London Ranks In World’s Most Innovative Cities

Recent research from innovation charity, NESTA, Accenture and Citie has revealed that London holds a firm place in the world’s most innovative cities list. A prestigious list combining the best cities in the world, the research aims to divulge which cities possess the local spirit and entrepreneurial edge needed to score above their global competitors. Study co-author and Director of Government Innovation at Nesta, John Gibson outlines the purpose of the study, “We set out to measure the quality of the policy environment — how well city governments are supporting the growth of a tech community”, the goal being to help policymakers make entrepreneurs’ lives easier and feed the city’s innovation.

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The data provided from the cities was analysed to identify nine roles within each city that can support local entrepreneurship from regulator and customer, to host and connector. Gibson reported that cities spend £4.5 trillion per year in buying goods and services, so set out to discover to what extent this market was open to entrepreneurs and startups. The study revealed that Sao Paolo scored very highly here as their government enforces a rule that says startup companies get preferential treatment if their price is up to 10% more than that of large companies. This different in Tokyo where policies favour large corporate companies when competing for government business, leaving the startups rather left out.

During the data analysis of the study, the team grouped the cities under four tiers of performance as a strategist, as an investor and as a customer. By grouping them in different ways it allows us to see how each city scores best, and compare them against their competitors.

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The bottom tier of these categories is home to what the researchers call “experimenters”, and classifies  cities who are new to entrepreneurship. Here we can see cities such as Jakarta, who are venturing into the world of e-government strategies, as seen in their new mobile reporting app for citizens’ complaints. On the other end are the “frontrunners”; here New York topped London due to its integrated entrepreneurial element in leadership, whereas London was still lacking, “Where London put in £1.5m into digital skills education, New York’s mayor De Blasio committed $70m.” London was however, the first to get its act together for open data, which led directly to the founding of startups like the famous Citymapper, which adapted the data into a business model (and something 100% of Londoners couldn’t live without).

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What’s next for NESTA?

Gibson concludes, “Ultimately we want this to be genuinely useful for policymakers, and to bring to light the most innovative ideas from cities around the world.” These exciting plans will see an updated version of the report next year, including at least 10 new cities, including Stockholm and others from the UAE and Latin America. They have also built an interactive ‘diagnostic tool’ that city policymakers can use to play around with the data. Choose any city that you’re interested in, and the tool builds up its profile, showing you its performance on a policy-by-policy basis.

Hopefully we will see London moving up the rankings on all measures of innovation this time next year.