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How the North is Winning: Launch of New Data Partnership

Winning

Recently, we hosted our first On Tour event, "How does the North Win?",  a conference with the aim of understanding what 'winning' means and how to measure that. We shared examples of what has worked elsewhere and what could work for North England now. This came about from an idea we had been trying to articulate for a while, which we introduced in a blog that Paul wrote back in December. It was not designed to be a fully formed conference or workshop, more a way for us to think out loud about a subject. We convened fellow travellers with a passion for North England, impatient with the status quo but with an optimistic outlook. The talks, slides and provocations are all at the event web page here. The experiment worked - people came, high quality conversations were had, optimism and positivity flowed.

How does the North win?
Our economic data and innovation conference on 20th March 2024
Credit: Open Innovations

Brabners, an independent law firm based in the North, sponsored this event, and have asked us to work with them to be their data partner for their True North Network.

True North looks like winning to us!

 Open Innovations has been a fantastic supporter of True North since we launched our first report, Defining Northern Ambition.  Not only is the data that Open Innovations can support us with collating going to be useful for informing the future activity of our advisory council, we believe that our networks are complementary to one another's and that we share a common vision to help the North win.
Brabners

What is True North?

Brabners' aim is for “True North to be a network of like-minded organisations committed to supporting the future of the North, uniting the region's most influential and purpose-driven voices to co-create a path forward with a view to unlocking the true potential of the Northern economy”.

True North is about developing meaningful partnerships between like-minded leaders across the region to spark new opportunities for collaboration that allow them to scale up their ambition and action, and deliver a more prosperous future for the North as a whole. Kind of like us and #RadicallyOpen :)

You can read more about True North here.


Credit: https://www.brabners.com/about/true-north
How Will Data Help?

To us, the True North initiative is a great example of how the North can win, so we are happy to join in and help to provide data infrastructure to help them move at the speed of the web and amplify their work. The data will help the True North network identify challenges across the North, for example, which sectors are growing, and which are struggling? How much do they contribute to employment in their area? 

There are 4 key themes: People, Skills & the Future; Innovation & Change; Sustainable Growth; and Purpose & Social Impact.

The data microsite will allow us to provide data for our focus groups to work on, if we can see where NEET rates are highest in the North, that will allow our People/Skills group to focus on those places that need most support. Appropriate data can be applied to each of the groups, to give them a more accurate picture of the challenge they're addressing, allowing them to create measurable targets and a framework for delivery.
Brabners


To answer these questions they need data! And we already have lots on these topics. Combining this with additional data from The Data City, we can help them to answer their questions and put it together on a microsite - the True North Data Explorer.

What Data Do We Already Have?

We have developed an Economic Data Dashboard (EDD) for open economic data. It's a standardised collection of open data from sources like ONS, Nomis, and Census. EDD is the culmination of years of work on economic data projects and technical data science projects. It scrapes and standardises almost 30 datasets published by various sources, automatically. 

We're also using open data that we have already processed in automated pipelines for the Youth Futures Foundation. Some of this data is too specific for EDD, but will be useful for this project.

Brabners are a B Corp certified company and they are interested in identifying others and their impact. We have already added some visualisations to show where they are located across England. We think if we combine B Corps, Community-Interest companies, Co-Operatives, and Limited by Guarantee organisations, we could use it as a proxy for "mission-led" companies. We will have to let the data answer that one.

Being Radically Open

Part of the reason we can work so quickly is because we are building on work we've done before - this is why working in the open is so important.

By being radically open we can combine our tools, such as OI Lume Charts, with good quality data, like that from EDD and YFF. When we add in some new data on top of this, we can create something new quickly.

What New Data Do We Need?

Brabners is a purpose led business  - 

Often, it is owner/founder-led businesses that can [make a positive impact on places and people] most effectively, because the organisation's mission is intrinsically tied to that of the owner/founder
Brabners

A big challenge for us has been to define what terms like "purpose-led", "mission-led" and "owner-managed" mean. These ideas are at the core of True North. Whilst it may be possible to explain the ideas behind these terms to another person, descriptive definitions are often difficult to codify. And even if you can come up with a definition, can the data you have be cut in that way? 

With The Data City, we're working to define what these terms mean. Using their database of over 5 million companies, we will employ their machine-learning list building and analysis tools on their platform to identify the companies that fit these more niche definitions.


As a first attempt, we are going to look at "owner-managed" businesses. We're starting with the following definition:

  • A director is appointed within two years of the company being incorporated.
  • The same director is, or has been, a person of significant control at the company. A person of significant control means they have shares or voting rights in the company.
  • The director is still active at the company.

    • These are our assumptions, and we probably won't capture every relevant business. However, this is expected, since we are trying to define something without an explicit definition. Any analysis that comes out of this will take into account the assumptions we make, and we will try to manually correct the data where we spot clear mistakes. The work with The Data City is exploratory and we don't know exactly what we will find.

    What's Next?

    Brabners are hosting a gathering of the True North network at a summer reception on Tuesday 25th June, where we launch the data microsite. 

    The site is up and running here and we are adding more data pipelines as we need them. Now we want to expand on the data to tell stories that can drive change. This will include headline stats for local areas, regional or national comparisons, and detailed views of data in different charts and graphs. 

    About page for the True North data microsite.

    We're going to look at data on emerging sectors using The Data City's RTICs. We will narrow this down to match the companies True North is interested in using financial and geographic filters.

    Get Involved!

    This work is open source and on the web. That means anyone can use it in other work, or do analysis based on the data we have brought together. We want to create assets and surplus value that is available to everyone, not locked in a data silo or behind a pay-wall. By sharing our work we make ourselves credible and accountable. This is not just about the success of Brabners and Open Innovations, but the whole of the North winning together.

    You can see the code at the GitHub repo and the visualisations on the microsite itself. If you would like to contribute or provide feedback, drop us an email hello@open-innovations.org, we want to hear from you!