Staying ahead of fast-moving trends is tough, especially when the tools for finding innovation are outdated or manual.
For researchers and organisations in healthcare and government, horizon scanning is a vital process: identifying emerging technologies, suppliers, and risks to inform strategy and drive innovation.
But too often, it’s still done with Google searches, internal CRMs, and spreadsheets. A process that’s time-consuming, inconsistent, and hard to scale.
At The Data City, we’ve built a platform that changes that.
By combining real-time company data with modern classifications, our platform makes it easy to explore UK innovation ecosystems, refine company searches, and conduct horizon scanning reports in days not weeks.
What is horizon scanning?
Horizon scanning is the process of identifying early-stage technologies, trends or risks that could impact the future. It’s widely used in government, healthcare, climate policy, and other sectors to help stakeholders prepare for change.
In the NHS and Health Innovation Networks, horizon scanning supports decisions around funding, evaluation and partnerships, for example, identifying new digital health tools for stroke recovery or solutions addressing workforce pressures in primary care.
Outputs typically include:
- Lists of innovations and suppliers, segmented by topic or priority
- Company details including stage, product focus, readiness and more
A modern approach to horizon scanning
Traditional horizon scanning is often slow, manual and hard to scale.
At The Data City, we’ve built a platform that makes it simple. Our UK-wide company and industry database removes the guesswork — replacing outdated SIC codes with real-time insights based on what companies actually do, drawn from their websites.
With Real-Time Industrial Classifications (RTICs), advanced filters, innovation metrics and intuitive AI tools, you can surface emerging suppliers, map local ecosystems and spot trends in seconds.
Whether you’re running a quick local scan or a deep national dive, The Data City gets you from challenge to company shortlist, fast.
Horizon Scanning with The Data City
Explore filters
The heart of The Data City’s Industry Engine is Explore – your gateway to over 4.5 million active UK companies.
From here you can start horizon scans by refining your search by location, industry, financial information, growth rate, funding, grants, innovation score and more.
For example within a few seconds you could identify Biopharmaceutical companies located in the East Midlands using our RTIC and location filters.
Say if you were looking to refine further, to identify companies innovating in Antibodies, you could select the ‘Antibodies’ RTIC vertical or include additional keyword filters like “innovation”, “antibody manufacturing” or “cell cultures’ to find specific products.
Within just a few clicks, we can generate a list of over 50 Biopharma companies in the East Midlands within our Antibodies vertical.
From here you can view individual company pages to access readiness, looking at detailed financials, funding info, company size, employee counts, sectors and much more.
Find company lookalikes
Have a number of great companies, but need more like it? You can use our ML-list builder and access our platform AI to return companies with similar tech, language, and market focus.
How it works:
- Start with a handful of known innovators – e.g. companies building digital tools for diabetes care.
- Add “negative examples” – companies that aren’t relevant – to refine your training set.
- Run the model – our platform learns from your inputs and returns a much wider list of relevant matches.
We trained the ML tool using just 5 known digital diabetes companies. After refining and running the model, we surfaced 400+ UK companies working on similar challenges.
Here are a few that surfaced:
- Generated Health – makers of Florence, a text-based automated clinical support tool
- Huma – creators of GDm-Health, a digital program supporting diabetes in pregnancy
- Silhouetee by Entec Health – a wound care platform supporting diabetic foot ulcer management
This approach dramatically expands your discovery net – helping Health Innovation Networks surface high-potential innovators in minutes, not weeks.
Smart search
Instead of relying on Google to help unearth the latest innovations, The Data City’s Smart Search allows you to bypass the hours spent trawling the internet, using a search engine just for companies.
It’s a search engine built just for companies. Type in a phrase, a description, even a problem statement, and Smart Search returns the most relevant companies based on real-world signals like language, sector activity, and classification.
We tried:
“MedTech companies developing AI products to support with cognitive care”
The result? A ranked list of 500 highly relevant companies. This allowed us to pin point a number of relevant companies and technologies. Here are just a few it surfaced:
- Astrix Health – API and UI-based tools to explore healthcare providers and services
- MindLife – AI and biosensor-powered tools for mental health and mind-body conditions
- Bering – advanced clinical AI products for imaging, population health and decision support
Pre-built industry lists
Alongside powerful filters, The Data City includes over 500 ready-made sector classifications called Real-Time Industry Classifications (RTICs), built with government and industry experts using machine learning and website data.
Where SIC codes fall short, RTICs map emerging sectors like AI, Quantum, and Digital Health in real time.
Explore broad areas like MedTech or Life Sciences, or dive into niche verticals like Targeted Therapies or Additive Manufacturing.
Each RTIC gives you instant insight into sector size, growth, turnover, workforce and geography, plus full company lists you can explore or export.
Downloading and sharing data
While many use The Data City platform in real-time for horizon scanning, we know sharing insights is just as important.
You can easily download shortlists and scan results into clean, ready-to-share CSV or Excel files – selecting only the data points you need.
For more advanced use cases, our API lets you integrate company data directly into your CRM, dashboards or internal platforms.
Try it for yourself
Whether you’re working on a targeted local scan or a strategic national programme, The Data City gives you the tools to go from challenge to company shortlist, faster, smarter, and with more confidence.
Want to try it for yourself? Sign up for a free trial today and gain access to our Industry Engine platform for 7 days.
