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 on why a panel left him bullish on Britain, and what a new paper teaches us about the challenges of decarbonising energy use, while Anastasia Bektimirova discusses the ‘pivot penalty’ facing researchers.
⚡ Eamonn Ives, Research Director
Detractors of renewable energy love to point out that wind and solar only generate power when the conditions are right. They’re not technically wrong, but the critique is increasingly outdated. Advances in battery technology mean that greater quantities of clean energy can be stored and discharged to the grid when wind speeds are low or the sun isn’t shining.
Batteries, however, aren’t the only innovative fix to renewable power’s stop-start nature. Smart technologies that easily allow people and businesses to adjust their power consumption to times when energy is abundant are gaining in popularity. In theory, they represent a handy way to smooth out imbalances in supply and demand. Yet, according to a new paper, smart technologies should not be seen as a panacea.
Researchers ran an experiment to investigate how people respond to ‘peak events’ – periods of high-energy demand, when electricity is expensive and users are rewarded for cutting back. One group in the study was given fully automated tech that reacted to peak events without them lifting a finger. Another used app-enabled devices requiring minimal effort. A third group made manual adjustments.
What the researchers found was striking:
“[H]ouseholds with passive, automated responses reduced consumption five times more than those required to take any action at all, even when the burden is greatly reduced via smart technology. The provision of enabling technologies alone made no difference in households’ responsiveness, as compared to a fully manual setting, when active participation was still required.”
Ultimately, they conclude that the “opportunity cost of time and effort – not technology limitations – may be the fundamental obstacle to unlocking electricity demand flexibility.” Thus, if smart technologies are to play a bigger role in decarbonising the grid, this study suggests that they’ll need to be clever enough not to count on their lazy human operators.
🌀 Anastasia Bektimirova, Head of Science and Technology
A study published in Nature last week mapped 25.8 million papers and 1.7 million patents and found a “pivot penalty”: the further a work strays from its author’s prior topics, the less likely it is to land in the top-5% of citations. Papers with the smallest pivots hit that bar 7.4% of the time, while the highest-pivot papers manage it 2.2%. The pattern holds across 93% of scientific sub-fields and has grown steeper over the past five decades. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, when scientists pivoted en masse to address urgent needs, those who ventured furthest from their established expertise faced, on average, the same penalty despite working on high-demand research. The data suggest that when researchers pivot, they pay a price that remains even in moments when pivoting is most needed.
At first glance, the pivot penalty seems to pit deep expertise against exploratory breadth. But the paper also hints that the problem is institutional. Large pivots underperform partly because outsiders struggle to penetrate new audiences and lack the conventional combinations that editorial gatekeepers reward. Researchers who step outside their established niche may face subtle hurdles: specialised communities can be sceptical of outsiders, peer reviewers may judge cross-domain work more harshly, and funding mechanisms are frequently siloed. As the study notes, the design of research culture and incentives makes major shifts difficult – from the narrow specialisation of expertise to funding systems that reward staying in one’s lane.
A lot of R&D and policy thought these days goes into the diffusion of AI-driven methodologies across science fields. But while AI-mediated knowledge networks are redrawing the established borders, those legacy patterns may be depriving science of valuable cross-pollination. In many ways, AI tools can lower the barriers for fields to interact with each other, and the less-quantitative fields can start using quantitative methods more. And on a GO-Science panel where I participated last week, a big question was around how to effectively upskill scientists at different career stages for Science in the Age of AI. That would require pivoting for some.
Efforts may falter unless we lower the pivot penalty and make breadth a feature of modern scientific careers. First, the boundaries between disciplines should be made more permeable. For example, collaborations and researcher mobility across fields should be explicitly encouraged. Second, we could treat an academic career like an investment portfolio of specialisms to develop diverse skillsets without being penalised for not having a single hyper-specialised focus. Third, we need to broaden what counts as valuable output. Developing methodological tools and software that can be used by many across different fields should be treated as first-class research outputs and not as byproducts. Two-way industry-academia exchanges are also part of the mix. Steps like these could help create a research ecosystem ready to adapt and innovate.
🇺🇦 Eamonn Ives, Research Director
This morning I had the pleasure and the privilege of talking on a panel with an audience of inspirational Ukrainian founders as part of the UK-Ukraine TechBridge. We were tasked with answering the question of “why the UK?” As I walked over to the event in the drizzling rain I could think of at least one reason why not the UK. But fortunately many more to the contrary sprung to my mind.
Critically, I think many of the main draws for entrepreneurs to Britain are things that are hard to get right. Our dense concentration of elite universities, not just in the Golden Triangle, but dotted across the length and breadth of the country, could not be conjured out of thin air. Nor too could our allure to international talent be. Our deep capital markets may not rival those in the US, but they do stand head and shoulders above Europe’s. Similarly, our language, geography, currency and legal system are blessings that could not simply be legislated for overnight.
This is not to say that Britain has challenges to overcome. But those obstacles to growth that do exist are mostly well understood and are relatively solvable. Planning policy, for instance, should be liberalised to enable the construction of more homes in productive areas, more transport connections where they are needed, and more energy assets to power the economy. Meanwhile, the tax system should be streamlined – with punishing high marginal rates eliminated so that we never disincentivise economic activity wherever possible. Regulation of emerging industries like autonomous vehicles, drones, lab-grown meat and so on should embody the spirit of ‘permissionless innovation’ to allow innovative companies to use Britain as a test-bed to roll out groundbreaking technologies.
Of course, I’m not suggesting that any of these bottlenecks could be remedied overnight. But as problems go, these aren’t necessarily bad ones to have.
Back in January, The Economist ran a piece outlining the “credibility trap” which the Labour Party found itself in once it went from being His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition to having its hands firmly on the levers of power. Prior to moving into Number 11, Rachel Reeves repeatedly sought to assure businesses by promising not to raise any of the main taxes and to abide by strict fiscal rules. Now faced with actually managing the country’s finances, there’s a strong argument that these guarantees are forcing the Chancellor into making sub-obtimal choices that make little economic sense in the long run.
News from the IMF this week that Britain’s future growth figures are expected to be higher than previously thought will therefore be well received on Downing Street. A bigger economy means bigger receipts for the Treasury, and thus fewer spending trade-offs. The credibility trap becomes that little bit less suffocating.
Perhaps more significantly, however, was that the revision came with what the Financial Times described as “political cover” for Reeves to amend her fiscal rules, opening up the possibility for her to extricate herself from the credibility trap. To promote stability, it recommended switching to annual, rather than twice-yearly, assessments of the public finances by the Office for Budget Responsibility, and “implementing additional revenue or expenditure measures as needed if shocks arise.” This wasn’t exactly a green light for radically changing course on tax, but it could grant the Chancellor grounds to have a more grown-up conversation about the nation’s fiscal situation.
Virtually all taxes drag on the economy, but not all do so in the same way. Economists generally see the wisdom in low but broad-based levies – such as income or consumption taxes – and warn against systems which impose high marginal rates and those which artificially distort individual decision making. It is these latter features which really destroy growth by discouraging economic activity. An historical example might be William III’s 1696 ‘Window Tax’; a more contemporary one would be Stamp Duty Land Tax, which stifles labour mobility by making it harder for people to move to where their skills are best deployed.
