glass.ai Maps the UK's North East Economy, Priority Sectors and Importers / Exporters.
Introduction
The North East Local Enterprise Partnership (NELEP) held its annual growth conference, ‘Our Economy’, in Newcastle on the 15th of November 2023. The event took place at a spectacular venue and one with data and insight at its core — the National Innovation Centre for Data. The agenda featured a broad array of speakers, focused on progressing the region’s ambitions for economic prosperity, reflecting on action and tackling barriers to sustained growth, head-on. Key tenets of inclusive growth were discussed, including talent and skills, infrastructure investment, Net Zero, regeneration and regional sector development, which are at the core of NELEP’s strategic remit. A golden thread to these themes and the event itself was the need for an informed evidence base, which is where glass.ai has made a material contribution to local policymakers and analysts.
New Sector Insights
glass.ai was commissioned by NELEP to provide a fresh and insightful perspective on the region’s economic characteristics. This was needed to provide a more informed picture of economic opportunity and underpin a bold growth narrative, as well as to support policymaking. The outputs were achieved using our AI research capability that deep reads the web to understand the activities of companies and sectors. The focus of the assignment was to:
Profile the North East economy in a new way, developing a whole region baseline dataset to showcase the full extent of companies and sectors.
Use a bespoke crawling approach to understand the presence and differentiation of eight priority sectors that are key to the region’s economic prospects.
Go deeper into the region’s companies by looking at evidence of trading internationally, including the exporting and importing of products and services.
Enriching the results to support onward engagement and primary research.
The project required us to harness the power of our AI intelligent crawler and develop bespoke classifications and research tools for NELEP’s key sectors, which were — Advanced Manufacturing and Engineering, Business Services, Digital Technologies, Energy and Renewables, Life Sciences, Logistics, Offshore Industries and the Visitor Economy. Through a collaborative approach and drawing on regional sector expertise, we fine-tuned our language models that enabled the discovery of several thousand companies and organisations, critical to the region’s success and vitality of priority sectors. This allowed the LEP to move beyond the constraints of existing data sources (e.g. company databases) and industrial classifications, to obtain a real-world view of the region’s capability, key clusters and the underlying characteristics of individual companies. Advantages of this crawling approach included uncovering discrete companies, better categorising diversified business activities and shining a light on international investors.
A hallmark of the work too, was a deeper dive into the companies’ import and export activities. Here, our AI that deep reads the web was able to determine the presence of import/export activity at a company level, using a triangulated approach, to support the LEP in its desire to boost exporting activity as a driver of business productivity. A significant innovation was achieved, which was to understand the trading activities of service-based industries, which are an important component of the regional economy and are a layer of intelligence poorly captured by official data sources.
To bring the data to life and support spatial analysis, we also developed an interactive map, capable of showing clusters, and company locations and providing direct links to websites. This is now available to view online, alongside other information assets.
Data Application and Looking Ahead
The dataset and map generated for the North East LEP are helping the organisation to make evidence-based decisions, take action and engage with local companies in a more focused way. It also provides unique insights into key priority sectors, clusters and employers, as the basis for deeper analysis and follow-on research. We were really pleased to hear at the ‘Our Economy Conference’ that the data is making a real difference, including in a case making and regional promotion capacity, securing valuable funding for the region. We expect the value of this to increase over time, and help shape other areas of focus, linked to economic development and inward investment.
Outputs from the work can be accessed on the LEP’s Evidence Hub and do get in touch to find out more about the work and glass.ai’s innovative approach.