define a list of companies that we believe to be in the digital sector. You can read more about that in an earlier blog post.
Building the website and visualisations
The architecture of the site itself has been a focus too. Utilising Open Innovations data visualisation library OI Lume Viz, we’ve been able to rapidly deploy consistent, interactive and accessible data visualisations. This makes it easy to find data sources and their licences. Too often, these are hard to find or even completely omitted from data publishing.
Our frequent readers will recognise our pattern of working. Our investment in building quality, generalised platforms, in the open, allows us to work rapidly and consistently.
Our frequent readers will recognise our pattern of working. Our investment in building quality, generalised platforms, in the open, allows us to work rapidly and consistently.
We built the site using our favourite static site generator, Lume. In a static site, the pages are pre-built and then served to the user when they visit the site URL. Every user sees the same content. We then use progressive enhancement to build on top of the HTML. CSS applies styling in the browser. JavaScript adds interactivity.
We develop this way so that even if you don’t have a JavaScript enabled browser, you can still load the site and its content. We optimise our sites to reduce the page size as much as possible. For example, we ensure that images are only as large as they need to be. This makes our websites lightweight and quick to load, even with slower internet speeds.
Key findings
- Innovation Clusters and the role of R&D: Clusters of innovative companies, particularly in sectors like AI, Biotech, and Fintech are transforming both established urban centres and newer regional hotspots, driving economic growth. Consequently, research and development spending is concentrated in a few regions, but it’s crucial for advancing technologies and industries across the UK, particularly in high-tech and energy-dependent sectors.
- Investment drives growth: Access to private investment remains a major factor in business scalability and competitiveness, with certain regions demonstrating how targeted funding can fuel sector-specific growth. This is not a new issue, and we believe progress is being made, as investment firms setup regional offices or initiatives. We would like to explore this topic further to better understand what more can be done.
We like to thank the sponsors BT and Moore Kingston Smith. Thank you also to organisations on the working group that have shaped the index that you see. Finally, thank you to Glasgow City, Greater Manchester and West Midlands for contributing to case studies, helping us better understand the impact of what the data shows.
You can access and start using the Local Digital Index today.
To find out more about The Data City, what we do and how we can help you, please get in touch, or better yet sign up for a free trial today.
