UK Innovation Map
Compare placesDifferent, not ranked.
Two or three clusters, read side by side across sectors, research, companies, capital, infrastructure, government designations and UKIZ relevance. There is no score and no ranking: British clusters are different from one another, not better or worse than one another.
Choose up to three clusters
- London
- Cambridge
- Oxford
- Manchester
- Birmingham & the West Midlands
- Bristol & Bath
- Sheffield & Rotherham
- Leeds & West Yorkshire
- Liverpool City Region
- Newcastle & the North East
- Teesside & the Humber
- Edinburgh
- Glasgow & the Central Belt
- Belfast
- Cardiff & South Wales
- Southampton & Portsmouth
- Cornwall & Plymouth
- Nottingham & Derby
- Norwich & the East
Side by side
| Dimension | BelfastNorthern Ireland | Glasgow & the Central BeltScotland |
|---|---|---|
| Sectors | Defence & Security, Advanced Materials, Financial Technology, Creative Industries Supporting: Digital Technologies, AgriTech & FoodTech, Advanced Manufacturing | Space, Semiconductors, Quantum Technologies, Advanced Manufacturing Supporting: Clean Energy, Digital Technologies, Robotics & Autonomous Systems |
| Research |
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| Companies |
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| Infrastructure | Not recorded on the map. Cyber security innovation centre, composites and aerostructures manufacturing and agri-food research facilities. |
Satellite manufacturing capacity, nanofabrication cleanrooms and national manufacturing research facilities. |
| Capital | A small local venture base supported by public co-investment; growth capital typically comes from Dublin, London or the US. | Public co-investment and specialist funds; hardware scale-up capital is scarce. |
| Government programmes | No place-based designation recorded. | No place-based designation recorded. |
| What exists | Cyber security research and commercialisation of international standing, aerospace and composites manufacturing, agri-food research and a fast-growing software sector. | More small satellites built here than anywhere else in Europe, quantum imaging and nanofabrication research, and a large applied engineering, manufacturing and energy research base. |
| What's missing · UKIZ interpretation | Scale-up capital and market access. Companies reach a ceiling and are acquired, and dual-market access advantages are under-exploited commercially. | Downstream value. Satellites are manufactured here while much of the data and applications value is captured elsewhere. Scale-up finance for hardware is limited. |
| What could connect · UKIZ interpretation | Belfast cyber capability connected to UK defence and financial services demand, and composites manufacturing connected to Bristol and Midlands aerospace supply chains. | Glasgow manufacture connected to Cornwall launch and Earth observation, Harwell space applications and domestic data customers, forming one national space chain instead of four regional ones. |
| UKIZ relevance | Northern Ireland's position between two markets is a commercial asset that is under-used. The proposed Northern Ireland mission treats it as the organising advantage. | Manufacture, launch and data are three different geographies in Britain. The proposed Scotland mission connects them deliberately. |
| Last verified | 15 August 2026 | 15 August 2026 |
Proposed by UKIZ · independent · not a government designation