Whether or not Reeves takes advantage of the IMF’s helpful pronouncement is anyone’s guess. As much as it might make economic sense to rationalise the tax system, electoral sense may come up trumps. The pledge not to increase any of Income Tax, National Insurance and VAT was a signature manifesto commitment. Reform, now the main threat to many Labour MPs, are running on a platform to slash personal taxes considerably. The Government is still feeling the heat from its Autumn Budget which cut Agricultural and Business Property Relief.
That being said, Labour is still less than a year into governing. Four more will elapse before voters go to the polls again, and it’s not unthinkable that they will be more inclined to reward growth than they will be to punish backpedaling. Moreover, as evidenced by the recent howls from the farming community, it’s not necessarily true that the political consequences of hiking taxes on supposedly narrow groups are easily brushed aside – as may have to happen under the current rules if spending goes up.
With global economic volatility spiralling, this is not the time to abandon caution. But caution that prevents sensible adaptation is anything but. So far the Chancellor has frequently found herself boxed in, but this week’s IMF verdict was more than a minor upgrade in growth expectations – it was a route out of the credibility trap.
As You Wish
Building on a recent paper with the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) on how to build the National Data Library (NDL), our Head of Science and Technology Anastasia Bektimirova released follow-up work jointly with TBI this week, focused on what data researchers and innovators in academia and industry wish they had, and what’s getting in their way when trying to access and work with data.
It’s not a paper, but a website, mapping both barriers and opportunities. The findings are worth a read. Respondents from academia and industry have already revealed that it can take 50-150 weeks to access health data, HMRC Datalab has insufficient computers, some datasets haven’t seen updates for several years, compute power is “woefully poor,” and people are spending months just finding out what data exists. But the findings also give clarity about what’s possible. For example, detailed emissions data by industrial sites could accelerate decarbonisation, traffic and mobility data could provide “unprecedented understanding of accessibility, transport and inequalities,” and NHS records linked across care settings could transform treatment development.
The website is built as a living platform, designed to grow and become more useful over time, and inform NDL development as it takes shape. Anyone can share their insights, ideas, and frustrations related to data access. Ultimately, the NDL’s practical usefulness will depend on how well it meets actual user needs rather than assumptions about them.
🔄 Eamonn Ives, Research Director
Here at The Entrepreneurs Network, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to reduce barriers to entry for ambitious startups looking to shake up markets and take on established corporates. What we’re probably guilty of, however, is not spending as much time thinking about reducing barriers to exit. But a new working paper shows why it’s crucial, for those interested in boosting productivity, that the latter side of the equation gets sufficient attention.
Nobody actively wants to see individual firms fail, but it’s a fact of life that many will. For whatever reason, when companies do fall by the wayside, there are various motions to go through in terms of formally closing down. Depending on where you are in the world, this process can be relatively more or relatively less burdensome – in terms of things like costs that may need to be paid, or the time involved in actually shutting down.
In their paper, economists Shoumitro Chatterjee, Kala Krishna, Kalyani Padmakumar and Yingyan Zhao explain how Indian firms face particularly high barriers to exit – with the process of voluntary closure taking 4.3 years to complete on average, compared to 15 months in the UK, and 12 months in Singapore. This harms productivity by trapping resources in less productive firms (allocative inefficiency in economist-speak), and lowers incentives for new firms to enter by reducing expected profits.
As well as diagnosing the issue, Chatterjee et al. also test possible remedies. They look at what impact subsidies for both entry and exit may have on different economic outcomes. Altogether, they find that: “spending the same amount on reducing exit barriers raises value added by more, productivity by much more, though it raises employment by less.”
How generalisable the paper’s findings are is up for debate, but it nonetheless should serve as a timely reminder to anyone interested in increasing business dynamism. It’s critically important to think about what can be done to enable as many would-be firms to enter a market – and part of that includes thinking about what can be done to make it easier for existing firms to leave it.
🤖 Philip Salter, Founder
By 2028, Matt Yglesias thinks AI could dominate every other policy debate. Voters should demand that politicians can show real comprehension – not just the ability to reel off slogans – and policy experts must translate tech hype (or doom-mongering) into workable rules.
This probably requires more honesty about the way things look to be panning out:
“The productivity promise of self-driving trucks is very real, but the promise is that it will eliminate truck drivers’ jobs, which is going to be touchy. Lying to people won’t help.”
We’re still in the slow-burn phase of disruption, yet history – from the Luddites to the Plug riots – shows that social change can cause social unrest. Politicians therefore need to plan now for the first-order shocks: unemployment, a shrinking payroll-tax base, congestion from cheap autonomous travel, soaring power demand, and already-tight housing markets.
Yglesias offers concrete tools – congestion and carbon pricing, planning reform, and a shift from payroll to pollution taxes – to maximise AI’s upside and blunt its harms.
This isn’t to take away from optimism. Just as industrial-era governments leveraged new wealth to abolish things like child labour, an AI-rich society could well take this to another level, ending disease and ushering in a future of radical abundance. But the road will be rocky, and for this to go as smoothly as possible, we need an upgrade – not in technology, which is racing ahead, but in our political systems.
⛱️ Jessie May Green, Events and APPG for Entrepreneurship Coordinator
Wind turbines peppered the foothills of the Pyrenees where I used to live in France, and I always found them exceedingly beautiful; especially at sunset. However, this sentiment is not shared by all – wind farms have long been a notable nemesis of NIMBYs. So, it is against the odds that one 116-turbine site off the coast of East Sussex is now emerging as a tourist hotspot.
Brighton-based fishermen are venturing into the business of boat tours, for locals and tourists curious to get up close to the turbines themselves. Not only does this create jobs, it also gives opportunities for people to learn about renewable energy in an experiential way. As one tour operator put it:
“A lot of people don’t really understand what the farm does. They think it takes one turbine to power a kettle, but once you explain it to them, and they realise all that goes into it and what it does, they’re quite impressed.”
This story brings hope that, as well as catalysing progress towards a more secure energy future for Britain at the national level, renewable energy projects can also bring positive impacts at the local level.
This is not to say that the concerns of locals were never valid – there are always environmental impacts from projects like this, and careful and considered cost-benefit analyses are important. However, if concerns are with appearances only, perhaps it’s time to get introspective about what we consider ‘beautiful’ – and be open to the fact that this can change. In the words of one wind farm tourist:
“Rampion got a lot of bad press because some people hate the look of them [wind turbines]. But I think coming to see them up close might make people think, you know what, they're actually really beautiful, graceful and technically amazing.”
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 a new paper emphasing the importance of reducing barriers to exit, Philip Salter implores politicians to consider the second-order impacts AI could have, and Jessie May Green writes about the unexpected opportunities emerging from the energy transition.
