Arc of History

As Our World in Data informs us, extreme poverty around the world is plummeting. There are more than a billion fewer people living below the International Poverty Line of $2.15 per day today than in 1990. On average, the number declined by 47 million every year, or 130,000 people each day.

This isn’t to excuse the poverty that still blights our world – exactly the opposite. It’s proof that progress is possible, and a motivation to work all the harder to help the remaining 650 million people – roughly one in twelve – who still live under that line.

So how does this happen? To radically simplify, the world gets richer through productivity increases – in other words, doing more with less, with entrepreneurs the driving force behind this. This doesn’t just happen in isolation – an entrepreneurial society is a social phenomenon. As Alfred Marshall set out in 1890 in Principles of Economics, agglomeration economies benefit from being close to one another due to knowledge spillovers, shared suppliers, and a concentrated labour market.

In other words, an entrepreneurial society thrives when businesses, talent, and infrastructure reinforce one another. This is why the Oxford-Cambridge Arc has long been seen as a potential growth engine – and why we’ve been long-standing supporters of it. As some readers may remember, the original plan under Boris Johnson was to build a new ​​rail link, new homes and a new expressway – but bit by bit, the project fell apart.

In a turn towards growth, Rachel Reeves has revived the Arc. And it’s worth quoting her at length – both for the all-too-rare pleasure of reading political statements that we can wholeheartedly endorse, but also to set it down as a marker to judge words against action.

The Chancellor said: “To grow, these world-class companies need world-class talent who should be able to get to work quickly and find somewhere to live in the local area. But to get from Oxford to Cambridge by train takes two and a half hours.”... “There is no way to commute directly from places like Bedford and Milton Keynes to Cambridge by rail. And there is a lack of affordable housing across the region.”... “Oxford and Cambridge are two of the least affordable cities in the UK. In other words, the demand is there but there are far too many supply side constraints on economic growth in the region.”

As Stian Westlake, Executive Chair of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and one of our Advisers, said back in 2022: “If you’ve got lots of smart people doing great research, if you make it easy to build housing and offices near those people, the magic of the free market will do its thing. People will set up businesses and economic growth will happen.”

“The tragedy in the UK,” he goes on to say, “is that we channel lots and lots of public money into two very beautiful towns – Oxford and Cambridge – where it is almost impossible to build anything. The arc is an attempt to solve this by allowing people to build things in between – Milton Keynes, Bedford – link it up with roads and rail, so it gets easier for entrepreneurs to set up the things they want to.”

As we wrote in Building Blocks: “Too few people subscribe to an agglomeration-led approach to growth. The political focus of late has shifted away from championing dynamic hotspots like the Golden Triangle, most obviously, but also even regions like Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Bristol.”

I’ll end with the words of Reeves: “It has the potential to be Europe’s Silicon Valley. The home of British innovation.” (Though in the long run, actions speak louder than words.)

The Codemakers
Hot off the press, we’ve just released an interview with Herbie Bradley, AI governance and policy expert and former member of the technical staff at the AI Safety Institute (AISI).

The interview with Anastasia Bektimirova, our Head of Science and Technology, covers a lot of ground, which defies summarising. Instead, I will point to one lesson Bradley says he learned from his experience at AISI that could be applied to getting other existing and future projects off the ground and scaling them effectively within DSIT, or government more broadly (excuse the long quote, but I think the insight deserves it):

“When you’re trying to build state capacity or launch a new initiative that needs to be impactful and move fast, you basically need to start a new team. If it’s an existing team, it’s probably too enmeshed in bureaucracy.

Secondly, you need significant political backing. In our case, we were fortunate to have great support from Henry de Zoete, who was then the Prime Minister’s Adviser on AI, and others in No. 10 and DSIT, particularly the minister at the time, Michelle Donelan. This means you can get around normal bureaucracy when needed, like hiring someone in a way that hasn’t been done before within the department.

You also need an incentive to perform well. This could be internal motivation from team members believing in the ideal or mission, a tight deadline like a Summit organised on very short notice, or competitive pressure from overlapping mandates with existing teams.

And finally, try to hire from outside government – people who are used to moving fast from industry and the startup world. That’s also effective.

There is an inevitable effect where a new, fast-moving, high-entropy team gradually gets pressed down by bureaucratic systems like HR, contracting, and finance. The general systemic incentive is to reduce fast-moving teams to a low-entropy state and make them more similar to the rest of government.

To counteract this, you need political backing and might need to start a new team or initiative if the first one becomes too slow. This explains why politicians often like to start new teams. There is an analogy here to the fractal startup model in industry. OpenAI scaled their ChatGPT team by creating conditions mimicking a pre-seed stage startup – totally new Google Drive, getting the new product team together in person five days a week, creating a separate office space – and that works surprisingly well.”

I strongly recommend reading the interview in full.

The Codemakers

In our latest interview, Anastasia Bektimirova spoke to Herbie Bradley, AI governance and policy expert and former member of the technical staff at the Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute. Among other things, they discussed building Britain’s AI advantage and what the AI Safety Institute can teach us about state capacity.

Three Big Ideas #18

Three Big Ideas is our weekly roundup of ideas (and our takes on them) in entrepreneurship, innovation, science and technology, handpicked by the team.

In this week, Eamonn Ives looks at the results of a new paper on the benefits of the sharing economy, Anastasia Bektimirova gives her take on the new Science and Technology Venture Capital Fellowship, and Philip Salter argues that fully unleashing academics’ innovative potential will take more than just building.

Three Big Ideas #18

🔁 Eamonn Ives, Research Director

In one of my first Big Ideas, I discussed research that suggested that the arrival of Uber to a city caused the unemployment rate to decline, especially for those at the lower end of the earnings spectrum. In that piece, I said the findings were just “one more datapoint proving the importance of the sharing economy.”

This month, that body of evidence grew a little bit larger. A new paper from Matthew Denes, Spyridon Lagaras and Margarita Tsoutsoura reveals that individuals who have previously worked in the sharing economy are more likely to subsequently become entrepreneurs. They also find that this is especially true for “those who are lower income, younger, and benefit from flexibility. [As defined by those with dependents.]”

Theories advanced for why experience of the sharing economy seems to increase the likelihood of future entrepreneurship include on-the-job learning (backed up by data that shows gig-workers-turned-entrepreneurs generally start firms in the same industry that they gigged in), plus additional liquidity (which can be invested into creating a new business).

In my previous gig worker post, I argued that the growing evidence base on the sharing economy shows the need to proceed carefully when regulating labour markets. Even well intentioned measures could have harmful unintended consequences – with the least affluent in the economy bearing the brunt. At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, that argument remains as important, if not more, today as it did then.

🧮 Anastasia Bektimirova, Head of Science and Technology

While similar in name and research output, funding levels for biotech firms in Cambridge, UK differ greatly from those in Cambridge, MA. The Kendall Square area of the latter Cambridge, stands out in particular – with VCs pouring $14 billion into its 600 biotech startups, earning this single square mile its reputation as one of the world’s most innovative places (more thoughts on this here).

