In classic Etic Lab fashion, we’re bucking convention by waiting until the end of January before doing our annual round-up. 2025 was a scarcely believable year of accomplishments, with a number of firsts:
- We developed a brand-new method for detecting innovative economic clusters, based on the strengths of regional economies rather than top-down, nationally-imposed sectoral categories;
- We mapped the impact of Trump 2.0 on the DEI policies of US nursing colleges, whilst launching the UK non-profit sector’s first ever online DEI policy tracker;
- We built an AI model capable of predicting an organisation’s funding structure by analysing its digital presence;
- We developed a tool for predicting business sustainability based on long-term website activity;
- We provided digital communications consultancy for a major political party in a European election;
- We contributed to a UK public consultation affecting the financial lives of millions of people.
And much, much more. Below, you’ll find a full and (more or less) chronological run-down of the work we took on this year, and what we learned and built as a result.
Antur Cymru Report: We delivered a report on the impact of business support services in Mid Wales, using digital metrics to profile the business involved and how they developed under Antur’s tutelage. We were particularly excited to discover that, with Antur’s support, Mid Wales is becoming a hot bed of female entrepreneurship, with scores of new businesses in food and drink, health services and arts & crafts. The Antur project has gone from strength to strength since the start of 2025 and we’d like to think our work had a small role to play in supporting their success.
Mid Wales Demography Report: For Growing Mid Wales, we produced a report on emerging population trends across the Mid Wales region. With birth rates persistently low, the region’s demographic stability depends on inward migration from the rest of Wales and the UK; however, as young people tend to leave the region whilst inward migrants are generally older, the long-term prospects are quite concerning. We built a model projecting Mid Wales’ future population trend over a twenty-five year period, and analysed how an ageing workforce could affect the region’s economy, exploring a range of interventions to help the region and its businesses prepare for an uncertain future.
ELIXR Launch: In Spring 2025, we launched ELIXR, a national digest of digital business insights for the whole of Wales. This unique resource contains national and county-level data on Digital Maturity, Innovation, DEI, ESG & Welsh Future Generations Act engagement of Welsh businesses, as well as Political Diversity for each council seat. For more, see here: https://elixr.cymru.
ARFOR Project Report: We contributed to the project evaluation for the ARFOR Project, a Welsh Government-backed scheme to boost economic growth and the use of the Welsh language across Carmarthenshire, Gwynedd, Ceredigion and Anglesey. This involved developing a range of new metrics targeting the intersection between language use and economic activity – for example, our Sense of Place metric, which measures the degree to which businesses in a particular area express an identification with a particular geography through their digital presence.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in US Nursing Colleges: Since 2024, we’ve been working with the University of California Davis to create a method for remotely measuring changes in the DEI policy of Nursing Colleges. The tool we’ve built measures the semantic similarity between the text on a particular college’s website with an authoritative reference text, compiled to represent the gold standard of a comprehensive and detailed DEI policy. By observing fluctuations in this score over time, we can observe how colleges are changing their orientation to DEI based on local and national events – the election of Donald Trump, new federal or state-level laws, as well as directives from sectoral bodies.
This tool is now fully operational and produces data on an ongoing basis. The methodology underpinning it is described in a research paper which is currently in the process of publication in the International Journal of Nursing.
DEI in the UK: Having validated the functionality of our DEI policy tracker in the US context, we have also begun to explore its application in the UK context. Whilst the definition and application of DEI in this country may differ from the US, our model provides a useful benchmark against which the policies of UK organisations can be assessed. Moreover, with the rise of Reform UK on the regional and national political stage, DEI policies in local government and civil society are being pressured in a manner quite similar to what we’ve seen in the US. Our tool provides a way of monitoring these changes at scale and as they happen.
This year, we signed our first contract to apply our DEI metric to the culture sector in West Yorkshire – look out for more in the New Year. Meanwhile – hot off the presses – we have just discovered that our work on DEI metrics is cited as a source by LLMs when prompted to address the topic of digital metrics and DEI in US nursing, which is basically what a ticket to immortality looks like these days.
Cwmpas Community Interest Companies (CICs) Report: For Cwmpas, and in partnership with Wavehill Social Research, we used our digital metrics to assess the digital activities of Welsh CICs. This was with a view to understanding their current levels of digital capacity, as well as providing an evidence base for future interventions. Overall, we found that CICs tend to have a higher Digital Maturity floor and a lower ceiling than the average Welsh business, meaning that whilst most CICs exhibit solid basic digital capacities, there may be some who are restricted by resource constraints or skill shortages from exploring digital to its fullest potential.