First up, if you’re not one of the hundreds of founders who’ve already completed our Entrepreneurs Survey, now is the time to do so. It will take less than ten minutes, and the anonymised results will help us tell politicians and civil servants – as well as the rest of the country through the media – what entrepreneurs are currently thinking about the state of the economy. This is the most efficient way to have an impact (you’ll also be invited to the launch event). Most of the questions can be answered with a single click, but for those who really want to get into things, there is also the opportunity to write in your own words what entrepreneurs need from politicians.
I don’t want to sway you, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a fair few mentions of the ongoing R&D Tax Credits debacle. For background, you may be interested in my thoughts on this matter from last year. Without wanting to sound overly dramatic, the fact is that the vagaries of HMRC are destroying the livelihoods and lives of entrepreneurs up and down the country, and denting innovation in the process.
As our Research Director, Eamonn Ives, wrote in his latest Big Idea, “it isn’t enough for a firm to suddenly decide that it can flip a magic R&D switch and have innovation follow as a result. Rather, […] innovation requires time, trial and error, and consistency to yield results.” He cites fresh academic research that finds that “persistent investment in R&D is critical for small firms to fully realise the innovation gains derived from the ‘learning effects’ and ‘success breeds success’ mechanisms.”
In short, HMRC is constraining the compounding effect of investment.
We’ve already heard enough horror stories to fill a Stephen King novel, but the more you let us know about your challenges, the stronger our case becomes when we’re advocating for you. We’ve already connected some of you to journalists to share your experiences in the media, and we will continue to do so. And we’ll soon be hosting a roundtable on this issue, so whether you’re able to add to the weight of evidence – or would like to be part of technical discussions about how to fix things – let me know.
Good News Travels
It’s the nature of our trade that we talk about problems, and how to fix them. But from time to time we need to celebrate what’s working, which is why I’m happy to share an opportunity to do exactly that from the Department for Business and Trade.
On the back of our input into the forthcoming SME Strategy, the Department for Business and Trade is looking to feature some success stories and case studies from entrepreneurs to reflect different themes of the strategy alongside innovative and impactful support programmes.
In the first instance they’re looking for a 100-150 word teaser which should include:
Brief description (business or programme name, sector, location, type of government support you’ve already received);
Impact highlight (across growth, productivity or community benefits);
Innovation or unique approach that sets it apart (i.e., new product/service);
Contact details of business for follow-up.
If you send them to us, we’ll forward them straight on to the Department.
Loud Voices
Many entrepreneurs are – or will become – parents, yet the intricacies of managing a business while raising children are seldom talked about in depth. We would like to change that, and to create a space where parents feel safe to explore the challenges of running a business while also running a household. It is all being led by our brilliant Adviser, Kajal Sanghrajka – herself an entrepreneur and new parent.
First off, on 4 June we’ll be hosting the first in an online series on Parenting and Entrepreneurship. Kajal will be joined by Anna Sofat of One Loud Voice for Women and Zoë Dagless of Meliora Financial Planning. As you might expect, there are a lot of thorny policy issues to be discussed here. Find out more here.
WhatsUpdate
The ball is now rolling on WhatsApp. Anyone can join here for occasional announcements. Patrons and Advisers can join here for a closed group to coordinate on strategy, while Patrons, Advisers and Supporters can join here for a closed group for early event invites and ad hoc media requests. Our other groups are slowly getting off the ground, but we’ll develop these further following meetings and in-person events.
The TL;DR is this: if you’re keen to get early invites to our events and the chance to talk to the media, now’s the time to join us as a Supporter.
Policy Updates
Our Policy Updates newsletter is back. The first was in partnership with Kingsley Napley and focused on the Immigration White Paper. Read it here, and drop me an email if you want to partner with us on future updates.
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 what a new research paper tells us about maximising the effectiveness of R&D, Philip Salter discusses how non-tariff barriers are now the real impediments to trade, and Anastasia Bektimirova reflects on ARIA’s Summit.
🔬 Eamonn Ives, Research Director
We all know that a dog isn’t just for Christmas. Nor too – fresh academic evidence suggests – should R&D be, if firms investing in it want to stay innovative, that is. In a new paper, the authors assembled a rich dataset of 743 Irish firms, observed each year between 2012 and 2018. Among their results, they found that “persistent investment in R&D is critical for small firms to fully realise the innovation gains derived from the ‘learning effects’ and ‘success breeds success’ mechanisms.” In other words, it isn’t enough for a firm to suddenly decide that it can flip a magic R&D switch and have innovation follow as a result. Rather, it underscores the idea that innovation requires time, trial and error, and consistency to yield results.
That wasn’t the study’s only finding, however. They also examined the role of R&D ‘diversity’ in successful innovation – with diversity determined by how many ‘Research Priority Areas’ any given R&D spending was focused on. (Research Priority Areas are a list of 14 variables, developed by the Irish Government, and include things like Manufacturing Competitiveness, Innovation in Services and Business Processes and Data Analytics, Management, Security and Privacy.) Ultimately, what the authors found was that having a more diverse R&D portfolio led to lower innovation returns – as they put it, “higher R&D diversity can lead a firm to become the so-called ‘jack-of-all-trades, master of none’.”
What lessons can we take away from this? First, if firms are serious about innovation, they need to engage in it constantly – the effects of R&D spending appear to compound over time, and businesses hoping that a sudden spike in investment will yield returns may end up disappointed. Second, R&D spending also seems to be most effective when it is more targeted on a single problem.
Just this week, the Government announced the steps it was taking to move towards ten-year funding cycles for R&D – which, it says, “will better support the ability to form long-term partnerships with industry, build and develop skills and talent, and foster international collaborations.” While we shouldn’t take this as a given, the results of this latest paper should give us confidence that we’re headed in a better direction.
📦 Philip Salter, Founder
Tariffs make headlines, but they aren’t the only blockers to international trade. Non-tariff barriers are now the more significant barrier globally, with broader and often less visible negative impacts on trade, welfare, and economic efficiency.
For the UK, the lowest of the low-hanging fruit is reducing barriers with the European Union. A new paper from Aston University puts some numbers on the sectoral trade gains from Mutual Recognition of Conformity Assessment (MRCA). In other words, mutual recognition for testing (e.g., a lab checking that a toy’s paint contains no lead), inspection (e.g. an expert visiting a factory to see that fire-doors work), and certification (e.g. an accredited body issuing a formal certificate saying, “this toaster meets Regulation 123”).
The authors use bilateral trade data for 2010-2023 and a gravity model to find that clauses on Mutual Recognition of Conformity Assessment raise exports by about 9.8% on average. The gains are concentrated in sectors that rely heavily on third-party conformity assessment and that have high value per unit (for example, electrical machinery, general industrial machinery, dairy products and clothing), and can exceed 30-50% for some products.
There are a handful of areas where MRCAs would be a net negative – e.g. rail locomotives, where system-level safety approvals are not fully covered by MRCA, so firms live with two regimes yet lose the home-market preference they once enjoyed – but they are the exceptions that prove the rule.
The UK-EU trade deal is a great first step, but to really get trade flowing will require some further deep thinking and recognition.
