Innovative Companies

Identifying innovative companies through official statistics can be difficult. For instance, while data on business R&D spending exists, it is often available only at a highly aggregated level, making it hard to pinpoint specific innovative firms.

To address this, The Data City has developed an Innovation Score, which offers insight into the regional distribution of companies likely to be investing in R&D. The score is generated using a machine learning model trained on businesses known to be investing in R&D. This model identifies other companies that use similar language patterns, suggesting they are also likely to be R&D-intensive and innovative.

The analysis relies on website text from companies to find these language patterns. To calculate the percentage of innovative businesses in a region, we divide the number of identified innovative companies by the total number of businesses registered in the area with a website. We believe that businesses with a website represent a significant proportion of the economically active companies, providing a reliable indicator of innovation activity.

Note: The model identifies whether a company appears to be innovative, and not the degree of innovation that a company has. We perform this analysis by a company's registered address and we acknowledge that companies may have multiple operating addresses, and their innovation activity may vary across their locations.