I was chatting to entrepreneurs recently when one said he thought Cambridge was the best place to start a business. So, I wondered how would we prove that?
UK companies choose a category (SIC Code) when incorporating and there are several which correspond to technology-orientated businesses. I’ve chosen a few larger ‘tech’ codes which represent around 6% of new companies in Oxford and Cambridge this century. This chart compares these against relevant populations and shows example firms.
This data includes lots of businesses which are still very small, but also key to future growth in the tech sector. It also excludes many important categories such as medical devices and telecoms which are still growing. And like any large data set, it has many small errors which I’ve not tried to fix. But overall, I think it’s a reasonable indicator of the tech sector’s activity.