🌐 Anastasia Bektimirova, Head of Science and Technology
If you spotted my X thread capturing some insights from a panel on science-based startups and entrepreneurial scientists at last week’s ARIA Summit, you caught just one slice of what made the whole event so interesting. Another panel – with Hayaatun Sillem (CEO of the Royal Academy of Engineering), Tom Kalil (CEO of Renaissance Philanthropy and former Deputy Director for Policy at the White House Office for Science and Technology under Presidents Clinton and Obama) and Dan Cole (ARIA’s Chief of Staff) – unpacked a tension in our innovation ecosystem: a system with specialised silos up against problems that often demand collaboration.
Since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve developed institutions that have become increasingly siloed. And, as Hayaatun noted, “we tend to have a real attachment” to that.
“We really prize the intellectual discovery end of the research and innovation ecosystem. And when you learn to cherish the application, deployment end, you realise you need all of those different groups to come together or you just can't achieve that… [Collaboration is] the only way we are going to solve the incredibly important and wicked problems that we face or exploit the exhilarating opportunities."
Tom observed that “the world has problems, but universities have departments,” and governments are organised along similar lines. These organisational boundaries exist for a reason – specialisation helps us cope with complexity – but crossing them isn’t costless, so there needs to be sufficient reason to do it.
The panel highlighted examples of effective cross-sector collaboration, with the COVID-19 pandemic as perhaps the most powerful recent case. When faced with an utterly compelling, shared goal, people can overcome hardwired resistance in remarkable ways. But a more challenging question is what happens “in peace time” – how do we maintain that collaborative spirit without a crisis driving us?
ARIA’s approach “ripped up the rule book,” which was described as an “utterly radical act.” Unlike traditional funders who often come with detailed specifications about who’s allowed to participate, ARIA doesn’t define people by career stage, experience, papers or patents. Instead, they focus on understanding “what you offer, what your motivations are” and consider individuals in the context of wider teams. ARIA-supported collaborations tend to involve such diverse expertise that traditional funding mechanisms struggle to support them. They also have a teaming platform which has already proven its value by bringing people together to spark collaborations that would be unlikely to happen otherwise.
A challenge ARIA faces is maintaining its distinctive approach while finding the right “docking interface” with the rest of the innovation ecosystem to ensure that its potential delivers real impact. I like to think about that challenge and ways to respond to it as another type of “product” that could come out of ARIA. If some approaches ARIA tries prove successful, they could become a model not just for ARIA, but for other science funding bodies, like the research councils, to adopt as well.
The panel closed with advice for anyone wanting to enable better collaboration in their own work. First, be mindful of who you’re spending time with – if everyone agrees with you, you’re probably missing out. Second, seek out your harshest critics as unexpected allies. And third, when tackling complex problems, think carefully about the minimum “coalition of the willing and able” needed to make progress: who needs to be involved, what steps they need to take, and how to make it as easy as possible for them to say yes.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, government business policy was constantly and rapidly changing. From not knowing what support was on offer, to uncertainty about what various rules actually meant, even the most clued-in entrepreneurs told us they were struggling to keep up. For that reason, we launched our Policy Updates newsletter – which aimed to provide information to entrepreneurs about what the latest developments coming out of Whitehall meant for them.
While the pandemic is now thankfully a distant memory, we think there’s still value in formally communicating to our network about what’s going on in the policy world – and to that end, we’re firing up our Policy Updates once again. We’ll only send these when we think there is a timely, relevant update that impacts a majority of entrepreneurs in our network. Alongside the team at The Entrepreneurs Network, we will work with trusted experts – lawyers, accountants, academics, economists, consultants – on these updates. If you’re an expert and would like to be considered for inclusion, please drop us an email.
Today’s Policy Update is about the changes proposed by the Immigration White Paper, which was unveiled last week. We know that many startups critically rely on international talent – from the staff they employ, to the people who found them, and the investors who back them. We’ve partnered with the law firm Kingsley Napley on this one – find out more about them at the bottom of the Policy Update.
First the good news. Right now, you can materially contribute to making the UK a better place to start and grow a business. The bad news is that it involves filling out this survey.
We get it. Nobody likes filling out surveys – least of all me. But this one really matters.
We want the insights of actual entrepreneurs – not simply sole traders or senior decision-makers in large firms, who already have their own ways of getting their views across. We pride ourselves on being the voice of entrepreneurs, so we’ve created a real opportunity for your voice to be heard by those in Westminster.
This isn’t something we wanted to do by halves – that’s why we’ve crafted it in partnership with the experts at Public First. We’ve tested it with real entrepreneurs and I promise it will only take you between six and ten minutes.
If enough of you respond, we’ll run it on a regular basis. Some of the questions in it will remain the same each time, allowing us to track trends on various issues, while others will focus on topical issues that might be dominating the conversation. Everyone on this newsletter will be able to feed into what we should ask.
As a bit of an inducement – not that you need it, of course – we’ll be inviting those who respond to a launch party for the results in the City of London next month at Wedlake Bell. Places for that will be on a first-come basis, so don’t delay – fill out the survey here.
Island of Stragglers
As you’ll know, one of the survey questions concerns visas and immigration. This was a last-minute decision in response to the Government’s Immigration White Paper, which was released on Monday.
It’s bad news for British businesses. Under the plans set out in the White Paper, fewer jobs will qualify for sponsorship as the skill threshold for Skilled Worker visas rises to degree level, with only some mid-level roles temporarily allowed under a new Shortage Occupation List.
At the same time, minimum salary requirements will increase, Graduate visas will be shortened to 18 months, and the Immigration Skills Charge will rise by 32% to £1,320 per year. English language requirements will be tougher, including for dependants. The path to Indefinite Leave to Remain will be extended to ten years for Skilled Worker visa holders, with some accelerated routes, and reportedly these changes could apply to current visa holders, subject to consultation.
As Nick Rollason, Head of Immigration at the law firm Kingsley Napley, explained in the Financial Times, the combination of higher fees, higher salary thresholds and a potential ten-year wait for settlement could push the total cost of sponsoring a skilled worker with a partner and two children as high as £67,000, if the employer bore the full cost.
If the ten-year wait is imposed widely, it would be disastrous for attracting and retaining talent here. If it applies to those who are already here, it would be immoral – and likely illegal, as was the case in 2009 when the government tried to do something like this with the Highly Skilled Migrant Programme (HSMP) visa.
A nod was given to the needs of entrepreneurs, with things like the Government looking into potentially doubling of the High Potential Individual (HPI) visa, which is exactly what we called for in Job Creators 2024. But as Bella Rhodes argues in City A.M., exceptional and entrepreneurial talent is just the tip of the iceberg. The risk isn’t so much becoming a nation of strangers, but becoming a nation of stragglers.
As you might expect, there are a lot of conversations happening about how to have an impact before some of this becomes law. If you’re keen to have your say – besides filling in the survey, which, of course, you’ve already done or shared – drop me a message so I can know to keep you updated.
