What are the UK’s top 20 Internet of Things cities?

Posted on 4 Aug 2017 by Jonny Williamson
The research from Canonical looked at the views, opinions and experiences of 361 IoT professionals regarding past, present and future IoT projects.

The UK Tech Innovation Index has revealed the UK’s most active Internet of Things (IoT) communities.

Larger cities have strong innovation ecosystems across all measured sectors, such as London, Manchester, and Glasgow - map tiles courtesy of OpenStreetMap Sweden / Map data © OpenStreetMap.
Larger cities have strong innovation ecosystems across all measured sectors, such as London, Manchester, and Glasgow – map tiles courtesy of OpenStreetMap Sweden / Map data © OpenStreetMap.

The UK Tech Innovation Index – published by the Digital Catapult and the Open Data Institute (ODI) – measures current activity and potential for future Internet of Things innovation.

It’s not very surprising that IoT tech innovation is by far the strongest in London. However, there a highly active IoT hubs across the UK, including: Edinburgh, Reading, Cardiff, Liverpool and Manchester.

The research aims to gain a more distinctive picture of UK innovation landscape, and help businesses and public sectors make better decisions around new investments and growth strategies.

This data sheds new light on where British innovation is flourishing, and the rankings show how active the IoT innovation community is in 36 of the largest UK cities.

The city rankings combine data from three sources: tech events, conferences and meetups, scientific and academic publications, and data on local skills measures, business start-up rates, and research and development spending.

The rankings incorporate data, and the algorithm built to create the rankings combines this data with more widely-used measures, such as: the number of start-ups in a city; nearby research and development spending; and the percentage of people with degree-level or equivalent qualifications.

Each UK city was appointed a scoring point, according to the created algorithm, and the study reveals that London (21.4) tops the list of the cities with the best Internet of Things infrastructure in the UK.

  1. London (21.4)
  2. Edinburgh (7.9)
  3. Reading (7.6)
  4. Manchester (7.0)
  5. Liverpool (6.5)
  6. Glasgow (4.1)
  7. Cambridge (3.8)
  8. Milton Keynes (3.8)
  9. Southampton (3.6)
  10. Brighton (3.3)
  11. Oxford (3.2)
  12. Portsmouth (3.1)
  13. Bristol (2.7)
  14. Nottingham (2.6)
  15. Leeds (2.2)
  16. Dundee (2.0)
  17. Blackpool (1.8)
  18. Norwich (1.6)
  19. Hull (1.5)
  20. Derby (1.5)

He added: “There are early signs of other new clusters emerging in other new fields, right across the country. The data behind these rankings is improving all the time, as more tech events are held, and more scientific papers are published. We hope that by sharing our research at this early stage we can learn from others and improve our techniques even more quickly.”