In an article exploring how a biotech startup from Cambridge, UK is trying to bridge the gap between British scientific excellence and US commercial savvy, The Economist explains that “much comes down to the deeper and more educated capital pools and greater appetite for risk in America.”

Science Minister Sir Patrick Vallance illustrated this well in his speech at the launch of the Science and Technology Venture Capital Fellowship at the Royal Academy of Engineering which I attended last week:

“For a decade or so as the Head of R&D at GSK, if I spoke to an investor in the US, the investor would very often know a lot about the science, would know exactly what was going on in different biotech companies, would know what competitors were doing, would know where the scientific problems were. If I had a similar conversation in the UK, nine times out of ten, it would be, ‘is the court diligent safe’? It’s a striking difference, and that’s really what this is all about. Ensuring that the very brightest people who understand finance as well as science and technology can be part of bringing this investment attitude to the UK, making sure that we’re prepared to take the risks, that more money goes into this space in the right and informed way, and in a way that understands the founder profile that needs to be pursued in order to be successful.”

I’m optimistic about the Fellowship, and, as ever, think it’s good when the government launches new initiatives and embraces a test-and-learn mode. At the same time, I wonder what an upside-down approach could deliver. We should be equally interested in people turning their deep understanding of science and technology into market foresight. We need to ensure an enabling environment is in place for scientists to have a more diversified impact portfolio – and reward that diversity. Policy-wise, this could mean better supporting the emergence and growth of small specialist funds led by people who are properly embedded in the research. After all, applying deep domain expertise to make informed investment bets and guide founders could probably count as impact alongside traditional academic metrics. In some cases, perhaps even more so than publishing a journal article.

🎓 Philip Salter, Founder

As part of a swathe of announcements to deliver growth, the Government has brought back to life the idea for an Oxford-Cambridge Arc. During the Johnson Government, plans were made, then scrapped, to build on the millions of jobs and the billions ‘the Arc’ already contributes every year.

As the Financial Times reports, achieving that requires more than just a train line – important though it may be. We also need the two world-leading universities at either end of the Arc to spin out even more incredible companies. Universities, however, are reluctant to cede much of their innovations, with one in four universities beginning negotiations demanding a 50% equity stake. “Investors balk at being accorded just crumbs.”

The article hints at the solution, comparing Cambridge University with Sweden’s Uppsala University, which usually “confers ownership on the originator.” Known as ‘Professor’s Privilege’, this system gives academics ownership of the intellectual property they create, rather than assigning it to universities.

Professor’s Privilege grants them the freedom to decide how best to use it – whether to release it to the world free of charge, or attempt to commercialise it independently, using pre-existing business contacts, or through a university Tech Transfer Office. As our paper Academic to Entrepreneur argues, numerous studies suggest that this system fosters greater innovation. It’s an idea deserving of serious consideration for any government focused on growth.

Constructive Comments

Britain needs to build. Actually, it’s been ‘time to build’ for a while now, which is why we’re encouraged by recent Government announcements and news reports suggesting those in power are taking it seriously. Better late than never.

First, plans were set out to reform the process developers have to go through to address any environmental impacts projects might cause. Under current rules, these have to be done in advance in order to receive planning permission. Under the proposed changes, developers will be able to pay into a Nature Restoration Fund, pooling contributions and putting them towards larger, more effective environmental projects.

Second, no-hope legal challenges that cost the taxpayer a fortune and delay critical infrastructure projects could be consigned to history. As Labour MP Dan Tomlinson writes on X: “The independent National Infrastructure Commission finds that an astonishing 58% of projects are being JR’ed [judicially reviewed] up from 10%.”

The Government is streamlining the planning process for major infrastructure projects – such as nuclear plants, wind farms, and transport networks – by limiting speculative legal challenges to one stage instead of three. This reform aims to cut delays, lower costs, and drive economic growth by removing unnecessary obstacles that hinder progress.

Third, Chancellor Rachel Reeves is expected to announce the approval of a new runway at Heathrow next week, while the Treasury is also considering whether to back a second runway at Gatwick and increased capacity at Luton Airport. Our friends at UK Day One have a timely paper out on why Heathrow is the most capacity-constrained transport hub in the world. In Britain’s Runway to Growth, they argue that expanding it could boost nationwide economic growth while still meeting the commitments on climate, air pollution, noise, and regional growth.

As with the AI Opportunities Action Plan, however, the Government must move at pace. They can and must go further too. In Small Wonders, for example, our Research Director Eamonn Ives explained how small modular reactors could provide cheaper, more reliable energy, while helping us cut carbon emissions too.

Our paper contains numerous policy recommendations that should be implemented to get the industry off the ground. These include allowing local authorities which approve the construction of new nuclear power stations to be entitled to capture more of the business rates they pay – creating a powerful incentive for them to green light development. It also suggests we should be able to mutually recognise the decisions of nuclear regulators in other allied countries when it comes to approving new nuclear designs, as already happens in pharmaceuticals, medical devices, aerospace, financial services and many other critical areas. Importantly, this would free up our own regulators to concentrate on issues that apply specifically to Britain, rather than simply duplicating work that has already been done elsewhere.

Labour’s Choice
If those growth policies aren’t enough, this week our Advisers Sam Bowman and Sam Dumitriu set out 11 more for Labour to choose from. The final recommendation is based on a paper by our Head of Innovation Research, Anton Howes. It deals with the thorny (but critical) issue of using copyright for AI development. Bowman as Dumitriu write:

“The best short-term solution to this is the one proposed in Matt Clifford’s AI Opportunities Action Plan: allow training without a license unless the rightsholder explicitly requires one. This is the EU’s approach, and while we think we should aspire to be better than the EU on tech regulation, it’s a lot better than the status quo. Instead of announcing yet another consultation, as the government has done, it should adopt Clifford’s proposals immediately and, in the medium-term, aim to set up an API standard for contract terms that reduces transaction costs between AI companies and rightsholders, so dealings between them can be fast and inexpensive.”

Paper Over
As I wrote in my latest Big Idea over on our Substack, according to the Government’s State of Digital Government Review, the public sector spends £26 billion annually on digital technology, yet nearly half of central government and NHS services still rely on paper forms and manual processes.

It doesn’t need to be like this. The report mentions Estonia in passing, which offers an online option for 99% of its services. As I wrote alongside Kirsty Innes, now of Labour Together, in our essay on building a digital state for our Way of the Future collection, the future of government services shouldn’t be only about moving forms online; we need to copy the likes of Estonia and Singapore which automatically provide services to citizens instead of requiring them to apply.

Read more and subscribe to our Substack here.

Need-to-know Basis
Our Adviser Harriet Green has just launched Basis, which is kicking off with private investment in early-stage companies that are building where the state is failing. If you are working in this space and the Basis thesis resonates with you, Harriet and team would love to hear from you. Message her here.

Three Big Ideas #17

Three Big Ideas is our weekly roundup of ideas (and our takes on them) in entrepreneurship, innovation, science and technology, handpicked by the team.

In this week, Philip Salter urges the public sector to think big on embracing digital technology, Anastasia Bektimirova wonders about how we label innovators, and Eamonn Ives puts forward ideas for spurring agglomeration in London.

