🌐 Philip Salter, Founder
As I write this, we are taking part in our annual trawl through Beauhurst’s proprietary data to work out the percentage of the UK’s fastest-growing companies that have a foreign-born founder, as part of our multi-year Job Creators project.
This year we’re teaming up with Kinglsey Napley, our longtime partners on immigration policy advocacy, and building out a set of policy recommendations to ensure that we have the visa routes to capture more of this small but incredible cohort of founders.
It’s no exaggeration to state that Britain’s entrepreneurial ecosystem has been built on the backs of these individuals who have actively chosen to make the UK their home. Foreign-born founders have been instrumental in innovating in everything from artificial intelligence (Synthesia) to avocados (Oddbox).
While immigration is an increasingly controversial issue, this sort of immigration isn’t. It’s why everyone from Prime Ministers downwards loves to cite our 2019 finding that half the fastest-growing companies in the UK have a foreign-born founder. I wouldn’t even be surprised to see Reform back it.
But as important as this tiny section of immigrants is, we shouldn’t fall into the trap of believing that Britain’s economy just needs entrepreneurs. Writing about the US – but with application here too – Jerusalem Demsas digs into this on her Substack, arguing that immigrants are also needed to build houses and infrastructure, which are critical for delivering economic growth.
To make this happen politically, Demsas makes the case for transfers to communities absorbing immigrants, building greater state capacity around immigration administration and funding assimilation projects. Whatever you think of her specific policy ideas, she is asking an important question: “will liberals confine ourselves to merely defending the Katalin Karikós of the world?”
⚙️ Anastasia Bektimirova, Head of Science and Technology
You know when a book suddenly becomes the conversation? That’s Dan Wang’s Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future right now. In my circle at least, it seems like every third person is reading it. To get a taste, there is a good Works in Progress interview with the author.
Wang’s central image of China as an “engineering state” that builds faster and bigger and the US as a “lawyerly society” mired in litigation and caution is an interesting framing. The contrast between Chinese and American infrastructure delivery is unquestionable, and his broader point that the US needs to rebuild industrial capability is right. Wang also doesn’t shy away from showing the costs of authoritarian control and bureaucratic paralysis. The book is well worth a read, especially for those less familiar with China’s modern history.
But the framing also risks flattening things. In his review of the book, Jonathon Sine notes the slipperiness of defining “engineering”. Many top Chinese leaders aren’t technical hands-on engineers but part of a “Leninist developmental state” class trained in ideology and party management, with all its features of centralised control, campaign-style governance and ideology-driven mobilisation. Michael Hill also argues that this better explains many of the policies Wang uses to typify the “engineering mindset,” such as the One Child Policy and Zero COVID. In fact, the share of Politburo members with undergraduate engineering degrees has fluctuated significantly: peaking at 70% in 2002, falling to 20% in 2017, and rising again to 33% by 2022. Ironically, as Sine points out, Xi Jinping’s PhD is actually in law. Similarly, the notion of a lawyer‑driven US may headline well, but doesn’t capture the democratic and institutional contexts where rights are the point, rather than procedure.
I also don’t buy that lawyers are quite the bottlenecks Wang makes them out to be. I know lawyers who are imaginative futurists or deeply involved in building with amazing foresight and contagious ambition. I doubt it’s really about credentials. Sometimes slowing things down to pressure-test risk and ask “What could go wrong here, and how hard is it to unwind?“ is what keeps a state governable. And to be clear, it’s not just lawyers who are qualified to do that.
The “engineers versus lawyers” frame prompts a broader question of how to build a government that combines capacity and expertise with pluralism. The challenge as I see it is how to regain our ability to build without opening the door to over‑engineered social control. This is less a matter of getting a specific quota of engineers or lawyers into government and more about the kinds of institutions that allow different strands of expertise to combine into action while enabling governing with care.
🛡️ Eamonn Ives, Research Director
If there’s one thing we’ve all had to learn – or perhaps re-learn – over the last few years, it’s that the first duty of a government is to protect its citizens. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, virtually all European countries have doubled down on bolstering their nations’ defences – in rhetoric, spending, and other reforms. This week, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) published its new Defence Industrial Strategy, which sets out a series of changes to improve the relationship between the Armed Forces and Britain’s defence sector, and put us on a surer military footing.
As the Strategy notes, one area holding back innovation in the defence sector is our “Cold War-era procurement cycles,” which are characterised by “a ‘feast and famine’ approach to investment” that conspires against smaller and potentially more technologically innovative players. Aside from simply increasing the overall spending envelope that will be afforded to defence contractors – which will doubtlessly help plug gaps – the Strategy also notes how the recently established UK Defence Innovation (UKDI) will be empowered to accelerate cutting-edge capabilities.
If the language used to describe the new unit is anything to go by, defence tech entrepreneurs should be heartened. UKDI will be granted operational autonomy from the MoD, be encouraged to take risks and not be afraid of failing fast, and be headed up by a strong figurehead with the ability to coordinate with a range of Whitehall departments where necessary. Alongside this, the MoD itself will commit to “targeted regulatory sprints” in priority areas, to review where red tape is suffocating startups that are pioneering promising technologies. While, of course, the results remain to be seen, it’s hard to fault any of these pledges.
Entrepreneurs outside of the defence tech space would be forgiven for thinking that they are, at best, an indirect beneficiary of the new Strategy. But a theme running through the 112-page blueprint is the importance of developing dual-use technologies – and specifically, how more will be done to leverage military innovation for civilian applications. Many of us will be familiar with how the Internet, GPS, jet engines, drones – even canned food – can trace their origins back to times of warfare. Should all go to plan with the new Defence Industrial Strategy, we might just be adding to that list of useful everyday inventions.