No British Cluster in the World's Top 10 Science and Tech Hotspots

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Jane Lambert

Cities have been motors of innovation and creativity throughout history,  Think of Periclean Athens, renaissance Florence, enlightenment Edinburgh and Silicon Valley.  Every year, the WIPO (the UN specialist agency for intellectual property) publishes a ranking of science and technology hotspots. 

The list is compiled using the following methodology:

• "Inventors listed in patent applications under WIPO’s Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), spanning the years 2014 to 2018. 
• Authors listed in scientific publications in the Web of Science’s Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and covering the same period. 
• The geocoding of inventor and author addresses and the use of density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) algorithm to the geocoded inventor and author points."

The above film shows the top 10 clusters for 2020. 

From a British perspective, it is disappointing that there are no British clusters in the world's top 10 hotspots. There is in fact only one European cluster in the top 10 and that is Paris which comes in at #10. The top-ranked cluster is the Tokyo-Yokohama city region, followed by Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou, Seoul and Beijing.  Silicon Valley is #5, Boston is #7 and New York City is #8.  The 6th spot is taken by Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto and the 9th by Shanghai.  I am reminded very much of a speech that the recently retired Director-General, Francis Gurry, made the first time I attended a domain name panellists' meeting in 2003. He was then in charge of the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Centre and the PCT. He told us that by the end of the decade most of the world's new technical literature would be in a North Asian language, That is to say, Japanese, Korean or Mandarin. If the 20th century was America's Century, the 21st is turning out to be Asia's.

Having said that, the USA is still the country with the most hotspots in the top 100 with  25 clusters. Iy is followed by China with 17, Germany with 10 and Japan with 5.  We have 4 which is one more than France if you just count French cities or one less if you include the French bits of the greater Bậle and Lausanne conurbations in the French tally. The UK clusters are London, Cambridge, Oxford and Manchester. London comes in at #15. Just behind LA but ahead of Houston. Cambridge is #57 between Tianjin and Rome.  Oxford is #71 behind Vienna but above Souzou. My home town of Machester is #93 between Grenoble and St Louis.

In the number of published papers, the UK does quite well.  London published a whopping 107,680 articles in scientific publications compared to Paris's 93,003. But there were only 4,281 patent applications through the WTO compared to Tokyo-Yokohama's 113,244 or Paris's 13,561. An important reason for our lacklustre patent performance is the cost of enforcement in England compared to other countries.  The Unified Patent Court would have made a difference as Part of the Central Division of the Court of First Instance would have been in London.  That advantage has been abandoned as "inconsistent with our aims of becoming an independent self-governing nation” (see Jane Lambert Volte Face on the Unified Patent Court Agreement 29 Feb 2020).

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