As regions outside London look to gain a more equal share of the country’s business and employment, the data shows that Manchester is taking the lead with Emerging Digital Technology.
MIDAS, an inward investment agency based in Manchester, commissioned a report to help identify its city’s strengths. The research undertaken by The Data City interrogated data from all the UK regions outside London that were visibly engaged in new and emerging technologies. Using the latest machine learning methods to identify specific growth sectors within organisations, whitepapers, patents and tech events we built a balanced picture of how each city was performing.
The emerging sectors we analysed included; Service Design, Advanced Materials, Ecommerce, AI & Data Science, Cyber Security, Construction Tech, IoT and MedTech. These new sectors were not available on Companies House, so to find organisations, we used artificial intelligent ways of finding and classifying companies using an alternative to SIC codes. This new approach has changed the way individual organisations can be categorised, giving a true reflection of their products, services and capabilities as they change over time.
The report also included the analysis of 500 thousand technology events and 200 million scientific papers to gauge the innovative and collaborative characteristics for each location. This contributed to a more accurate comparison than organisation count alone due to differing company sizes.
The power in the North
Manchester outperformed all cities in the Service Design sector. It came first across all three data sets with almost double the amount of events and a third more scientific papers, topping the charts with over 700 organisations engaged in Service Design.
Manchester also outperformed all cities in most other sectors. It only marginally slipped behind with 21 fewer events in MedTech than Bristol, and falling into 2nd and 3rd place for organisations, events and papers in IoT, where Reading and Oxford-Didcot and Edinburgh took top spots.
As Manchester takes lead within the Emerging Digital technology arena, it will be interesting to see how other cities react to the levelling up challenge set by No.10.
For more detail download The Emerging Digital Tech Report 2020 below.
In the production of both the 2019 Census and the UK’s Top Digital Tech Cities | 2020 report we have worked closely with the inward investment teams at Manchester who would be delighted to hear from organisations interested in locating teams in the city. They provide an extensive support package to organisations considering the city and you can find out more or request information by visiting Invest in Manchester.