Three Big Ideas #17

💾 Philip Salter, Founder

According to the Government’s State of Digital Government Review, the public sector spends £26 billion annually on digital technology, yet nearly half of central government and NHS services still rely on paper forms and manual processes.

In the past decade, satisfaction with public services in the UK has dropped from 79% to 68% – well below private sector benchmarks. The report states: “Many UK public services still rely on phone calls, emails, letters, and in-person visits. HMRC, for example, handles 100,000 daily calls, the DVLA processes 45,000 letters every day, and Defra manages over 500 services accessed via paper-based forms.” Someone moving home must contact ten separate organisations, while managing a long-term condition or disability requires interactions with more than 40 services across nine different organisations.

Critical public services still rely on decades-old technology, with 28% of central government IT systems classified as legacy. Some police forces and NHS trusts operate with up to 70% legacy technology, posing significant cybersecurity risks and potential outages.

It doesn’t need to be like this. The report mentions Estonia in passing, which offers an online option for 99% of its services. As I wrote alongside Kirsty Innes in our essay on building a digital state for our Way of the Future collection, the future of government services shouldn’t be only about moving forms online; we need to copy the likes of Estonia and Singapore which automatically provide services to citizens instead of requiring them to apply.

🦾 Anastasia Bektimirova, Head of Science and Technology

Last week, I was at Phoenix Court to listen to their Co-Founder and Managing Partner Saul Klein and Bloomberg columnist Parmy Olson discuss her award-winning new book – Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the race that will change the world.

“We laud science but pretend industry is dirty,” Saul observed, drawing a contrast between British and American cultures. He then compared Demis Hassabis, CEO and Co-Founder of DeepMind, who recently won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AI-driven protein structure prediction, to Sam Altman, CEO and Co-Founder of OpenAI. While Demis is celebrated as a scientist, Saul explained, Sam is viewed as an industrialist. Where the UK is fidgeting with a degree of discomfort around the cult of the entrepreneur, the US doesn’t seem to raise an eyebrow.

I find the division between a scientist and an industrialist somewhat artificial. It’s possible to embody both – untapped innovation potential lies at this intersection. What often makes an outstanding scientist is the ability to navigate science with an entrepreneurial mindset – not necessarily driven by profit-making, but rather by an ambitious vision for impact. It just so happens that great ambitions can often lead to great rewards. As an industrialist, you strive for impact and lay the practical steps to get there. As a scientist, you make impossible things possible – bending reality to the will of ambition for impact.

When it comes to bridging the scientific and entrepreneurial worlds, I’m following ARIA’s updates with keen interest. As part of its experiment to diversify institutional models by teaming up with ‘activation partners’, it recently announced a collaboration with Fifty Years, which will launch its company creation programme in the UK to help translate breakthrough science into deep tech startups. There are more similar partnerships to come. Mechanisms like these that are breaking down the barrier between science and industry could drive the cultural shift we need.

🚦 Eamonn Ives, Research Director

Whether it’s finance or fashion or theatre, New York City leads the world in many ways. In other respects, it’s still playing catch up. One of those is road pricing for traffic – with the Big Apple only adopting it this month. In comparison, London has been charging vehicles to drive into its city centre since 2003, Stockholm likewise since 2007, and road pricing poster child Singapore has done so for nearly half a century.

Since 5 January, drivers entering a zone below 60th Street into downtown Manhattan between 5am and 9pm are now liable for a $9 fee, with higher charges for bigger vehicles like vans and trucks. Data released by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority suggests the scheme is working – with traffic already down by 8%, and increased speeds recorded across all tunnels and bridges in the affected area.

None of this should come as a surprise. Allocating resources – in this case road space, or perhaps thought of more accurately as a better guarantee of quicker, more predictable journeys – via prices is generally a far superior option to allocating them with time or other mechanisms. (For a whole list of other reasons to support road pricing in particular, read this.)

Yet while a step in the right direction, NYC’s congestion charge is far from perfect. It is not especially dynamic, in the sense that it doesn’t continually adjust to when demand – or traffic – is high or low. As Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin explains: “Price uncertainty is better than time uncertainty (paying $10 more today is fine if you pay $10 less tomorrow, but you can’t compensate being 30 min late for a flight or meeting by being 30 min early to the next one).”

As a Londoner, my main takeaway from Manhattan’s belated embrace of road pricing is that we should think about how to improve our capital’s own scheme. Stagnating average road speeds suggest that the daily fee is currently set too low, at least during the morning and evening rush hours. New bands that apply a surge price between 7-9am and 5-7pm should be trialled. Furthermore, we should apply the spirit of congestion pricing to other aspects of London’s transport network. Adding an additional charge, for example, for tapping in and out at certain busy Underground stops which suffer from dangerously overcrowded platforms would smooth out numbers by incentivising people to use other stations.

Agglomeration is essential for successful entrepreneurship, and to maximise the amount we get in our cities, people need to be able to get around quickly. Short of building more infrastructure, the simple logic of prices may be our best tool for keeping places moving.

Does Compute

Matt Clifford’s long-awaited report finally landed this week. The AI Opportunities Action Plan packs a punch, delivering 50 recommendations to the Government.

For a deep dive, our Head of Science and Technology Anastasia Bektimirova offers a thorough analysis of the Plan on our Substack. As she said to Sifted (paywall): “The plan has a lot of very constructive recommendations... but this is something that was supposed to arrive much sooner, and at the moment it feels like we’re playing catch-up.”

The proof of any plan is in the execution. But as Anastasia said for another Sifted article (paywall): “It’s a very good sign that Matt Clifford will be overseeing the delivery of this plan.” It’s clear that the necessary infrastructure development, sustained funding commitments, talent attraction, and changes to procurement will all require tough political decisions to be made. As she writes in our Substack analysis, “the responsibility is also on the AI sector itself to demonstrate how it can deliver on the Government’s aims. The success of the Action Plan depends on sustained political support. Ministers want something to feel positive about and to champion, so articulating the opportunity is important – and this will be our task.”

As our Adviser Richard Mabey, founder of the AI-powered contract automation platform Juro, responds: “The key now is not the recommendations in the report, it’s in the delivery. To stand a chance of getting ahead, the Government must implement the recommendations at breakneck speed. Can Government move at the pace of AI? Let’s see.”

Janan Ganesh isn’t convinced we can. Ever the provocateur, he writes in the Financial Times (paywall) that Britain should stop pretending it wants more economic growth: “Tories want growth, but not if it means building things, aligning with Europe, or much exposure to China. Labour wants growth, but not if it incommodes the unions, or ‘leaves people behind’ or some such NGO press release inanity. What growth policy is left over, then?”

I’m more optimistic (and I suspect Ganesh might be too). Just this week, politicians across the political spectrum endorsed a National Priority Infrastructure Bill from the Looking For Growth group. These included Chris Curtis, co-chair of the Labour Growth Group, which has around 100 Labour MPs as members. Looking For Growth is run by friend of the Network Dr Lawrence Newport (and author of an essay for us on Inspiring Innovation) – it’s a social movement dedicated to making Britain grow. He is one of many people working on policy to increase the size and dynamism of our economy.