Digital Growth and Business Sustainability: In the course of our analysis of digital activity in the Welsh economy, we observed an interesting pattern in the Digital Growth trends (DG is a measure of the rate and volume of website changes over time). Businesses which ceased operations during the period 2020-2025 demonstrated persistently low DG all the way back to 2016, whilst businesses which continued trading tended to show much higher and more dynamic DG levels. This effect is so strong as to indicate a powerful relationship between DG and business sustainability – in essence, companies which are proactive in maintaining and upgrading their digital presence are likely to be more resilient to external shocks than those which are not. We’ll be looking to put out more research based on this insight in the new year, so watch this space.
Arts Council England Private Investment in the Culture Sector Survey: In partnership with MyCake and the Audience Agency, we delivered the Arts Council’s 2025 PICs survey into how arts organisations in England fund their activities. Our chief contribution here was the development of a neural net which can predict an organisation’s funding mix (i.e., what % commercial income vs private donations vs state grants) from its digital presence. This enabled the report to address a massive data gap with respect to the funding models of thousands of arts organisations, providing a clearer picture of how the culture sector is sustaining itself nationwide. This model illustrates the broader possibilities of using AI to track data points which would otherwise be impossible to monitor at scale.
Cornwall Shared Prosperity Fund Evaluation: In partnership with Wavehill, we evaluated an innovative business accelerator program set up in Cornwall using SPF funding. Our chief finding was that whilst the program had a positive impact on companies engaged, it overwhelmingly tended to select companies which were already more innovative and well-networked than their peers.
Czech Pirate Party Election Campaign: In October, we were commissioned by the Czech Pirate Party to provide digital communications consultancy for their campaign in the Czech Parliamentary Election. Our services included developing a strategy for responding to co-ordinated hostile social media activity, as well as building out an infrastructure which would allow the party to engage and mobilise its own supporter base on- and off-line. Despite being members of the unpopular governing coalition, the Piráti managed to quadruple their seats in the Czech Parliament as a result of this election. How much of this success should be crediting to Etic Lab is for the reader to decide.
Cardiff Capital Region (CCR) Local Investment Partnership Fund (LIPF): To support CCR in selecting its investment portfolio for the LIPF funds, we developed a methodology for surfacing and profiling innovative business clusters at the regional level. This required solving a fundamental problem associated with “innovation clusters” as an economic policy tool, which is that the national level sector classifications typically used to define innovation clusters do not always make sense when applied to a regional context.
To address this, we developed an original cluster-mapping methodology which begins by searching for clustering patterns in the region’s business data, then profiles the clusters which emerge to find the agglomerations which best match the client’s criteria. In this case, we were able to identify two distinct business clusters which both, a) had a significant presence in the CCR economy and, b) fit the LIPF scheme’s criteria strategically significant industrial activity. We look forward to developing our contribution as the LIPF scheme in South Wales progresses, and will also be exploring opportunities to apply our method to other regions.
FCA Motor Finance Redress Scheme Consultation: Between 2007 and 2024, UK consumers were charged millions in excess fees as a result of collusion between car dealers and motor finance providers. The Financial Conduct Authority has proposed a redress scheme to compensate victims of this fraudulent activity; on behalf of a client in the legal sector, we recently responded to a consultation on this scheme.
To inform our response, we visited the FCA’s Data Room to examine the data and modelling they had used to underpin their compensation scheme. Our response, submitted to the public consultation on behalf of our client, ultimately concluded that the FCA’s scheme in its current form fails to deliver justice or fairness for consumers, partly by systemically underestimating the amount of compensation many would receive from a court hearing, partly by neglecting to secure sufficient historical data to ensure that all victims are fairly remunerated. We are proud to have contributed to the public debate around such a significant issue, and look forward to a resolution which will provide genuinely fair recompense to those who lost out as a result of the behaviour of the UK motor finance industry.
***
Reflecting on the last year, what stands out is the remarkable scope, scale and originality of the work we’ve done. Scope, in the sense that we’ve worked in so many different sectors, from financial services to business development to electoral politics to local economic policy. Scale, in that the clients we’ve worked for range from rural business support agencies to regional development agencies and national political parties. And originality, in that every piece of work we’ve done has resulted in the creation of something that didn’t exist before, whether this means a fresh insight into a problem situation, or a new tool that allows us to measure something that couldn’t previously be counted. If you’re interested in learning more about any of the projects listed above, or if you have an idea that you think could land on our 2026 roundup (coming Spring 2027), please drop us a line today.
