Entered by: Glasgow City Council (Digital Economy)

Around two years ago, it became clear that one of the single biggest untapped marketing opportunities for Glasgow lay in the exploitation of its emerging technology ecosystem. The challenge was that no one had effectively mapped that tech ecosystem due to its complexity, plus there was no ready source of detailed and reliable intelligence on high growth companies or venture capital activity at either city or region level to support data storytelling.

Any data that did exist was ‘owned’ by a few select suppliers with access strictly controlled by licence and an individual organisation’s ability to pay. While good data is valuable by itself, building an engaged community around that data helps it becomes more valuable. Data transparency has the power to accelerate entrepreneurship and innovation. It does so by inspiring people and enabling better decision-making. Rather than treating data as something to be hoarded, the ambition is to support the startup ecosystem through insights driven by open-source intelligence available to all and use those insights to increase visibility of high growth companies and clusters attractive to a broad network of international investors. Thus began the start of a beautiful partnership between Glasgow City Council and dealroom.co!