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Two or three clusters, read side by side across sectors, research, companies, capital, infrastructure, government designations and UKIZ relevance. There is no score and no ranking: British clusters are different from one another, not better or worse than one another.

Choose up to three clusters

Side by side

Dimension	BelfastNorthern Ireland	Teesside & the HumberNorth East / Yorkshire and the Humber	Norwich & the EastEast of England
Sectors	Defence & Security, Advanced Materials, Financial Technology, Creative Industries Supporting: Digital Technologies, AgriTech & FoodTech, Advanced Manufacturing	Clean Energy, Advanced Manufacturing, Advanced Materials Supporting: Digital Technologies, AgriTech & FoodTech	AgriTech & FoodTech, Engineering Biology, Clean Energy Supporting: Life Sciences, Digital Technologies
Research	Queen's University Belfast Ulster University Centre for Secure Information Technologies	Not recorded on the map.	University of East Anglia John Innes Centre Quadram Institute
Companies	Northern Ireland aerospace and composites cluster	Not recorded on the map.	Not recorded on the map.
Infrastructure	Not recorded on the map. Cyber security innovation centre, composites and aerostructures manufacturing and agri-food research facilities.	Centre for Process Innovation Process innovation and biologics scale-up facilities, port capacity and grid-connected industrial land.	Not recorded on the map. Plant and food research institutes, genomics facilities and offshore energy operations bases.
Capital	A small local venture base supported by public co-investment; growth capital typically comes from Dublin, London or the US.	Infrastructure capital, corporate investment and public programmes; almost no local venture base.	Research council and charitable funding dominate; venture capital is scarce.
Government programmes	No place-based designation recorded.	Teesside Freeport — Freeports Humber Freeport — Freeports	Freeport East — Freeports
What exists	Cyber security research and commercialisation of international standing, aerospace and composites manufacturing, agri-food research and a fast-growing software sector.	The largest concentration of industrial decarbonisation activity in the UK: hydrogen, carbon capture, process manufacturing, biologics scale-up capability and two Freeports with substantial serviced industrial land.	Plant, food and genomics research of international standing, offshore energy operations and maintenance, and a significant agricultural production base on the doorstep.
What's missing · UKIZ interpretation	Scale-up capital and market access. Companies reach a ceiling and are acquired, and dual-market access advantages are under-exploited commercially.	Skills pipelines and company formation. The land, power and permits exist; the innovation companies and the technical workforce to fill them do not yet exist at the same scale.	Commercial translation of agri-food science, and connection between offshore energy operations and the research base inland.
What could connect · UKIZ interpretation	Belfast cyber capability connected to UK defence and financial services demand, and composites manufacturing connected to Bristol and Midlands aerospace supply chains.	Industrial land and process scale-up capability connected to research clusters elsewhere that have technologies without a place to build them — a national scale-up site rather than a regional one.	Agri-food and genomics research connected to national food manufacturing and to engineering biology capacity, and offshore operations connected to the Humber and North East energy supply chain.
UKIZ relevance	Northern Ireland's position between two markets is a commercial asset that is under-used. The proposed Northern Ireland mission treats it as the organising advantage.	This is where Britain either builds an energy supply chain or imports one. The proposed Teesside & Humber mission is explicitly about retained industrial capability.	Food security and biotechnology intersect here more clearly than anywhere else in Britain, and connect to the proposed Oxford–Cambridge mission.
Last verified	15 August 2026	15 August 2026	15 August 2026

Proposed by UKIZ · independent · not a government designation

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