Digital sector mapping

Motivation

The 2014 Tech Nation report identified 463 digital businesses in Leeds. Following the Tech Nation report, 1,500 digital businesses were identified in Leeds, in a separate process run by Herd. This data used in this report has identified 3,500 digital businesses in Leeds and a total of 8,500 across the city region. This is the first time that the City Region has been mapped in this way. We are confident that the data, and the insight provided from this data, goes far beyond what has been done to date in mapping the digital business landscape across the region.

The ODI Leeds and Leeds Data City had a desire to look beyond outdated SIC code definitions of organisations and to ensure as accurate a picture of the activities of the organisations within our region as possible.

Approach

We took a data science driven approach and utilised data sources from companies house, the organisations' websites, social media profiles including linkedin and twitter, open data sources such as rates data and data available from job board APIs. These were then analysed against sector definitions and organisations were scored against each category and sub category. Finally a manual check of 15% of the data was performed to ensure accuracy. We intend to build upon this understanding and add new data sources over time.

Results

The exercise showed that there are 8,522 digital organisations in the Leeds City region. View the final summary PDF.

Data

The data are available on the Data Mill in CSV format.

• Infographic

  Download an infographic summary of our mapping project (PDF)