For Cutting-edge Innovation in the UK: It’s London That Is Out In Front

I see my own home city — Edinburgh — as a great place for innovation, but London completely dwarfs anything that my city has. It is the same for virtually every city in the UK. Overall London drives a cutting-edge innovation economy, and has the ecosystem to support this.

For many of our innovations, we have struggled to get any traction in Scotland — especially within public sector — but always have been welcomed in London, and where there is a real spirit of change. For our information sharing across the public sector, we struggled to get any traction within Scotland, but were welcomed in London.

So let’s look at the most disruptive area of innovation: Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) [here]. The graphic on the left-hand side shows the spread of companies involved in DLT in the UK, and it shows, more than most — the importance of London in the UK in respect to innovation.

In Scotland, there are six DLT companies, whereas London has 216. London has a population which is around twice the size of Scotland, but it London has over 40 times the related companies. Oxford, Manchester and Edinburgh all manage…