Greater Manchester is the UK’s second digital city-region, with major R&D assets and business clusters focused on MediaCityUK and the Oxford Road Corridor. Already worth £5 billion and home to 11 unicorns, growth in the digital sector is booming across the city-region.   

Innovation GM aims to drive investment into R&D in areas where we have distinctive strengths in Artificial Intelligence, digital trust and security, and immersive technologies, creating the conditions for them to be applied across other sectors such as health, creative industries, and advanced machinery.   

We provide the new home for major operations for the Digital Markets Unit and DCMS. The private sector includes national and international tech firms who are deploying AI and data analytics in the City Region, such as BT, Amazon, and Arm, who have a deep partnership with OpenAI to deploy AI across all facets of the business.

We are also home to R&D active companies such as the BBC, Bosch, Cisco, Cloud Imperium, Epic Games, JLR, NCC Group, Raytheon UK, Roku, Thales, and The Hut Group. 

Greater Manchester is a core part of the North West Cyber Corridor, encompassing institutions such as the Digital Security Hub, the National Cyber Security Centre, and GCHQ. The assets which underpin our strengths in this capability, frequently extend beyond our borders and into Lancashire and Cheshire. There is increasingly strong alignment between cybersecurity and AI, with companies deploying AI as part of cybersecurity solutions and an emerging focus on security within AI applications.

The Sister innovation district supports AI, R&D, startup acceleration, upskilling and enterprise development. Greater Manchester has deep links to the Hartree Centre Sci-Tech Daresbury UK supercomputing hub focused on industrial HPC, data analytics, and AI applications.

AI and data analytics are also being deployed in other specialist areas including Health Innovation, Fintech and e-commerce, and as such is a key cross-cutting capability for the Greater Manchester economy.