Peer Review
As you may have spotted, on Monday we released a letter on the Data (Use and Access) Bill. Our request was a rather modest one. As I wrote for Forbes:
“The proposed amendments reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of AI development. They would impose crushing transparency obligations – like monthly reporting of comprehensive training data – that bear no relation to how modern AI systems are actually built.”
It was signed by the great and the good: Professor Lord Tarassenko (Oxehealth), Professor Alison Noble CBE (Intelligent Ultrasound), Sir John Michael Brady (Perspectum, Optellum, Naitive Technologies, ScreenPoint Medical, and Oxford Community Diagnostics Centre), Professor Niki Trigoni (Navenio), Professor Paul Newman (Oxa Autonomy), and many more besides. Lord Tarassenko went on to mention the letter in the House of Lords.
Drop me a message if you have views on this thorny but critical policy issue.
Lilacs Are New
This week also saw the release of the final report from The Lilac Review. I’ve been on its Steering Committee, so it’s wonderful to see this come to fruition. The Review sees the launch of the LILAC Centre for Disabled Entrepreneurship, the UK’s first flagship business incubator and research centre dedicated to advancing the success of disabled entrepreneurs.
🐽 Eamonn Ives, Research Director
Whether it’s the bacon in your butty or the bangers with your mash, pork plays a starring role in some of Britain’s most cherished delicacies. Nearly five million pigs are reared each year in the United Kingdom, producing close to one million tonnes of meat. And while that might result in some tasty meals, it also serves up a number of less desirable consequences.
One of those is a virus called porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PPRS) which causes pneumonia, stunts growth and can even kill pigs. Most obviously, it’s a serious problem for the infected pigs themselves, but it’s also a significant burden for the pork industry too – causing billions of dollars of losses globally.
Enter PIC – or the gloriously titled Pig Improvement Company – a British biotech firm. Harnessing the power of CRISPR technology, they genetically modify pig embryos to cut out the receptor used by the PRRS virus to infect its unwitting host. Test data shows that the process results in pigs which are immune to 99% of the known versions of the PRRS virus. No doubt thanks to these impressive numbers, the technology has just been given the seal of approval from America’s Food and Drug Administration – meaning they agree that it is safe to eat.
Technological answers to increase how ‘efficiently’ farmers can rear livestock usually, and often rightly, come with a lot of ethical baggage. But this development seems to me to be an unalloyed positive. If rolled out across farms, fewer pigs will suffer and there will be less wastage overall – including in terms of carbon emissions and other pollutants created by the pork industry.
Irrespective of if you eat pork or not, this ought to be news to cheer – or happily oink at.
💷 Will Prescott, Senior Research Fellow, Bright Blue
On Monday, the Government unveiled its new Immigration White Paper. One of its core pledges is to uprate the baseline minimum annual salary requirement for Skilled Worker visas – which itself had only very recently been increased from £26,200 to £38,700 by the previous Conservative Government.
While there’s every reason to believe this will reduce numbers of immigrants coming into the country, there’s a risk that it creates an insurmountable cliff edge for many promising, younger people who are just starting out in the workforce, including foreign graduates who studied at British universities. (While such individuals can remain in the UK to work for up to two years on a Graduate visa, the Government is now vowing to cut this route to just 18 months.)
Fortunately, as outlined in Bright Blue’s new essay collection, A positive contribution, there is a relatively simple solution – vary the salary threshold based on age.
Median weekly pay varies substantially by age. According to 2024 ONS data, the median weekly wage for someone aged between 22 and 29 – the typical age range for recent university graduates – was £621 per week, considerably lower than the equivalent figures for 30 to 39-year-olds and 40 to 49-year-olds, which were £769 and £823 per week respectively. In addition, because younger workers have more years to pay into the tax system, and are less likely to rely on services such as healthcare, their lifetime fiscal impact on the UK Treasury will be lower.
Accordingly, if we impose higher thresholds for older workers while maintaining lower ones for younger skilled workers, we can balance the economic need to recruit foreign talent with the public’s growing desire to reduce net migration further and ensure that those who stay make a lasting contribution to their new home. In all sorts of areas – from the minimum wage to perks like subsidised travel – we apply policies differently depending on age. Perhaps it’s time to do the same in our immigration system?
🩺 Jessie May Green, Events and APPG for Entrepreneurship Coordinator
The use of plants in medicine predates written records. ‘Herbalism’ and ‘medicine’ were interchangeable until not too long ago, and trainee medical doctors in the UK were taught botany until the 20th century. Yet, in the 21st century, many of us would struggle to point out the lemon balm among a sea of nettles; most wouldn’t know that the whole dandelion plant is edible, and could be effective for a range of health complaints – from acne, to arthritis, to PMS.
On Beltane, I took a walk at Olympic Park in east London – home to West Ham’s stadium and ABBA Voyage, but also a nature reserve where I saw probably twenty wildflowers with medicinal value. For example, hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna) – a traditional tonic for anxiety, grief and heartbreak, which blossoms in May to gently let us know that summer is near. There was also great mullein (Verbascum thapsus) – a trusty cough remedy due to its constituent mucilage which lines and soothes the throat. Historically, mullein was nicknamed ‘candlewick plant’ in Europe, as its flowering head was dipped in tallow to make torches. In the western US, it has another nickname, ‘cowboy toilet paper’, but I’ll let you research that one.
‘Herbalism’ and ‘medicine’ only began to diverge when researchers discovered that the active ingredients of these plants could be separated out and sold. Take meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria) as an example. Meadowsweet is a river-hugging, red-stemmed plant with small creamy flowers and a hypnotic sweet smell. Vikings used it to sweeten mead (where it got the name ‘meadsweet’ which eventually became ‘meadowsweet’, much like maṅgūs became mongoose). As well as tasting nice, meadowsweet contains a compound called salicin, which has anti-inflammatory and painkilling properties. Felix Hoffmann is said to have used this to synthesise the first aspirin in 1897 (‘aspirin’ coming from meadowsweet’s previous botanical name ‘Spiraea’), which is of course still sold in pharmacies today.
Save for the common plant-derived drugs – such as morphine from poppies and digoxin from foxgloves – herbalism and medicine are largely distinct now in this part of the world (unless you’re a medical herbalist). However, we may see them begin to intersect more. Clinical trials on wild plants are sparse as they are not particularly lucrative, but the Covid-19 pandemic did cause a surge in interest, so expect more research to pop up that confirms (or discredits) traditional uses. As new research comes through to back plants, the challenge for entrepreneurs in the health and wellness sectors will be to make associated products economically viable while keeping actual production sustainable. So, watch this space – and enjoy your walk.
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 brings news worth cheering about for pigs around the world, Jessie May Green looks at potential growing opportunities in using wild plants for medical purposes, and a guest contribution comes from Bright Blue’s Will Prescott on a smarter way approach to the minimal salary threshold immigrant workers need to clear.
Today, we published an open letter to the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Peter Kyle, asking him to urge Members of Parliament and Peers to reject amendments to the Data (Use and Access) Bill that threaten to undermine the Government’s careful and consultative approach to legislating on copyright and AI development. Below is the text of the letter and the full list of its signatories, who consist of leading AI founders, investors and academics. Anyone wanting to also sign the letter can do so here.
