Data science for the public good

Improved and better targeted Government business support receives significantly higher take-up, successfully stimulates higher growth rates in firms, which in turn creates positive economic spill-overs for the wider economy.

The department for Business Energy, and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) are leading a project aiming to use data science techniques to support business performance and growth by connecting businesses to targeted support.

Our work

At the Data Science Campus we are supporting BEIS by assessing how useful non-traditional business data sources might be in identifying these characteristics. In this instance, non-traditional data sources includes both ONS data sources and a variety of commercial data sources. Our work here complements the advanced algorithms that BEIS are developing using HMRC data, as well as the longitudinal dataset that BEIS and ONS have created from the InterIDBR.

What’s the data science?

The Data Science Campus are exploring a sample of company website data. We are using NLP techniques to analyse features including company descriptions and news items, and job titles and biographies.

What’s the impact?

This project is intended to help improve:

• business support offered by Government
• understanding of the relationship between online presence of enterprises and growth.

Our partners

Collaborative links were maintained with the following partners:

• Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS)
• HMRC
• GlassAI

If you’re interested in learning more about this project or would like to get involved then you can get in touch via email or Twitter.