A decade ago, being unashamedly pro-growth and pro-progress could be a lonely place to be. This is no longer the case. Time to get involved.

Join us for an evening of networking with like-minded, pro-growth entrepreneurs in Soho this Wednesday. Spaces are limited, so sign up now.

On Your Mind
We want to hear from founders! What barriers are holding your startups back? Here’s a message from Eamonn Ives, our Research Director setting out what he’s looking for:

“At The Entrepreneurs Network, we’re here to solve problems. But in order to do that, we first need to know what those problems are. And there’s nobody better placed to tell us than the founders who have to deal with them each and every day. Our pipeline of research for the year ahead is taking shape but we’re still eager to know what issues you think we should be focusing on to ensure Britain’s startups have the best shot at success. Maybe it’s a regulation that stymies your sector, or something that cuts across the breadth of the economy – whatever it is, drop me an email and let’s chat further.”

Three Big Ideas #16

Three Big Ideas is our weekly roundup of ideas (and our takes on them) in entrepreneurship, innovation, science and technology, handpicked by the team.

In this week, Eamonn Ives asks whether Elon Musk is a genius, Philip Salter writes about the disruption AI could spell for the labour force, and Anastasia Bektimirova discusses the myth of objectives.

Three Big Ideas #16

🧠 Eamonn Ives, Research Director

Is Elon Musk a genius? A glance at some of his social media activity suggests maybe not. A look at some of the companies he’s helped build suggests maybe yes. But who’s to decide? One person who reckons they have the answer is University College London’s Professor Mariana Mazzucato – and it’s firmly in the negative. Posting on Musk-owned X this week, she declared: “He invented NONE of the TECH. Just bought stuff at the right time. More marketing than science.”

There’s certainly a kernel or more of truth in this. Rockets existed long before SpaceX, satellites before Starlink, online banking before PayPal, large language models before xAI and digging holes in the ground before the Tunnel Boring Company.

Should all this debar Musk from genius status though? No. First of all, innovation is, always has been, and always will be, an iterative undertaking where new insights are built on previous ones. I’m sure Mazzucato can reel off a list of names of people she does think are geniuses, all of whom would happily agree their individual contributions were influenced by the work of someone else.

Second, much as I wish society would do more to venerate invention, I’d question how positive a development that’d be if the form it took was reserving the term ‘genius’ only for scientists who tinker away on contraptions in the laboratories. Bringing any new technology into being – and then disseminating it throughout the economy – is a multifaceted process. It requires the ‘D’ as well as the ‘R’ of R&D, which economist Stian Westlake elegantly describes as “making inventions useful.” For this to happen, skilled managers and shrewd investors who can envision a radically different future are essential. I think Musk’s track record here suggests he’s pretty good at that side of the equation.

I don’t doubt that the esteemed Professor hopes for us all to enjoy a more innovative future. And in light of some of his more controversial opinions, to say the least, I empathise with the desire to take Musk down a peg or two. But thinking that someone’s politics renders their innovative contribution to the world worthless is simply an exercise in failing to decouple and childishness.

💼 Philip Salter, Founder

According to a new NBER working paper, the years spanning 1990 to 2017 saw a less disruptive US labour market than any prior period measured going back to 1880. The reason? General-purpose technologies (GPTs) like steam power and electricity dramatically disrupted the twentieth-century labour market, but the changes took place over decades.

The authors see signs that the US is returning to a period of labor market disruption. The evidence they cite includes the end of job polarisation (the shrinking of middle-skilled jobs due to technological advancements), the stalling growth of low-wage jobs, the increase of STEM occupations from 6.5% of US jobs in 2010 to nearly 10% in 2024, and the decline in retail jobs by 25% over the past decade.

AI is likely the next GPT. And while the full scale of AI is still unfolding, early indicators – such as rapid private investment in AI-related technologies and growing STEM employment – signal that it is already playing a significant role in labor market changes.

So what’s the likely timeline? Remember, it was 1769 when James Watt patented his separate condenser for the steam engine, and 1882 when Thomas Edison opened the first commercial central power plant at Pearl Street Station. So history teaches us that these things can take a while. But this time it could be different – it’s a topic Dwarkesh Patel’s and Tyler Cowen politely, and constructively, disagree on.

Bonus: Speaking of AI, don’t miss our reaction to the AI Opportunities Action Plan, which the Government published on Monday.

🧭 Anastasia Bektimirova, Head of Science and Technology

“When objectives are ambitious, the only reward you’re likely to receive is deception,” write Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman in Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective. They go on to say:

“The future that the past created was not the vision of the past, but instead what the past unexpectedly enabled. The genius of the Wright brothers wasn’t to invent every necessary component for flight from scratch, but to recognise that we were only a stepping stone away from flight given past innovations. Great invention is defined by the realisation that the prerequisites are in place, laid before us by predecessors’ entirely unrelated ambitions, just waiting to be combined and enhanced.”

Almost no prerequisite to any major invention was invented with that invention in mind. This gives a basis to challenge, from first principles, whether our typical approach to public funding of science and technology is truly optimised to deliver the highest possible return on investment.

Take the AI Opportunities Action Plan launched by the Government this week. Under the proposed changes, the AI Research Resource (AIRR), our national AI compute infrastructure, “should evolve into a set of Mission-oriented clusters that bring together compute, data, and talent to pursue frontier AI research and other national priorities.” It will now operate under Missions-focused programme directors who will oversee compute allocation. They will “quickly and independently provide large amounts of compute to high-potential projects of national importance, operating in a way that is strategic and mission driven.”

A possible risk here is falling into the trap of the objective and drifting away from the AIRR’s original purpose. We need to ensure that scientists and students in universities have the compute they need for AI research and applying AI-driven methods across different fields, from computational biology to the social sciences. This is foundational for diffusing AI throughout science, including in the fields where it has fewer immediately obvious applications. Against the backdrop of GPU poverty in academia, this is not an unambitious goal. The AIRR shouldn’t be confused with ARIA. The former is foundational research infrastructure, while the latter has a mandate to fund high-risk high-reward research making bets on specific opportunity spaces. We should, as Stanley and Lehman write, “let novelty search roam in an endless maze that stretches to the horizon in every direction.”

Calling It

Peter Drucker once said that the only thing we know about the future is that it will be different. Far be it from me to correct the founder of modern management theory, but at least in the short term, we aren’t entirely clueless.

Although precise predictions are impossible, our experience can guide us toward likely outcomes, something that both entrepreneurs and policymakers need. While we don’t know what a second-term President Trump will look like, we have more knowledge than we did when he was elected for his first term. We know, for example, to take his words seriously despite claims back in 2016 that we should take them symbolically. That’s not to say he will – or can – do everything he wants. And we also know that he’s quick to change his mind. This underscores how uncertain the global policy landscape will be under Trump’s leadership – and why entrepreneurs and policymakers alike must stay agile.