Dear Secretary of State,
Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents a generational opportunity to grow the economy, cement the UK’s strategic advantage in science and technology and reshape the delivery of public services for the better. British-based companies, researchers and institutions are already creating and using AI tools to make scientific breakthroughs, build businesses, improve health outcomes, enhance creativity and make people’s lives easier.
Since coming to power, this Government has taken decisive actions to ensure Britain can lead the world in the development of new AI technologies. The publication of the AI Opportunities Action Plan sets out the laudable ambition for the UK to be an “AI maker, not an AI taker,” and provides a solid blueprint for a thriving ecosystem of AI developers and users.
We welcome the Government’s intention to follow the consultation process and to consider the impact of any proposals before developing legislative solutions. Unfortunately, amendments to the Data (Use and Access) Bill proposed in the Lords threaten to undermine that process.
Tabled before the Government had an opportunity to review submissions to the consultation intended to help develop viable proposals for copyright reform, these amendments pose a serious threat to the UK’s potential to lead in AI. We appreciate that some Parliamentarians feel strongly about these issues, but hurried decision making of this kind will not deliver a sustainable outcome for British businesses seeking to develop and deploy innovative new AI services.
The debate around AI and copyright is complex. Navigating that complexity is not helped by legislation that sidelines the considered perspectives of those who are directly driving innovation in Britain’s AI ecosystem.
As founders of and investors in British companies that are leading the charge to keep Britain at the forefront of the global AI industry, we ask that you urge Members of Parliament and Peers to reject these amendments and instead explore workable proposals that stand up to scrutiny.
Yours sincerely,
Professor Lord Tarassenko – Founder and Director, Oxehealth
Professor Alison Noble CBE – Founder, Intelligent Ultrasound
Sir John Michael Brady – Founder, Perspectum; Founder, Optellum; Director, Naitive Technologies; Founder, ScreenPoint Medical; CEO, Oxford Community Diagnostics Centre
Professor Niki Trigoni – Founder and Chief Science Officer, Navenio
Professor Paul Newman – Founder, CTO and President, Oxa Autonomy
Mark Girolami – Sir Kirby Laing Professor of Civil Engineering, University of Cambridge
Rodolfo Rosini – Co-Founder, Vaire Computing
Stephen Roberts – Co-Founder, Mind Foundry
Michael A. Osborne – Co-Founder, Mind Foundry
Professor Philip Torr – Co-Founder, Director and Chief Technologist, Aistetic
William Briggs – Founder and CEO, Naitive Technologies
Sarah Drinkwater – Solo GP, Common Magic
Jonathan Gilmore – Founder and CEO, DeepFlow
Irina Pafomova – Co-Founder, Zestic AI
Andres Guadamuz – Reader in Intellectual Property Law, University of Sussex
John Spindler – Founder, Twin Path Ventures
Michael Slade –Founder, Retainit
Sam Bose – Founder and CEO, IntelliSense.io
Oliver Cameron – Co-Founder and CEO, Odyssey
Jeff Hawke – Co-Founder and CTO, Odyssey
Alasdair Thong – Head of Sovereign Innovation, Alloy Therapeutics
Typical. You wait months for a trade deal, and then two come along at once. But these are very different beasts. First, India; one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing economies, with a huge and youthful population. Here, a trade deal provides British entrepreneurs with easier access to a vast and expanding consumer base.
It should be acknowledged that this has been in the making since January 2022, but hats off to the Government for getting it over the line. As I said to Sifted:
“Given the strength of both countries in technology and services, opportunities will open up for British firms to offer fintech, edtech, and professional services in India without requiring a physical presence.
“Critically, UK entrepreneurs will benefit from being among the first foreign entrants in newly-liberalised Indian sectors, giving them an edge over competitors in countries without a deal.”
Having visited many of India’s big cities, I’m more bullish than most. A trip to Gurgaon sticks in my mind. It’s India's 56th largest city in terms of population, eighth largest in terms of wealth, and the country’s second-largest information technology hub. I met countless razor-sharp, hugely ambitious young people building incredible things. It goes without saying that India, like all countries, has challenges to overcome, but it also has a huge amount of potential – potential that we could tap into in more ways than just trade.
After all, everyone knows that many of Silicon Valley’s – and by extension the world’s – biggest companies are run by people hailing from the most populous democracy on Earth. The UK has also benefited hugely from Indian-born founders, as our Job Creators reports have shown.
Those reports also show that many of the UK’s most successful founders (as judged by company valuation) are foreign-born and come to the UK to study before starting and growing their businesses here. If the forthcoming Immigration White Paper limits the ability of people to stay here after graduation (as has been rumoured), the impact on the UK will be profoundly damaging to entrepreneurship. It would mean vast swathes of future high-potential firms won’t be built in the UK (it will also slam universities and local economies across Britain).
The other trade deal was, of course, with the US. While it’s understandable that the UK Government signed the deal, I think the more sober assessments of Britain’s broadsheets are about right, with Alan Beattie writing that “the pact is closer to a protection payment to a mob boss than a liberalising agreement between sovereign countries.”
For our part, as per our Towards A More Special Relationship report, in partnership with Rigby Group, we continue to make the case for small steps towards a better agreement. British businesses are certainly optimistic, expecting tariffs to be withdrawn within six months, according to polling by Boston Consulting Group.
Uncanny Valleys
Our Head of Science and Technology Anastasia Bektimirova sat down with Graeme Reid, Professor of Science and Research Policy at UCL, to discuss the forces reshaping Britain’s innovation landscape since the 1980s. Having advised governments on science policy over the years, Graeme shared thoughts on how academia-industry-government relationships have shifted over the decades.
“The valley of death weakness has been diagnosed many times. We know the problem and don’t need another review to confirm it. What we need now is a solution.”
This blunt assessment cuts to the heart of a peculiar affliction: diagnosing problems in our innovation ecosystem without implementing lasting solutions.
For example, “one of the problems is the turbulence in regional funding,” he explains, describing how promising initiatives are repeatedly replaced before they can demonstrate effectiveness.
“Just as it begins to show promise – five or seven years later – it’s replaced by something similar but with slightly different terms or people, essentially starting over from scratch.”
This pattern appears across the innovation landscape, from the challenges of science-based companies scaling up to academic-policy engagement. Read the full interview here.
Butler Did It
I’m delighted to welcome Buzzacott as our latest Corporate Partner and Iain Butler, their Head of Innovation Incentives, as our latest Adviser.
Iain specialises in R&D Tax Credits, but has spent ten years as an R&D team manager and engineer himself in the space, semiconductor, and media industries, so truly understands the challenges these teams face.
“For the UK to truly thrive, it must bolster the R&D and innovation efforts of ambitious entrepreneurs and SMEs. We are committed to collaborating with The Entrepreneurs Network to ensure that SME innovation remains a focal point in Westminster’s discussions.”
