Divide Intervention

I hope you’ll forgive another push, but our Entrepreneurs Survey is now open. If you’ve already completed it — thank you. If not, we’d value any founders who are reading to give just ten minutes of their time to do so.

We know your time is precious, so we wouldn’t ask you to spend it on us if we didn’t think it was worth it. Your responses will form the basis of our submission to the Treasury’s call for evidence on tax support for entrepreneurs, which closes soon. And while I can’t promise that the Government will do everything necessary to make the tax system perfect for entrepreneurs, this really is an opportunity to make a meaningful difference.

I’ve used Margaret Mead’s quote before and will do so again: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Have your say

If you’re not a founder, you can help us by forwarding this to entrepreneurs in your network and reposting this LinkedIn post (also feel free to connect with me while you’re there).

It’s Not Me

The Liberal Democrats have proposed breaking up the Treasury and replacing it with a new Department for Growth based in Birmingham if they were to enter government.

The proposed department would set taxes, design growth strategy, oversee major infrastructure decisions and shape spending rules. The Department for Business and Trade would be merged into it, while a separate Department for Public Expenditure would oversee spending.

All the way back in 2014, Giles Wilkes and Stian Westlake (an Adviser to us) argued for a similar idea. As with many Nesta papers from that period, it is still worth reading — not least because it explains how the reform could fail if poorly implemented.

The main risks are weaker fiscal discipline, the loss of the Treasury as an internal challenger to departmental spending demands, and coordination problems between tax, spending and growth policy. It would also shift power toward the Prime Minister and would rely on a politically strong growth department — without that, the old behaviour likely re-emerges informally.

Nevertheless, it’s a bold idea worthy of serious consideration from all parties. It also shows the long arm of influence that top quality research can have.

Still Believe

This week, Tim Shipman claimed in The Spectator (paywall) that even loyalists think Keir Starmer lacks a ‘philosophical worldview’. If the Prime Minister is on the hunt for one, we have one ready and waiting. The clearest articulation is in our statement of What We Believe, namely that:

“Entrepreneurship is one of the most powerful engines of productivity and progress. Throughout history, entrepreneurial ventures have transformed societies, lifting people from subsistence to prosperity.”

Our first signatory was Adviser Richard Browning — Founder, CEO and Chief Test Pilot of Gravity Industries. But the idea isn’t limited to entrepreneurs (or Prime Ministers). If you share our worldview, add your name to our website here.

Rise Up

Barclays is working with Female Founders Rise on The Rise Report of Female Entrepreneurship 2026. You can sign up here to receive a copy in your inbox. Women’s Health Horizons is inviting female healthtech founders and senior leaders to apply to speak at its conference on 10 March.

Rally Round

Bradley Jones, Founder of ThatRound, has joined us as an Adviser. A serial entrepreneur and angel investor, Bradley is focused on improving how UK-based startups raise capital.

Bradley sees the UK as one of Europe’s strongest places to build a company: deep financial services, strong early-stage incentives, leading universities and growing regional hubs. He believes founders need a stronger policy voice — “entrepreneurs on the front line should help shape the rules of the game” — and values our role translating founder experience into reform.

You can learn more about joining our growing ambitious band of Advisers here.

Message from our Partner

At Fora, we create flexible workspaces that empower ambitious businesses to thrive. With over 70 locations across London, the UK and Germany, our spaces are designed to fuel productivity, creativity and growth.

Now, we’re bringing that vision to The Jellicoe at King’s Cross — a dedicated hub for founders and fast-growing companies. Here, flexibility meets opportunity: scale at speed with agile workspace solutions, connect with a curated community of entrepreneurs and investors, and enjoy all the perks of a Fora membership, from wellness spaces and hospitality-grade service to events that open doors.

Surround yourself with innovators and global tech giants in one of London’s most exciting neighbourhoods.

If you’re building the next big thing, this is where you want to be.

Three Big Ideas #54

🧑‍💻 Eamonn Ives, Research Director

Nigel Farage has built his political career on making blunt, plain-spoken interventions. His latest — a promise to end Britain’s “work from home culture” if he becomes Prime Minister — certainly fits the mould. Speaking in Birmingham on Monday, Farage argued that people are more productive when labouring alongside one another. As someone who enjoys the routine of working among colleagues in my office, I have a vested interest in wanting to agree with him. But what do the hard data say?

