⏳ Philip Salter, Founder
Back in 1999, a small group of British and American academics launched what would become one of the most enduring studies of its kind: the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM). A quarter of a century on, its 150,000-plus interviews each year across more than 120 economies give us a rare window into trends driving entrepreneurship across the world.
A couple of weeks ago, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor UK National Report 2024/25 was launched. Despite the many challenges over the years, the UK is a far more entrepreneurial country than it was at the turn of the millennium. At last count, 36% of working-age adults are either running a new business or intend to start one within the next three years – the highest level since 1999. There has also been remarkable progress in who is starting businesses. Early-stage entrepreneurial activity by women has more than tripled since 2002, rising from just over 3.5% to 10% in 2024, while immigrants and ethnic minorities remain consistently among the most entrepreneurial groups in the UK.
It’s worth adding a note of caution. Entrepreneurship isn’t – or at least shouldn’t – be an end in itself. What matters is whether it leads to better outcomes – for founders and for society at large. Still, for policymakers (and for “policy recommenders” like us), it’s vital to have a firm grasp of the facts. Longitudinal studies like GEM are gold dust.
That’s why it was encouraging to see last month’s announcement that the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) will fund the Generation New Era study — a landmark project that will follow the lives of more than 30,000 babies born in 2026 through their early years, and potentially well beyond.
Britain’s landmark 1946, 1958 and 1970 cohort studies show how early life conditions shape later health and attainment, and how childhood poverty leaves lasting marks. They also reveal that intergenerational income mobility declined for those born in 1970 compared with 1958.
Internationally, landmark longitudinal studies have transformed our understanding of health and human development. The Framingham Heart Study, launched in 1948, was the first to show that heart disease isn’t an inevitable part of ageing but is driven by modifiable risk factors such as high blood pressure, cholesterol, smoking and obesity – insights that revolutionised preventive medicine. Likewise, Harvard’s Nurses’ Health Studies, which have followed more than 230,000 women across several cohorts since 1976, have demonstrated how lifestyle and diet shape long-term wellbeing.
If there’s a lesson for entrepreneurship policy, it’s that we still lack this kind of long-term evidence about the people who start businesses – who they are, what shapes their choices, and how their ventures affect both their lives and the wider economy. Perhaps it’s time to invest in longitudinal research that tracks entrepreneurs from the very start of their journeys – capturing not just whether they start businesses, but how those ventures evolve, what drives success or failure, and what lasting impact entrepreneurship has on individuals and communities.
🗓️ Eamonn Ives, Research Director
Across much of the world, the age at which companies decide to go public is trending steadily upwards. Few have done more to catalogue this than University of Florida’s Jay F. Ritter, whose carefully organised data on American IPOs over recent decades show that in the 1980s the median age of a company listing was just eight years old, while last year it had grown to 14. A similar trend can be seen in the United Kingdom, which partly explains why it now boasts one of the ‘oldest’ exchanges in the world – with centenarian companies responsible for a sizeable portion of the London Stock Exchange’s combined market cap.
Much ink has been spilled about the reasons for this increase. Fingers are quick to be pointed at the challenges involved in the process of listing, and then existing as a public company. The dulling effect of the Stamp Duty Reserve Tax, which levies a 0.5% tax on the purchase of shares, has also been singled out for criticism. Certainly, there is merit in these accusations, and the Government would do well to ease these burdens – as reports suggest they might be.
A more positive potential explanation, however, is that privately-held companies nowadays have a wider range of options for raising capital. From family offices, to more established VC firms, to sovereign wealth funds and private equity, promising startups are finding that they don’t necessarily have to turn to public markets to get the capital they need to grow. This will have other consequences for the economy that warrant consideration, but from the perspective of the individual entrepreneur, greater choice can only be a good thing.
In the past week, Beauty Tech Group joined the LSE with a £300 million IPO, while Princes Group and Shawbrook also announced plans to list there. This was enough for Bloomberg to declare that London had broken its ‘IPO drought’. While one swallow does not make a summer, three in quick succession should give ground for optimism that sunnier days are ahead. Whether that will be enough to reverse long-term trends, and help determined founders realise their IPO ambitions sooner rather than later remains to be seen; after all, Princes Group was originally founded all the way back in 1880.
♟️ Anastasia Bektimirova, Head of Science and Technology
Here’s a claim I keep coming back to: discovery is among the most important phases of any complex project. It’s also the one we struggle to give the right shape to, often ritualising it into paperwork that turns discovery into something defensive rather than inquisitive. By discovery I mean the process of figuring out what problem we’re actually solving, who is affected, which constraints are real, what trade-offs people will accept in practice, and what failure modes we should avoid. In policymaking, discovery is how you turn unknowns into choices. It’s also how you avoid designing for a world that doesn’t exist.
You’ll be familiar with how this often plays out in infrastructure projects. Dan Davies offers a good illustration of how our quasi-judicial system invites “the problem factory”: since a project can be derailed late on a narrow point, teams try to pre-empt every hypothetical, amplifying every perceived hazard, which can narrow options to solutions shaped by imagined vetoes. This looks more like optimising for surviving scrutiny rather than uncovering a workable bargain. Pre-emptive risk-aversion is discovery done backwards, which is also why it can underdeliver.
Here’s a thought experiment on what discovery might look like instead. Seb Krier’s new essay imagines that competent, personally aligned AI agents could lower the transaction costs that make early-stage bargaining so hard, such as finding affected parties, eliciting preferences, drafting options, stress-testing trade-offs and tracking commitments. It’s hard for people to reveal what they actually want and what they’d trade for it, so we end up with one-size-fits-all rules.
If agentic AI could lower those costs, more problems could be handled through bottom-up bargains rather than top-down approximations. Take a high-street resurfacing. What if instead of running a generic consultation, every household and shop would get a civic agent to express bounded choices (night works versus weekend closures, access windows, tolerable noise levels). The contractor would publish several concrete schedules with mitigations, agents would then aggregate responses and negotiate towards a feasible package – for example, trading later start times for guaranteed delivery windows. The few obligations that actually change behaviour, such as quiet machinery, acoustic screening or automatic compensation if access is breached would be escrowed, and a public compliance log would make monitoring straightforward. Instead of pre-emptiveness, we’d get early evidence about what people are happy to accept before decisions are made.
The essay is clear-eyed about the boundaries: default rights still matter, bad alignments would do harm, and none of this makes politics vanish. But the core claim that better, cheaper discovery through faster and broader participation could expand and improve the feasible set of options is worth noting. If tools like this can reliably lower the cost of discovery, we might spend less time defending paper universes and more time building in the real one.