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Arloesiadur (innovation directory in Welsh) is a website that maps innovation in Wales, developed in a collaboration between Nesta and Welsh Government. It is a collection of interactive data visualisations and open datasets about industrial, tech networking and research activity in Wales. You can use these visualisations to answer big questions about Wales’ industrial and research strengths, its collaboration networks and future economic opportunities. All this information can help develop policies that strengthen innovation in Wales, and improve its economic future.
The project is born from the belief that new data, analysed and presented in new ways can create valuable information for innovation policymakers. This includes web sources, such as company websites and social media platforms that are richer and more timely than official data sources, machine learning and natural language processing techniques that can generate predictions as well as descriptions, and help us understand reams of text, and interactive data visualisations and open datasets that empower users to answer their own questions, and carry out their own analysis.
Arloesiadur is an experiment to test the value of these new approaches: Nesta scoped the needs of Welsh innovation policymakers, carried out agile pilots to explore the potential of different datasets – including official datasets about industrial activity, open data about research and web data about tech networking – and now present the results in the interactive visualisations in this website, developed together with infogr8, a visual content agency.