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Arloesiadur is a collaboration between Nesta and Welsh Government to map innovation in Wales. We have used new data to measure and visualise Wales’ industry, research and tech networks with the goal of informing policies that drive growth.
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. But to support innovation, we need to understand it first. In Arloesiadur, we have tried to achieve this with new data sources, data science methods and visualisations.
Arloesiadur means Innovation Directory in Welsh. It is a collection of interactive data visualisations and open datasets about industrial, tech networking and research activity in Wales. You can use these visualisations to answer big questions about Wales’ industrial and research strengths, its collaboration networks and future economic opportunities. We believe that all this information can help develop policies that strengthen innovation in Wales, and improve its economic future. Going forward, we will update the data, analyse it in the Stories Section, and look for ways to bring new datasets and visualisations into the platform.
The analysis of economic data highlights that 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 (including recycling and collection and treatment of hazardous waste) which should gain importance in tomorrow’s sustainable economy.
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.
The analysis of Gateway to Research (GtR), an open dataset about publicly funded research, and web data from Meetup.com, a platform used by tech communities to organise networking and skills-sharing events, support the idea that Wales has the knowledge base and innovation communities to deliver this promise. In particular, our analysis of research trends suggests growing strengths in research areas related to the data revolution such as robotics and cybernetics, prosthetics, robotics and health, bioinformatics, statistics and data analysis, and security.