When I started The Entrepreneurs Network back in 2013, I thought I had a pretty good sense about the scope of our work. We would focus on the nuts and bolts of policies to support entrepreneurs, advising on things like how the tax system can best incentive people to start and grow businesses, and identifying regulations that are holding back businesses. And yes, there is plenty of that, but our scope has widened much more than I could have imagined.
Take our latest report, which we produced with the Tony Blair Institute and Convergent Research. A New Model for Science makes the case for Focused Research Organisations (FROs) to tackle some of the world’s biggest challenges.
I first came across FROs in an excellent Nature article in January. FROs are designed to fill a gap in the market, solving problems too big for a single academic lab to take on, too complex for a loose, multi-lab collaboration to solve, and not directly profitable enough for a venture-backed startup or industrial R&D project to fund.
Though nonprofits, FROs are entrepreneurial, being run by full-time technical founders who oversee 10-30 employees. They pursue specific, quantifiable technical milestones for a finite-duration (5-7 years). And as they near completion, they translate what they have built into longer-lived nonprofits or venture-backed startup spinouts.
Because these are bigger undertakings than most academic labs handle, and are focused on a very tangible, focused goal, entrepreneurs are as critical a part of FRO founding teams as scientists. As Tom Chivers put it in his first-rate article on our report: “If it’s not profitable, the private sector won’t fund it; if it’s too big and complicated, universities can’t do it.”
Three FROs have been launched so far, all in the United States. E11 Bio is building the key tools needed to map the connections between neurons in a mammalian brain. If successful, it could make new treatments for brain disorders possible. While Boston-based Cultivarium is building an end-to-end toolkit for cultivating currently unculturable microbes. This will accelerate the study and engineering of microorganisms for purposes such as medicine and carbon removal, which will be vital if the world is to keep global temperatures stable.
Milan Cvitkovic of Convergent Research has identified the NHS as offering scope for FROs: “The potential of the NHS for biomedical research is extraordinary and unique to the UK. Its size, centralised approval processes, and consistency in data and standard of care make it possible to run biomedical projects in the UK that could not be run elsewhere.”
The report has the backing of pioneering geneticist George Church, who described FROs as “a timely and much-needed approach with momentum behind it.” And Stian Westlake, CEO of the Royal Statistical Society and former innovation policy adviser to the UK government said: “Organisational innovations like FROs represent a very promising opportunity to refresh our research institutions and accelerate human progress. This report is a very welcome contribution to a rapidly emerging field, and will be valuable to anyone who cares about science and technology policy.”
FROs are a bold new idea. A lot of you, I know, are equally bold. So please reach out to Milan Cvitkovic at Convergent Research if you're interested in founding, funding, or joining an FRO. Or you just want to learn more. (Also, please give our thread a retweet if you're on Twitter.)
People Power
Don’t worry! We’re still doing the nuts and bolts too.
What can we do to ensure small businesses can access the talent they need to scale? Are there cost-effective ways that the government can help businesses get access to better advice from experts? What role can government play in ensuring marginalised groups have access to fellow entrepreneurs, experts and investors to inspire and support them? What are the easiest ways for the government to ensure that the next generation has the right skills to work in start-ups? And what about the role of training courses?
If you have answers to any of these questions, you should join us for our latest Access All Areas virtual roundtable on Tuesday from 11am to 12pm. Just drop our events team an email to register your interest. Your insights will help guide the report and we may want to use you as a case study for the report.
What Reliefs!
The APPG for Entrepreneurship is undertaking a report on tax reliefs for equity investments: specifically SEIS, EIS and VCTs. At rather short notice we’ll be hosting a virtual roundtable on this topic next Friday at 11am to 12pm. If you have expertise on this topic and want to register your interest in attending, get in touch.
Into Focus