As our Research Director Eamonn Ives argued last year following the election, the lesson for many European countries, including the UK, is that we’ve grown too accustomed to relying on external actors. Whether that’s the US for technological innovation and security, or Russia and China for cheap energy and goods – without adequately considering the vulnerabilities this creates. Rather than retreating into economic insularity, Eamonn makes the case for smarter policies that prioritise resilience and recognise the true foundations of growth. Whether that’s in policy areas where we can work more closely with our allies, or in areas where we need to build our own capabilities – like producing our own cheap, clean energy.

On this side of the pond, we now know a lot more about our new Labour Government. It’s fair to say that not everything has gone the way that Britain’s entrepreneurs would have wanted, but we – and Labour – should remember that there’s still four and a half years left before the next election needs to be held, which is ample time to turn things around.

That won’t happen on its own, however, and as the warning lights of the economy flash a darker shade of red, Starmer should be minded to look back to the record of the last man to break the Tories’ stranglehold on power. In his first term alone, Tony Blair managed to enact a host of reforms that materially changed the political fabric of Britain. Many of these he gripped early on in his premiership, meaning that the benefits had time to accrue by the time voters next went to the polls. Short-term news cycles have certainly changed how politics works, but they haven’t rendered long-term governance a thing of the past just yet – Labour can’t forget that they have the power to act. On this, Anastasia Bektimirova shares Blair’s insights on X, taken from his recent book On Leadership.

So what else should entrepreneurs be thinking about this year?

The elephant (not playing chess) in the room is artificial intelligence. The only challenge is predicting the timeline. However, this isn’t entirely a black box; there are people with proven insights. Rodney Brooks, for example, has been making predictions since 2018. While he hasn’t always been spot on forecasting the timeline for AI, robotics, self-driving cars and human space travel, his deep knowledge combined with his self-awareness makes his 2025 update a must-read.

He’s not the only one worth reading to get a better understanding of how AI will evolve in 2025. Read Herbie Bradley to understand what Trump could mean for AI. Read Simon Willison for a comprehensive update on LLMs and AI, with a few hints at likely directions for the future. And read Austin Vernon for a view on how AI agents may be integrated into companies (this one is a short, essential read for all entrepreneurs).

There’s room for disagreement. That is why AI sceptic Gary Marcus has made a bet with Miles Brundage, formerly of OpenAI, on whether AI will be able to pass ten tests – including writing Pulitzer-caliber books, coming up with Nobel-caliber scientific discoveries, writing cogent, persuasive legal briefs – by 2027.

In reality, the truth likely lies somewhere between these extremes. The Pulitzer test may miss a more immediate shift. AI is already reshaping how influential thinkers approach their work. Economist Tyler Cowen says he is now writing primarily for AI as a target audience. So is researcher Gwern Branwen. (For my part, I’m still writing for humans.) What we can be sure of is that reality will be transformational for everyone reading this.

It’s time
If you’re one of the thousands of people reading this, wondering how you can get more involved in 2025, here are three ways.

First, if you haven’t already, join us as a Supporter, Adviser, Patron or Corporate Partner. We wouldn’t be able to do all the work we do without this. You can join online in a couple of minutes. Along with the warm glow of supporting us, you’ll also receive invitations to many more events.

Second, we’re collecting testimonials and case studies from our supporters and collaborators. If you’d like to contribute, please drop me an email. Your input will help us showcase our impact to new audiences.

Third, we have a survey that helps us tailor opportunities to your interests. It only takes a few minutes to complete and really helps us focus our efforts.

We’re looking forward to seeing you in 2025!

Three Big Ideas #15

Three Big Ideas is our weekly roundup of ideas (and our takes on them) in entrepreneurship, innovation, science and technology, handpicked by the team.

In this week, Eamonn Ives highlights an innovation arms race going on in the food industry, Anastasia Bektimirova discusses revolving doors in the world of AI, and Philip Salter espouses the potential of pilots.

Three Big Ideas #15

🍩 Eamonn Ives, Research Director

Christmas and the New Year period may have been a time of gastronomic excess for many, but – thanks to the continuing spread of novel appetite suppressant drugs – perhaps for fewer this time around than last. A recent paper studying how food habits changed in households with at least one GLP-1 (such as Ozempic or Wegovy) user found that grocery spending reduced “by approximately 6% within six months of adoption, with higher-income households reducing spending by nearly 9%.” Most of the fall in spending was explained by a radical reduction in calorie-dense, processed foods – including an “11% decline in savory snacks.”

Food brands who are threatened by demand drying up are not sitting idly by, however. As detailed in a New York Times long-read, companies are already developing ‘Ozempic-optimised’ product lines – playing up certain nutrients, like protein or fibre, or catering for other qualities that GLP-1 users find attractive, such as more convenient preparation and smaller portion sizes.

While innovation is usually only considered as a positive, it’s seldom a positive-sum game. As this example shows, one industry’s gain is very much another’s loss. But this process of creative destruction is rarely a single, isolated incident. More often than not, it triggers an innovation arms race as competing companies vie to respond to each other’s developments. Who will eventually win out in this instance is anyone’s guess – but what’s not up for debate is that this is the process of innovation, facilitated by flexible markets, being played out in real time.

🚪 Anastasia Bektimirova, Head of Science and Technology

Yesterday’s Lords Science and Technology Committee evidence session focused on the impact of immigration policy on science and universities. Naturally, the discussion touched on wider questions about the UK’s competitiveness as a destination for scientists and students. Speaking about AI research, Professor Alison Noble, Foreign Secretary at The Royal Society, said:

“The UK has a recognised strength in AI. We have some very good companies and a very strong ecosystem. I think that’s important for scientists as well. They might come in … and then a few years later, maybe go work in industry for a while, move around. This is what entrepreneurial-type scientists want to do, including people who are pure entrepreneurs as well. We are known for having a very active and very good environment for that. There is a concern about people going to work in industry, but if that’s where research is done in AI, then universities focus on other things. I’ve actually been around myself – my PhD was during the last wave of AI, so I’ve seen the whole circle of starting off, going through a winter and coming through again. So maybe I have a bit more balanced view on it. I think things go in cycles. But you don’t sit back when that happens – you decide as well, you work together, you have a strategy. I think that’s the important thing we need.”

An academia-industry revolving door drives innovation. The development of deep learning itself was a back-and-forth exchange. When renowned researchers like Geoffrey Hinton, formerly at Google, and Meta’s Yann LeCun left their university roles, what they gained from the vast resources of big tech companies continued to benefit academic researchers through their publications. Google’s Attention Is All You Need paper, laying out the theory behind transformer architecture, is one such example. We want to encourage cross-pollination of ideas, skills, and experience of working within various organisational structures.

For this reason, industry’s strengths shouldn’t breed complacency when it comes to ambition and capacity building in academia. Universities shouldn’t just sit back and “focus on other things” while industry advances AI research. Historically, AI innovation was academia-led, but now universities are being priced out. The work on large-scale AI models is increasingly out of reach for universities, largely due to high computing costs. Even though tech companies publish research papers, they are less transparent about the workings of their most advanced models, making resources for academia even more crucial. Resource constraints are not an exclusively UK issue – US universities don’t exactly match OpenAI’s compute capacity either. It’s not only about the science of AI itself but also application in other fields. It’s not uncommon to hear from PhD researchers and postdocs working on AI-driven biology who can’t access the compute they need. It’s particularly concerning to hear our talent compare their challenges to relatively easier compute access enjoyed by their peers stateside. What once seemed anecdotal stories now form a clear pattern.

