More and better data can and should be a core part of industrial strategy and local-growth policy. But is data delivering and can it be a centralising force?
Tom Forth
Tom Forth is Head of Data at Open Innovations, the CTO and cofounder of The Data City, and the boss at imactivate. He lives and work in Leeds, UK.
In 2013 Tom developed and maintained the Phonegap plugin for Moodstocks. He worked with Neil Clark on the 2014 release of Rusty the Squeaky Robot, an augmented-reality physical book for children with real-time translations and human voices. Later he worked with Jenny Lee on the release of Material Alchemy. He has specialisms in industrial structure and transport analysis and he has worked with Open Innovations. Tom writes for various publications about industrial strategy.
Tom is also doing The Data City, a spin-out from Open Innovations. He is using huge amounts of data to better understand economic development and the potential for innovation.