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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.

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Side by side

Dimension	Nottingham & DerbyEast Midlands	Teesside & the HumberNorth East / Yorkshire and the Humber	CambridgeEast of England
Sectors	Advanced Manufacturing, Clean Energy, Mobility & Transport Technology Supporting: Advanced Materials, Digital Technologies, AgriTech & FoodTech	Clean Energy, Advanced Manufacturing, Advanced Materials Supporting: Digital Technologies, AgriTech & FoodTech	Life Sciences, Semiconductors, Engineering Biology, Artificial Intelligence Supporting: Quantum Technologies, Advanced Materials, AgriTech & FoodTech, Digital Technologies
Research	University of Nottingham	Not recorded on the map.	University of Cambridge Wellcome Sanger Institute MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology
Companies	Not recorded on the map.	Not recorded on the map.	Cambridge semiconductor and processor IP cluster
Infrastructure	Not recorded on the map. Propulsion and nuclear engineering facilities, rail test capability and chemistry research centres.	Centre for Process Innovation Process innovation and biologics scale-up facilities, port capacity and grid-connected industrial land.	Babraham Research Campus Cambridge Science Park University and institute laboratories, genomics and biomedical campus facilities, and semiconductor design capability.
Capital	Corporate and supply chain finance; limited venture activity.	Infrastructure capital, corporate investment and public programmes; almost no local venture base.	Specialist deep tech and life science funds, university-linked funds, and corporate partners; strong at seed, thinner at growth stage relative to demand.
Government programmes	East Midlands Investment Zone — Investment Zones East Midlands Freeport — Freeports	Teesside Freeport — Freeports Humber Freeport — Freeports	No place-based designation recorded.
What exists	Aerospace propulsion and small modular reactor engineering, rail technology, sustainable chemistry research and one of Europe's busiest air freight hubs.	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.	Extreme research density for its size: life sciences and genomics, semiconductor and processor IP, engineering biology and AI, with a mature spin-out culture and specialist investors who understand long timelines.
What's missing · UKIZ interpretation	Diversification of the supply chain beyond a small number of large primes, and company formation from a strong engineering research base.	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.	Ownership retention. Discovery and early company formation work; the Series B onward stage frequently transfers ownership overseas. Laboratory and scale-up space, power and housing also constrain growth.
What could connect · UKIZ interpretation	Propulsion and nuclear engineering connected to Sheffield manufacturing research and Midlands electrification — one Midlands industrial mission rather than three sectors.	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.	Cambridge discovery connected to UK manufacturing and biomanufacturing capacity, and to later-stage domestic capital, so that value created here is realised here rather than acquired out of the country.
UKIZ relevance	Propulsion and nuclear capability sit alongside the Midlands mobility mission. The proposed Midlands zone connects them.	This is where Britain either builds an energy supply chain or imports one. The proposed Teesside & Humber mission is explicitly about retained industrial capability.	Cambridge produces intellectual property at a rate few places match, and loses ownership of too much of it at Series B. The proposed Oxford–Cambridge zone concentrates on commercialisation and retention rather than on more discovery.
Last verified	15 August 2026	15 August 2026	15 August 2026

Proposed by UKIZ · not a government designation

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