We’ll be hosting a roundtable discussion with Buzzacott on R&D Tax Credits as part of our partnership. If the last few conversations I’ve had with entrepreneurs is anything to go by, I know this will be oversubscribed.
If you’re keen to discuss becoming an Adviser or Corporate Partner, you can find out more here, and book a time to speak with me here.
In our latest interview, Anastasia Bektimirova spoke to Graeme Read, Professor of Science and Research Policy at University College London. They discussed how the relationships between academia, business and government have changed in the last several decades and how these have impacted science and technology innovation in Britain.
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 explains why de minimis exemptions on imports are a good thing, Philip Salter argues the case against restricting visas for international students, and Anastasia Bektimirova dives into how the design of AI microsites influences our perception of their messages.
🧑🎓 Philip Salter, Founder
Rumours abound that the Government is considering restricting international students by curtailing the Graduate visa route. This pathway allows international students to stay in the UK for two years after graduation, or three years for those with a PhD. It makes studying in the UK more attractive and serves as a draw for universities looking to attract the very best and brightest. Even the Home Office’s own data makes it clear that being able to work in the UK after studying is a pull.
Those young people then feed talent-hungry firms, which is why business leaders across the country are urging the government to consider the critical role that international students play in the growth and success of UK businesses.
We’ve been here before. Back in 2015, we teamed up with the NUS to produce Made in the UK, which made the case for the reintroduction of a post-study work visa that Theresa May had taken away. Economic sense prevailed. When it comes down to it, the British public wants local economic growth, universities offer by the bucket-load.
Over on his essential Substack, Tim Leunig unpacks the damage that could be caused to a place like Huddersfield. The university has a £180 million turnover – outpacing the £130m turnover of the area’s top private firm, UK Greetings, much of which comes from reselling imports. In contrast, the university imports virtually nothing and is a major exporter: every international student represents money flowing into the UK.
This story repeats across the country. Research by Public First shows that in over 100 constituencies, the local university is one of the top three exporters – more than any other sector. Of those, 85 are Labour seats. As Jonathan Simons puts it: “In a lot of towns your university is your car plant, it is your steel mill.”
Let’s not make ourselves at least £10 billion poorer each year. Not again.
📦 Eamonn Ives, Research Director
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few months, you’ll know that tariffs are firmly back on the agenda. Thanks to US President Donald Trump’s zeal for taxing imports and subsequent retaliation by leaders of other countries and trading blocs, we’ve all had to become trade experts at breakneck speed. And though soaring headline tariff rates have captured most of the attention, other anti-trade related measures have also arisen.
One such example is the scrapping of ‘de minimis’ exemptions for tariffs that would otherwise apply to the import of low-value goods. Last Friday, Trump ended this ‘loophole’, as the White House calls it, which enabled parcels valued at less than $800 to enter the country duty-free. Closer to home, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced last month – while in Washington, perhaps not coincidentally – that she would review the tax treatment of low-value imports into Britain (currently our de minimis threshold is set at the much lower rate of £135).
While opinions differ on de minimis, the common justification in favour of it as a rule is that calculating and processing the tax that low-value imports would otherwise attract would simply not be financially worthwhile. Moreover, common sense dictates – and real-world evidence proves – that it would clog up already strained ports as lots of small shipments take extra time to be checked.
Some, including a lot of retail groups who stand to benefit from its abolition, argue against de minimis exemptions because it effectively creates a two-tier tax system. A more economically rational system would be neutral towards both low-value and high-value imports. Here at The Entrepreneurs Network, we’re guilty as anyone of professing our support for neutrality.
In this instance, however, I think it’s fair to say that tax idealism trades off against tax practicalities. While anyone can envision a more perfect tax system in the abstract, ensuring it works well in reality is another matter. (And, it goes without saying that reducing the scope of tariffs – as far from a feature of a perfect tax system as any – is generally going to be a good thing.)
A paper published last year estimated that ending de minimis in the US would not only reduce consumer welfare by between $10.9-13 billion, but also that these losses would be concentrated among lower-income and minority consumers. De minimismight translate to ‘of little importance’, but scrapping it would have profound consequences for living standards.
🧶 Anastasia Bektimirova, Head of Science and Technology
How much thought do we usually give to how a presentation format, such as text layout, colour palette, and visual pacing, shapes how compelling we find what we read? For example, how does the effect of the Situational Awareness microsite’s scrolling experience differ from going through a static PDF think tank policy report? A recent essay Scroll the Future: How AI microsites reshape persuasion, urgency, and memory by Ben Johnson, Professor of Practice in Research and Innovation Policy at the University of Strathclyde and Head of Science at the Centre for British Progress, makes one pause and think.
Ben writes about how these microsites – which have an influence on public discourse and policy thinking about AI – not only contain arguments about AI futures, but also constitute arguments through their very design:
“The microsite aesthetic is a velvet hammer. It hits softly but leaves a deep impression. Readers must be careful: just because a site looks serious does not mean every claim within it is equally serious. Minimalism is not a substitute for epistemic caution. [...] This carefully calibrated aesthetic performs substantial rhetorical work. It frames even highly speculative claims with an aura of plausibility and projects objectivity without having to explicitly argue for it.”
The scroll becomes our sensor, allowing these microsites to tap into our sensory apparatus: the rhythmic scrolling motion, the visual pacing of ideas, the progression through carefully designed screens. Their very form – the slow, deliberate scroll through carefully sequenced arguments – shapes how we perceive the content before we’ve even processed a single claim. Marshall McLuhan would have instantly recognised his “the medium is the message” working directly on our nervous systems in ways that can bypass some immediate rational filters.
While the strategic use of design for persuasion has a long history – from Victorian science papers whose austere typography signalled rigorous scholarship to Cold War white space giving ideologically charged arguments a veneer of neutrality – what’s noteworthy is how today’s digital environment is expanding the palette of persuasive techniques available to communicators. The microsite is an evolution of familiar rhetorical instruments which, as Ben writes, requires “new literacies not just of reading, but of pacing, aesthetic resistance, and epistemic humility.” As we scroll through these carefully designed narratives about future technological trajectories, the question becomes not just what we believe, but how the medium itself has already shaped what feels believable.
Yet we should maintain a healthy realism about the actual influence. While microsites may present certain technological futures with inevitability, the messy reality of institutional policy development and implementation tends to resist tidy narratives and the policy pathways that follow from them. They may shape the initial framing, but the real world inevitably introduces complexity that no scroll can fully contain.
Timing is everything in politics: when to call that election, when to U-turn on an unpopular policy, and when the moment’s right to spend more time with the family. It also matters to those trying to influence politics. You can have the best ideas in the world – or the worst – but you need to wait for a window of opportunity. When it comes to AI and copyright, that moment is now.
We’ve been talking about this for a fair while, and back in January last year we set out the challenges in our ‘Ronseal’ paper: Can the UK become competitive on text-and-data mining for AI? While we didn’t take an exact line on the solution, we wanted to draw attention to the fact that other countries were moving faster than the United Kingdom in securing the legal foundations for training AI models, with Japan, Singapore and the European Union each providing competitive models for the UK to consider.