The goal isn’t for academia to compete with industry but to work alongside it, each bringing their strengths to AI development and its applications. The timing or nature of cycles or disruptions are hard to forecast. What we can do is put strong foundations to ensure different parts of the AI ecosystem can thrive through them.

⚗️ Philip Salter, Founder

Eric Gilliam, writing for Asimov Press, argues that Edwin Cohn – a temperamental, entrepreneurial protein chemist at Harvard in the 1930s and 1940s – was one of the most underrated translational scientists of all time. Initially focused on pure research, Cohn’s lab was enlisted by the US military in 1940 to develop blood protein products to treat shock and blood loss. His team successfully created stable, concentrated human albumin, which was used extensively during the Second World War, including in the Normandy landings.

Cohn also demonstrated the pivotal role of pilot plants. Operated at a scale larger than lab experiments but smaller than full industrial production, these facilities replicate manufacturing processes so researchers can test methods under near-real-world conditions. By integrating a pilot plant into his Harvard lab, Cohn was able to scale production from laboratory experiments to 40-litre batches of plasma, develop manufacturing protocols for pharmaceutical companies, train industrial personnel (thereby ensuring smooth technology transfer), and rapidly produce enough material for clinical trials and battlefield use.

Gilliam thinks Cohn has something to teach us today about how pilot plants can accelerate both discovery and practical application. If more universities adopted the pilot plant model for challenges like producing synthetic blood or commercialising advanced materials – carbon nanotubes, graphene, aerogels, lithium-ion battery anodes – researchers could more quickly transition breakthroughs from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Summary Time

In 2024, The Entrepreneurs Network turned ten. Given that only around a third of businesses survive beyond a decade, perhaps we’re doing something right. Ultimately though, there is only one metric that matters: are we making the UK a better place than it would otherwise be for entrepreneurs? I’ll leave it to others to make that ultimate judgement, but as you’ll see below it’s not lack of effort – and our plans for the next year are even more ambitious. We hope you’ll remain part of our journey.

Unless something extraordinary happens in the next few days, the UK’s biggest political event of the year was July’s General Election. While we don’t take sides on politics – we do take a keen interest in policy. And there has been plenty of policy to get stuck into.

Most vocally, we got over 1,250 entrepreneurs to sign a letter against the negative impact that rumoured changes to Capital Gains Tax and Business Asset Disposal Relief would have. The Chancellor took note, but there is more work to do. As Richard Tyler wrote in The Times: Gordon Brown’s tax break for entrepreneurs survives — but for how long?

Back to Basics
Every year we release at least one wide-ranging report that aims to influence – or at least capture – the zeitgeist. In March, we released Building Blocks, which argued that the fundamentals of what makes for a competitive economy have been neglected for too long. We focused on four areas to fix: our chronic under-agglomeration, looming fiscal headaches, obstacles to innovation and a failure to fully harness domestic and international talent. There is still much to do on all four fronts, but the narrative that we and others have called for – fixing the foundations – has cut through.

Another wide-ranging report was June’s Backing Breakthrough Businesses, which was driven by our new Patron Steve Rigby through his leadership of the Private Business Commission. We launched it in Parliament with Jonathan Reynolds MP, Secretary of State for Business and Trade, and it picked up coverage in The Times and elsewhere, with many of the policy recommendations in train.

In September, our Research Director Eamonn Ives got to the core of small nuclear reactors in Small Wonders. As the report argues, abundant energy is crucial for economic growth, particularly with the rise of energy-intensive technologies like AI, and achieving climate goals requires significantly expanding clean generation.

Big Society
While entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone, we should aspire to live in a country where nobody faces social impediments when starting and growing a business.

We want to take everyone on this journey with us. Whether that’s the neurodivergent in March’s Neurodiverse Founders, the next generation in June’s Empowering the Future, the regions in September’s United Growth, or anyone no matter where they’re born in February’s Entrepreneurs Unwrapped.

As many of you will have seen, this week we launched Gaining Altitude in the House of Lords – the latest report from our Female Founders Forum. For this one we partnered with the Invest in Women Taskforce to better understand Britain’s female angel investor community around the UK. Yesterday, Hannah Bernard OBE set out in City A.M. what needs to be done.

Global Britain
We’ve long argued that if we are to remain competitive we must remain open to talent. In August’s Job Creators 2024, we reveal the proportion of founders behind Britain’s fastest-growing companies that were born overseas: 39%.

British companies also need to expand internationally. In December’s Towards A More Special Relationship we examined what challenges exist for British founders looking to do that in the US, and set out a clear raft of policy recommendations for the Government to address them.

Science Superpower
I’m delighted to announce that Anastasia Bektimirova has been promoted to become our Head of Science and Technology to build out our work portfolio in this area. Her main interests include AI policy, strategy and delivery of the National Data Library, research commercialisation, alongside broader topics related to the health of the UK’s R&D ecosystem. She is also thinking about how institutions can improve their delivery of national science and technology objectives. If you share these interests, reach out.

As such, we will be engaging with the Government as it is consulting on copyright and AI. We believe in a policy environment which enables responsible access to high-quality input needed to develop AI models in the UK, and have already set out some potential options in January’s Can the UK Become Competitive on Text-and-Data Mining for AI? We are keen to hear your thoughts on how the Government can strike the right balance. Feel free to drop Anastasia a line.

White Heat of Technology
This year we joined Substack. Check out our interviews with: Station F Director, Roxanne Varza; former DSIT Policy Adviser Ben Johnson; and ARC Accelerator Co-Founder Chris Fellingham. We also revived our Three Big Ideas series – where we and experts in our community pitch our weekly hot takes on things that have piqued our curiosity – and written up more digestible analysis about the research we publish.

Ten More Years
Last but certainly not least, I want to thank our Patrons, Advisers, Supporters, Corporate Partners, and event hosts. This includes everyone here, as well as American Express, Arbuthnot Latham, Barclays, Barclays Eagle Labs, Beauhurst, Blick Rothenberg, Bradshaw Advisory, Britain Remade, Enterprise Nation, Evelyn Partners, FieldHouse, Fora, Fragomen, Gatsby, Growth Hub Global, Jobbatical, Kingsley Napley, LSE IDEAS, MDRx, Milltown Partners, OakNorth, Octopus, Rathbones, Rigby Group, Sumer, UCL, University of Bristol, YBI, and almost certainly one or two I’m forgetting.

We can only do what we do with support from our partners. If you would like to help us deliver on our mission, support us here or book a time to chat over Zoom. We look forward to working with you.

Three Big Ideas #14

Three Big Ideas is our weekly roundup of ideas (and our takes on them) in entrepreneurship, innovation, science and technology, handpicked by the team.

