Sheffield City Region had recently developed a draft Growth Plan for the local economy and this had been submitted to government for review. A fundamental conclusion of this work was to highlight the need to better understand the sub sectors of the City Region’s economy which represent its USPs, and the specialist businesses and specialist technologies that exist locally. This was deemed to be vital in demonstrating the specialisms that differentiate the City Region from other LEP areas.
This project was designed to identify and assess these specialisms, with a view to providing insights to allow the City Region to prioritise investment in support of them. Importantly, the specialisms had to be identified in light of global trends and in consideration of the key markets and areas that are forecast to grow.
In delivering this commission, the Ortus team (whilst at TBR) worked in partnership with the University of Sheffield who brought a qualitative local knowledge to complement the specialist economic analysis skills of our team, to build a comprehensive research team to respond to the challenges of the brief.