Over recent months, this issue has become front-page news thanks to artists like Elton John, Paul McCartney and Dua Lipa adding their celebrated voices to the debate. Sadly, I don’t think this thorny policy is going to be solved by even the genius behind Yesterday – anyone who has a simple solution to what’s going on is either deluding themselves or lying to you.
As a new survey of 500 UK-based AI developers and investors revealed this week, there is a near-unanimous reliance on text and data mining (TDM) – the process of using automated techniques to train AI models. Of those surveyed, 99% said TDM is essential, while 76% said the absence of a copyright exemption for TDM – like that in the US, EU, or Japan – would make the UK less attractive for AI investment
For our part, we have a modest recommendation: listen to experts, including entrepreneurs. This is actually the Government line, as Ministers and officials pore over the 11,000 responses to a consultation they launched on copyright and AI in December 2024.
However, this process could all be derailed. On the back of the Data (Use and Access) Bill – a separate piece of legislation which addresses a broad range of priorities related to data – Peers have proposed adding changes to that Bill regarding how UK copyright law is applied to AI services.
Among other things, it would require developers to disclose comprehensive information regarding all text and data used in the pre-training, training and fine-tuning of general purpose AI on a monthly basis.
These proposals have been introduced outside the process of consultation that was launched precisely to inform the Government’s approach on copyright and AI. It’s a divisive issue, but surely we can all agree that any proposals with significant implications for businesses and innovation should be considered through proper channels. What’s the point of asking industry for their views if they are just going to be ignored?
Now is the time to act. It may seem perverse to dynamic founders who can pivot on a sixpence, but Westminster is a place where inertia too often rules the roost. Once the legislative train leaves the station, it can become impossible to switch tracks – even when many on board know their going the wrong way.
If you’re a founder, investor or just an interested party, drop me an email to find out how you could get involved.
Take a Punt
On Wednesday, we are hosting our second Young Entrepreneurs Forum Meetup in Cambridge. If you are a young founder – or wannabe founder – in or around the area, it would be great to see you there. (If you know of any young founders who you think should know, either pass this on or tag them in this LinkedIn post, which also helps get the word out either wider.)
The Young Entrepreneurs Forum is an international project from The Entrepreneurs Network. It aims to connect and empower young entrepreneurs who are building incredible things across the world, and to influence governments to create better enabling environments for young entrepreneurs.
⏪ Eamonn Ives, Research Director
Passing laws in Britain is usually pretty easy. Ensuring they work properly is the challenging part. We have a tendency in this country to legislate with the noblest of intentions, but also with little clarity on what success should look like. What we* might term ‘post-legislative scrutiny’ often goes missing, which creates a host of issues later down the line. (*Or more accurately in this instance, Lord Goodman, whose recent posts about the Football Governance Bill inspired this blog.)
One way to improve things would be to treat major legislation more like a scientific experiment. That would mean defining, upfront, a set of testable hypotheses: measurable goals the law is supposed to achieve, and a timeframe for achieving them. We might also want to establish a formal, independent process to judge whether those goals have been met. This task could be allotted to relevant existing regulators, or to an ad hoc Parliamentary committee scheduled to be formed however many years in the future.
This would create a credible ‘off-ramp’ for bad policies. Politicians wouldn’t have to admit personal failure if their pet policy backfires. They could point to the independent verdict and move on. It would depoliticise course correction and normalise cleaning up mistakes, rather than entrenching them out of pride or fear of bad headlines.
Of course, no system would be perfect. Measuring policy impact is messy, and attribution is often contested. But simply having to define clear, testable objectives at the outset would itself be a step forward. It would force better policymaking by making aims concrete, and by keeping open the possibility that some ideas just won’t work.
If we really believe in evidence-based policymaking, maybe it’s time we started legislating with hypotheses we’re willing to test, and willing to abandon if they fail.
🐕 Philip Salter, Founder
It’s a dog’s life. At least it is, according to Trevor Klee, an entrepreneur who makes drugs for animals. He is often asked if there is a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for animal drugs. There is – and, as he explains in Works in Progress, both human and animal regulators could learn from each other.
Back in 1983, the Orphan Drug Act was introduced to address the lack of treatments for rare human diseases – those affecting fewer than 200,000 Americans – by offering regulatory fast tracks, tax credits, and extended market exclusivity. These diseases had been largely neglected after the FDA tightened drug approval standards in the 1960s, making development too costly and risky for low-revenue conditions.
Seeing similar challenges in veterinary medicine, the animal health industry pushed in the 1990s to create an equivalent framework for neglected species and conditions. In 2004, the Minor Uses and Minor Species (MUMS) Act was introduced, going further – regulators were willing to take more risks with animals’ health, particularly for uncommon species and conditions.
In 2018, the FDA expanded the MUMS Act to include major uses in major species, if trials would be prohibitively expensive. This brought major diseases in cats and dogs into scope. Companies like Loyal aim to give dogs longer, healthier lives – and eventually help humans too.
Klee envisions a new FDA pathway for human drugs that lowers costs and complexity by allowing approval based on a reasonable link between biomarkers and outcomes, with follow-up trials within five years. This could reduce investor risk, encourage innovation in expensive fields like Alzheimer’s, reveal hidden disease variation, and make treatments more affordable.
The trade-off? Less certainty. Patients might pay out of pocket for unproven treatments and rely more on doctors’ judgement. But with strong post-market oversight, Klee thinks the benefits – access, affordability, and innovation – would outweigh the risks.
🛰️ Jessie May Green, Events and APPG for Entrepreneurship Coordinator
According to the IPCC, global greenhouse gas emissions need to peak this year in order to keep global warming to 1.5°C – or even 2°C – above pre-industrial levels. But how do we know if we’re on track for that? Thanks to Climate TRACE, data on drivers of climate change will now be available in close to real time for the very first time.
Co-founded by former US Vice President Al Gore, Climate TRACE has mobilised the tech community to unite diverse sources of climate data. Using a mixture of satellite imagery, infrared imagery, artificial intelligence, and reliable on-the-ground sources, they can track overall global greenhouse gas emissions, but also pinpoint local hotspots such as landfills and factories, and even moving sources like planes and ships.
Described by Forbes as a planetary MRI, Climate TRACE will report this climate data once per month, and with only a 60-day time lag. Promisingly, the data just published for February 2025 show that emissions have fallen on the year prior. However, the decrease was marginal, and only time will tell if this will represent a real peak. Still, this early data is imperative.
As the saying goes, you can only manage what you can measure. Ensuring a successful transition to net zero requires us to know exactly where to focus decarbonisation efforts, and this tool gives us that. Hopefully, it will also serve to create a culture of transparency and accountability that inspires collective action. Take a look around the Climate TRACE interactive map – there is much to explore.
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 argues the case for post-legislative scrutiny being written into laws from their conception, Philip Salter looks into how pets could be a gateway for approving more treatments for their human owners, and Jessie May Green writes about a new climate data initiative that promises to be a ‘planetary MRI’.
