Research will help policy makers to identify sector strengths to inform investment decisions.
Innovate UK has today published a report: ‘Global competitiveness: how does UK transport measure up?’
The report benchmarks the UK transport supply chain against the performance of leading nations in different sub-sectors of the transport sector.
The report focuses on 29 segments identified as strategically important and, or, high growth areas.
Key findings
The key finding of the report is that, when adjusted for gross domestic product and population, the UK is in the top 10 across all segments.
This indicates an overall strong position relative to its size.
It finds that the UK has:
- strength across all areas of the transport supply chain analysed
- considerable depth and breadth of capability in both traditional and emerging technology sectors.
It further demonstrates that the UK is well positioned to take advantage of upcoming opportunities in transport markets.
Data-driven decisions approach
Paul Gadd, Deputy Director, Land and Maritime Transport, Manufacturing and Materials at Innovate UK said:
This significant review is part of Innovate UK’s data-driven decisions approach.
We will use this data to inform our understanding of UK capability relative to other countries, alongside the UK Transport Vision 2050, published last year.
The findings are available to other government-supported organisations to inform their decisions.
Further information
The project had significant support from the Department for Transport.
We also consulted groups including:
- Department for International Trade
- British Standards Institute
- others.
A strategic advisory board supported the study.
Its members were drawn from government and arms’ length bodies, and they gave insight and support to ensure the conclusions are of value to the wider community.
In using these results, it is important to note that:
- the study is intended to be purely quantitative and avoids any qualitative metrics or inputs
- all the data is historical and was taken at a point in time. It does not indicate future trends
- the data comes from a variety of both publicly available and private subscription-based sources
- weightings were applied based on Innovate UK’s assessment of the relative importance of the data but can be adjusted in the underlying model as required
- data is intended to be representative and comparative rather than comprehensive. Developing fully exhaustive lists across all segments and metrics was not feasible, but any inherent biases or challenges within individual datasets are consistently applied across all countries in a segment and so comparisons between nations are still valid
- whilst every effort has been made to ensure that data is as representative as possible across all metrics and segments, this was not always possible. Where data was not deemed to be representative, it was removed from the study and that metric did not contribute to the overall score in that segment.
Top image: Credit: Innovate UK