For the six month period beginning March this year, nearly 40,000 new businesses have been launched, a rise of 13% on the previous period, according to a study from the Royal Mail.
The largest number of new start-ups can be found in Sunderland, making up slightly less than 2% of the business population. In the start-up league table, Sunderland leads the way, closely followed by Rotherham and another north-east location, Stockton-on-Tees. The leading Welsh town was Swansea at 1.67% and in Scotland; Aberdeen led the way with 1.28%.
The British Library recently proclaimed the north-east as the most inventive region in the UK. Population wise, the north-east is a third of the size of London and yet proportionately it generates the same amount of patents, design rights and trademarks but with a quarter the amount of research and development investment. The East of England Development Agency later challenged this claim saying that 23% of R&D private sector spending could be attributed to the East of England.
Doug Richard, the Dragons Den investor who founded the School for Start-ups said he was not surprised that there has been an increase in the number of start-ups. The difficult market conditions have led to people becoming more creative and opportunistic. In the past six months there has been increased interest in the School for Start-ups; a sure sign that new companies will follow, he added.
A lot of organisations track start-up activity and they each produce slightly different conclusions due to their method of obtaining data. Barclays Bank, for example, claim there have been many more start-ups because it calculates its figures based on the amount of new business bank accounts opened during the period.
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