In this week, Philip Salter reflects on mirrored life, Anastasia Bektimirova discusses launching startups inside of government, and Eamonn Ives argues the case for paying CEOs like footballers.

Three Big Ideas #14

🪞 Philip Salter, Founder

Those of a nervous disposition may want to look away now. Last week, a prominent article in Science warned of the potential creation of “mirrored” life – organisms composed of biomolecules with reversed chirality. These engineered microbes, theoretically invisible to our immune systems and natural predators, could spread unchecked, infect humans, devastate crops, and drive species to extinction.

Authored by a team that includes 16 members of national academies, two Nobel Laureates, and several pioneers who once aspired to create mirrored life, the article is supported by a 300-page technical report. For those lacking the time – or the requisite PhDs – turn instead to Asimov Press’s useful long read on the dangers. As it summarises: “A mirrored organism would use right-handed molecules everywhere a naturally-occurring organism uses left-handed ones, and vice versa. It could thus elude the typical chiral interactions by which microorganisms hunt their prey… Such mirrored invaders could theoretically spread across the Earth while evading the biological defenses that have evolved to check such threats.”

While the ability to create such life forms remains at least a decade away, the scientists urge proactive measures: prohibit their creation, regulate enabling technologies, and foster global, open dialogue. They point to existing precedents for responsible oversight, such as the Tianjin Biosecurity Guidelines, which guide the ethical and secure development of emerging biotechnologies.

While the science behind mirrored life is somewhat speculative – it’s far from idle speculation. Lessons from the nuclear era – during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Stanislav Petrov Incident, and the Able Archer 83 exercise – remind us how close human ingenuity can come to catastrophe when risks are poorly managed.

Nevertheless, we should be prepared to reappraise this position. The other lesson of nuclear technology is that overly stringent regulations have massively held back civil applications of nuclear power. As Jason Crawford speculates, the risk-benefit calculation may shift over time. Future technologies could radically improve biocontainment, perhaps through isolated, robot-operated labs far from Earth, or advanced nanotechnology might allow for tighter ecological control. But that is speculative – given what we know now it’s that rare case where prohibition really is the best policy.

👾 Anastasia Bektimirova, Researcher

Applications have opened for the next cohort of the No10 Innovation Fellowship, which aims to bring innovators and original thinkers into the government. The programme’s intent is commendable, and it really is quite exciting to see what previous Fellows were tasked with.

The challenge lies in continuity. Is the government equipped for the long-term delivery of a disruptive new initiative or innovative ways of working put into motion by a Fellow brought in for 6-12 months? The key to genuine transformation is scale. Yet, many innovative projects are trapped in “pilotitus” – failing to reach their full potential.

To counter this, people with a similar outside-the-box mentality are needed inside the government for the long term to carry forward the original vision during implementation. Without this, an innovative idea conceived with great ambition risks being watered down to something rather conventional. In his new book On Leadership, Tony Blair writes that improving delivery capacity requires people “working with the system but not formed by it,” and calls to “treat policymaking not as a spasmodic response to the difficulty of the day but as an opportunity to go deep and make change which lasts: a change not a splash.”

Having innovative thinkers embedded in government as a norm also increases the chance of something exceptional emerging from within. When Pat McFadden outlined the idea of experts from tech companies doing “Tours of Duty”, it might have been interpreted as if no innovator had set foot in Whitehall before. This is not the case. For example, such individuals were critical to the creation of the Vaccine Taskforce, ARIA and AI Safety Institute – all remarkable examples of startups inside the government.

But despite the clear, lasting value that innovators bring, the system hasn’t always been good at keeping them. It is worthwhile for the government to reflect on why such thinkers and doers leave, and what changes are required to empower the “weirdos and misfits” who are instrumental to meaningful transformation.

⚽ Eamonn Ives, Research Director

No fewer than 88 companies have delisted or moved their primary listing from the London Stock Exchange in 2024 – putting it on track for its worst year since 2009. This languid performance has left many asking what can be done to avert the rot.

One answer offered up recently by Lord Michael Spencer is that we need to be comfortable paying the bosses of listed companies “like top-rate footballers” without worrying about triggering a backlash. I’m minded to agree – FTSE 100 bosses are paid about a third of their S&P 500 equivalents on average, and while a large part of that will be down to the US market being far more dynamic overall, it’s not unreasonable to think that remuneration is restrained this side of the Atlantic for fear of negative press. In addition, the less enticing we make it for bosses to manage UK-listed firms, the less likely it is we’ll get the sort of talent required to achieve economic success.

Managers matter, and we have a wealth of evidence to back it up. In study after study, economists have demonstrated the power of good management. To take a famous one from Nicholas Bloom, John Van Reenen and Erik Brynjolfsson, they found that management performance can explain differences in productivity between firms even more than R&D, employee skills and investment in IT can.

Meanwhile, having a respected individual at the helm can boost a company’s value by many, many multiples more than what they take home each year. When Apple’s visionary leader Steve Jobs quit, shares dipped by 3%, erasing billions in value; in contrast, when Steve Ballmer announced the end of his less-than-spectacular tenure as Microsoft CEO, shares in the tech giant jumped by 7.5%.

Of course, becoming intensely relaxed with people getting filthy rich – to re-coin a phrase – is only one part of the puzzle. Other policies, like ending Stamp Duty on shares, would likely be quicker routes to bolstering the attractiveness of the LSE. But for long-term success, maybe we really do need to look a little deeper – and begin to cheer our corporate bosses as we do our footballing idols.

Growing Concerns

For a government that came into office with the laudable if stretching ambition of making Britain the fastest growing economy in the G7, today’s growth figures do not make for pretty reading. I say growth figures, but they’d perhaps more accurately be described as contraction figures – with the economy as a whole shrinking by 0.1% in the month of October, mirroring September’s languid performance.

Of course, far from all of the blame lies with the new Government. They inherited a sluggish economy plagued by decades of cumulative underinvestment in the fundamental building blocks of prosperity. Turning the ship around will take time, and credit should be given to the commitment to shake up areas like planning policy, which we know have an outsized influence on growth.

But nor are the occupants of Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street entirely without fault. Just this week, a number of stories splashed the concerns bosses continue to have following the most recent Budget. OakNorth founder Rishi Khosla warned that tax changes are already causing wealth creators to leave the country, while at a roundtable between the Chancellor and senior business leaders, reports say almost all were pessimistic about the year to come. If Labour are to hit their growth goal, something needs to give.

Never ones to sit on the sidelines in this debate, on Monday we launched our latest report. In Towards A More Special Relationship, supported by our Patron Steve Rigby, we examine how to strengthen the entrepreneurial ties between Britain and its old ally America (the economy of which, if you needed reminding, is up a healthy 2.8% on the year prior). The report saw us talk directly to entrepreneurs who’ve made the hop across the Atlantic, investors who’ve ploughed money into startups stateside, and other key players involved in the growth journeys of similar companies. As well as mapping out the benefits the US market presents, we were also interested in understanding the barriers that prevent those benefits from being seized – and how to subsequently dismantle them.

