Wales Innovates: New Arloesiadur Innovation Directory

New Arloesiadur platform reveals insights into Wales’ innovative
industry, research and tech networks to provide policymakers in Wales
with actionable insights

Wednesday, 18 October 2017 – Arloesiadur (Innovation Directory, in
Welsh), a new web platform for mapping innovation in Wales has been
unveiled today. A joint initiative between Nesta and Welsh Government,
Arloesiadur, https://arloesiadur.org/, uses new data (interactive data visualisations and open datasets) to measure and visualise Wales’
industry, research and tech networks with the goal of informing
policies to drive growth.

Nesta is a global innovation foundation. It backs new ideas to tackle
the big challenges of our time. Nesta’s innovation mapping team uses
new data sources, methods and technologies to measure and map
innovation to inform better policies. Working closely with Welsh
Government, firstly scoping the needs of Welsh innovation
policymakers, Nesta has created Arloesiadur to provide visualisations
which can be used to answer big questions about Wales’ industrial and
research strengths, its collaboration networks and future economic
opportunities. This is based on new analyses of business datasets from
Office of National Statistics, open data published by Research
Councils and Innovate UK, and web data from Meetup, an event platform.

Highlights of the data reveal:

*

Wales is rapidly gaining jobs in high paying industries: between 2011
and 2015, the number of people working in sectors like R&D, Aerospace
or Telecommunications grew by 73% (from 22,200 to 38,500 jobs)
*

Wales is already competitive in several high knowledge, high value
added Manufacturing industries like Aerospace or Instruments, as well
as sectors related to the green economy such as Energy and
Environmental Services which should gain importance in tomorrow’s
sustainable economy
*

A corridor of Manufacturing activity running from the North East to
Bristol Channel has added almost 7,000 jobs between 2010 and 2015 (an
increase of 12.5%)
*

Wales has become more competitive in scientific and technological
areas, with a particularly strong recent showing in Engineering and
Technology, Medical Sciences and Mathematics and Computing, where
projects led by Welsh organisations were awarded 71m in funding in
2015-16, compared with 55m in 2007-08
*

Wales is also developing new strengths in knowledge intensive and
creative sectors such as R&D, creative services, computing and
knowledge intensive business services – however, most of this activity
seems to involve small entrepreneurial organisations rather than
larger employers. In 2015, businesses in these sectors represented
6.5% of Welsh businesses (20% more than in 2010), but only 1.5% of
Welsh employment.
*

Analysis of research trends suggests growing strengths in Wales in
research areas related to the data revolution such as robotics and
cybernetics, prosthetics, robotics and health, bioinformatics,
statistics and data analysis, and security.
*

Our analysis of tech communities using Meetup data supports the idea
of a thriving cluster of data innovation in Wales, with 8 active
groups and 1,741 participants in 264 data-related events.
Interestingly, attendees from all over the UK are coming to Wales to
participate in meetings about the data revolution, including topics
such as big data, data science and machine learning.

Juan Mateos-Garcia, head of mapping at Nesta [4] explains:
“Economists and policymakers recognise that innovation – the creation
and application of new ideas – is one of the main ways to address the
big challenges of our time. In order to support this innovation, we
need to understand it first. With Arloesiadur, we have tried to
achieve this with new data sources, data science methods and
visualisations and so far, our work suggests that this can generate
useful information for innovation policy. Moving forward, we need to
monitor how they are used by policymakers, and identify the processes,
skillsets and policy instruments that have to be in place to augment
their impact.”

Welsh Government Minister for Skills and Science, Julie James said:
“The Arloesiadur collaboration marks an important milestone for
developing innovation in Wales and is a clear demonstration of our
commitment to our programme for government, Taking Wales Forward. This
information can help make important evidence-based decisions and
develop policies to strengthen innovation in Wales which will improve
productivity and provide a boost to our economic future.”