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 | Sheffield & RotherhamYorkshire and the Humber | Birmingham & the West MidlandsWest Midlands | Liverpool City RegionNorth West |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sectors | Advanced Manufacturing, Advanced Materials Supporting: Clean Energy, Robotics & Autonomous Systems, Mobility & Transport Technology, Digital Technologies | Mobility & Transport Technology, Advanced Manufacturing, Quantum Technologies, Advanced Materials Supporting: Clean Energy, Digital Technologies, Defence & Security | Life Sciences, Engineering Biology, Advanced Materials Supporting: Digital Technologies, Clean Energy, Creative Industries |
| Research |
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| Companies | Not recorded on the map. | Not recorded on the map. | Not recorded on the map. |
| Infrastructure |
High Value Manufacturing Catapult centres, nuclear manufacturing facilities and industrial research factories. |
Automotive research centres, battery and vehicle test facilities and major logistics assets. | Not recorded on the map. University research institutes, automated chemistry facilities and port and logistics assets. |
| Capital | Public co-investment, corporate partnership and asset finance rather than venture capital. | Corporate and supply chain finance dominate; venture capital is thin relative to industrial output. | A modest local investor base; public and charitable research funding dominate. |
| Government programmes | No place-based designation recorded. |
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| What exists | One of the strongest applied manufacturing research bases in Europe, covering machining, materials, nuclear manufacturing and factory-scale process development, working directly with industrial customers. | The largest manufacturing base in the UK by employment, automotive and electrification engineering, rail and mobility research, and a young, large working-age population. | Infection and tropical medicine research of international standing, materials chemistry and automated discovery, a large port and a Freeport designation. |
| What's missing · UKIZ interpretation | Domestic demand. Process capability of international standard is often demonstrated for overseas primes, and local SMEs lack the capital to adopt what is proven a mile away. | Ownership of the value in electrified vehicles: battery, power electronics and software increasingly sit outside the region and outside the UK. Innovation-active SME supply chains are under-capitalised. | Translation capacity: strong discovery science with limited local scale-up manufacturing and limited early-stage capital to hold companies in the city region. |
| What could connect · UKIZ interpretation | Applied manufacturing research connected to domestic customers, energy, defence, mobility and medical technology, with procurement used as the connector rather than grants. | Midlands manufacturing paired with battery and power electronics research, North East battery production and Coventry testing capability as a single electrification value chain. | Infection and biologics research connected to North West and Teesside biomanufacturing capacity, with the port used for export rather than only import. |
| UKIZ relevance | The research holds international standing; the domestic customer base for what it produces is thinner than it should be. The proposed Midlands and Teesside & Humber missions both depend on this capability. | The region's transition depends on owning the new value in a vehicle rather than assembling someone else's. The proposed Midlands zone focuses on batteries, power electronics and software. | Discovery and manufacture here are unusually well connected, with scale-up routes that are already in use. The proposed Manchester mission treats the North West as one health and biomanufacturing geography. |
| Last verified | 15 August 2026 | 15 August 2026 | 15 August 2026 |
Proposed by UKIZ · independent · not a government designation