One of the common themes we heard from those we interviewed was that for all the preconceptions of America being the land of the free, finding a foothold in the US market can be a bureaucratic nightmare. Whether it’s getting insurance or navigating immigration frameworks, founders told us that the administrative aspect of expansion can be a more costly experience than you might imagine – both financially and time-wise. Efforts to simplify this could prove especially helpful for the growth of companies who spot an opportunity.

In terms of our recommendations to foster greater Anglo-American economic integration, we set our sights high. At the top of our list is an appeal for the Government to prioritise a free trade agreement (FTA) with the new US administration once President-elect Trump is sworn in next January. Though certainly ambitious, it would not be unthinkable – when he was last in the White House, Trump appeared keen to strike a deal, and five rounds of negotiations were undertaken in his final year in office. Rachel Reeves, meanwhile, has made a number of positive noises about one in recent weeks and months.

Rarely does a lever for growth quite like an FTA with the world’s biggest economy present itself, but if the Government can yank it, their objectives will be made all the easier. Here’s to hoping they manage to.

Action Stations
On Tuesday, my colleague Anastasia published her fascinating interview with Station F director Roxanne Varza. Among other things, the two discuss how Station F has become a focal point for the French startup scene, what trends European artificial intelligence legislation is setting in motion, and whether there are any policy lessons Britain can learn from across the Channel to boost its own entrepreneurial ecosystem. Highly recommended – all this and more can be found on our Substack.  

Three Big Ideas #13

Three Big Ideas is our weekly roundup of ideas (and our takes on them) in entrepreneurship, innovation, science and technology, handpicked by the team.

In this week, Philip Salter explores the gruesome if useful history of medical self-experimentation, Anastasia Bektimirova argues the case for enabling widespread adoption of AI, and Eamonn Ives discusses what lessons the cruise liner industry can teach us on dry land.

Three Big Ideas #13

🧑‍⚕️ Philip Salter, Founder

My big idea this week comes from a visit to London’s Hunterian Museum, where we joined a free curator-led tour as part of an unconventional Christmas office party.

The museum, named after the 18th-century surgeon and anatomist John Hunter (1728–1793), features over 2,000 anatomical specimens from Hunter’s original collection. It also showcases surgical instruments, models, paintings, and archival material that trace the history of surgery – from ancient procedures to modern robot-assisted operations. It’s fascinating and gruesome in equal measure.

One thing’s for sure – you’ll leave the Huntarian grateful for the progress we’ve seen since Hunter’s time, with the modern miracles of anesthesia, antiseptic, antibiotics, and advanced imaging.

Hunter himself played a pivotal role in this journey of progress – he was a pioneer who transformed surgery from a craft into a science, emphasising the use of research, experimentation, and teaching. One notable experiment may have been on himself. He believed that syphilis and gonorrhea were caused by the same pathogen, so he reportedly deliberately inoculated himself with pus from a patient who had one of these conditions.

Hunter wasn’t the first nor last to experiment on himself. In a recent example, virologist Beata Halassy treated her own breast cancer with experimental oncolytic virotherapy (OVT). After undergoing a mastectomy and chemotherapy, she injected her tumor with viruses known to attack cancerous cells.

Other famous examples include Werner Forssmann, who pioneered cardiac catheterisation in 1929 by threading a catheter into his own heart, earning him the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Similarly, Barry Marshall ingested Helicobacter pylori bacteria in 1984 to prove it caused stomach ulcers, a discovery that won him the 2005 Nobel Prize. And Daniel Bovet’s groundbreaking work on antihistamines and nervous system drugs earned him the Nobel Prize in 1957.

Such self-experimenting scientists may not be outliers. A paper found that half of the scientist respondents performed self-experiments, and roughly one-fifth had conducted serious self-experiments. And while concerns are raised around biologics injections, radiation exposure, and surgical implants, most scientists who responded thought self-experiments were valuable.

🧑‍💻 Anastasia Bektimirova, Researcher

To lead in capital-intensive areas of science and technology, countries need strategic discipline and focus. There is more than one way to approach this, and what might work for, say, semiconductors might not work for AI.

Eric Schmidt recently proposed his “playbook for a category of countries that have the capacity to do something meaningful with AI—that is, those with disproportionate capital or large enough domestic labour and consumer markets, plentiful talent and a high demand for AI…These countries should first find a niche somewhere along the AI value chain, from regulation to software to data centres. Britain, for example, is positioning itself as a leader in AI governance. Its AI Safety Institute gets ten times the funding of its American counterpart. Saudi Arabia launched a National Semiconductor Hub in June, focusing on simpler chips than those of market leaders. Ireland is making use of its clean-power abundance by building large data centres and shipping out processed data as a product.”

But the argument for countries to focus on isolated nodes misses a critical point about the economics of AI. Unlike industries where controlling key supply or value chain components can yield strategic advantage, the same logic doesn’t fully apply to AI. Its value is realised through application, adoption, and diffusion rather than concentration in one layer of the stack.

The AI Safety Institute is, in fact, a case in point. The previous government focused closely on AI safety, but not as an end in itself. Rishi Sunak told the AI Safety Summit last November that building a strong AI safety state capacity “will attract even more…new jobs and investment.” Unless AI is trusted, advancements, adoption and diffusion will be curtailed.

AI’s potential lies in how it integrates into and reshapes industries, R&D, and public service design and delivery. Countries should prioritise structural changes and downstream reform needed to create an environment that enables widespread AI adoption for these purposes and across industries, rather than focusing narrowly on dominating specific value and supply chain points.

🛳️ Eamonn Ives, Research Director

Regular readers will be painfully aware of how bad much of the Western world seems to have become at building things. Whether its homes, roads, rail lines or power stations, infrastructure is only being constructed with an increasingly heavy price tag, if it’s getting constructed at all. It is enormously refreshing, therefore, when a correction to this narrative presents itself – and in writer Michael Hopkins’ recent article for Works in Progress, I found one.

While we’ve stagnated elsewhere, in the world of cruise liners, it appears we’re merrily sailing along. “Since the SS Great Eastern in 1858,” Hopkins writes, “the gross tonnage of the largest passenger ships has grown an average of 1.59 percent per year.” He contrasts this to the growth rate of the height of tall buildings – which in America grew by an average of a mere 0.24% a year between the completion of the Empire State Building in 1931 and the One World Trade Center in 2020. Moreover, if you look at the data on passenger ship tonnage from the mid-1990s, the rise in size is borderline exponential.

Of course, building stuff on land faces different challenges to building stuff to float on the open ocean. But what the experience of ship manufacturing suggests is that we haven’t necessarily lost the fundamental ability to design and assemble big bits of infrastructure. Rather, there’s something else getting in our way – NIMBYs.

Three Big Ideas #12

Three Big Ideas is our weekly roundup of ideas (and our takes on them) in entrepreneurship, innovation, science and technology, handpicked by the team.

In this week, Eamonn Ives discusses likening poor scientific research to dangerous lab equipment, Philip Salter writes about when governments act swiftly, and in a guest post, Patrick King of Reform think tank explains how the Civil Service Fast Stream can up its game.