Unfortunately, it’s a question that’s remarkably hard to answer conclusively. Much of the existing research suffers from weak methodologies (such as relying on self-reporting), small sample sizes, or findings applicable to only very specific industries. Even so, the balance of evidence suggests that the productivity impact of remote working is probably positive, or, at the very least, not meaningfully negative.

That should not come as a shock. As any student of Adam Smith will recall, the division of labour — a central driver of productivity growth — is limited by the extent of the market. By embracing remote working, firms effectively expand their potential labour pool from the local to the national (or even international). That gives employers access to a much wider range of talent, and a better chance of matching the right worker to the right task.

Other evidence suggests the declining importance of people working physically close to one another for economic growth. Writing for us in 2020, Matt Clancy pointed out how there has been a steady increase in the percentage of scientific articles published that are co-authored by academics from different institutions. In a similar vein, he also presented evidence of the growing geographic distance between inventors listed on the same patent. Insights like these suggest that physical proximity is becoming less central to collaboration than it once was — and that the ties which bind productive teams are increasingly intellectual rather than geographical.

Farage is right that Britain’s labour productivity is lower than it should be. The more our political elite focus on it as an economic indicator in need of improvement the better. But his diagnosis — and less so his prescription — misses the mark. Nostalgia for a pre-pandemic office culture may well win a few votes, but it won’t necessarily usher in a wave of productivity growth.

🏛️ Mann Virdee, Senior Researcher

There’s a simplicity to the principle ‘less is more’. Many organisations, however, gravitate towards the opposite.

Take, for example, the UK’s Office for Investment — a one-stop shop or ‘concierge service’ for dealing with Foreign Direct Investment. There’s a simplicity to that. It says to foreign investors: “if you want to engage with the UK on inward investment, just go to the Office for Investment.”

Well it might not surprise you to learn that the Government decided to put another layer on top of that with the creation of the Office for Investment: Financial Services. That seems like a good idea in principle — we obviously want to be attracting investment in Financial Services. But what about the life sciences, or quantum, or other frontier technologies? Why don’t they get their own entities in the Office for Investment? Perhaps in time they will — although then an investor looking to engage with the UK on, say, the life sciences will have to go through the trouble of figuring out whether they should be dealing with the Office for Life Sciences or the Office for Investment: Life Sciences, or one of many other bodies.

This chimes with a piece I read recently by Martha Dacombe. Government often lacks the imagination and politicians often lack the incentives to think beyond reorganisation. It’s as if the government is a carpenter with a single tool in their toolbox, and believes all problems can be solved with the same approach: the creation of a new entity, the publication of a new strategy, or a reshuffling of priorities. It confuses the means with the ends.

Incentives are a tricky problem to overcome. Which politician wants to spend time tackling tangled ecosystems when it’s far easier and politically beneficial to announce Another New Thing?

It’s time we re-evaluate how and why we set up new organisations, and work clearly with the outcome in mind. Organisations benefit from well-defined and focused missions. They should be frequently revisited to prevent unintended mission creep. Other organisations may benefit from sunset clauses requiring them to disband once they have achieved a clearly defined objective. Politicians should not underestimate the political rewards they could reap (and trust they could gain) by closing down entities that have achieved their goals instead of announcing the creation of new, poorly defined ones.

⚡ Jessie May Green, Events and APPG for Entrepreneurship Coordinator

Last month, the Government finally released its national security assessment on global biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, to a relatively hushed response from the national press. Indeed, how do you break the news that every critical ecosystem globally is on a pathway to collapse, posing a high risk to our national security and prosperity?

The assessment revealed that the UK could be left unable to feed itself if we don’t see major intervention to reverse current trends. Ecosystem degradation risks geopolitical competition for food, and with the UK reliant on imports for both food and fertiliser, that puts us in a precarious position.

To draw attention to this, some are calling on the Government to stage a prime-time televised emergency briefing across all the main channels à la the recent National Emergency Briefing, during which Lieutenant General Richard Edward Nugee said:

“If we do treat this [the climate and nature crisis] as the security challenge it is, the solutions make us stronger. We end up with more secure energy, more resilient infrastructure and a safer, more stable society. And important to me and, I hope, to you, a stronger democracy.”

This is a lesson in giving due weight to the challenge without being fatalistic. Humankind has shown its ability to invent its way out of problems before, and it can again. Now more than ever, we have the knowledge and tools available to restore our ecosystems and optimise our food systems. The assessment names some potential technological solutions — regenerative agriculture, lab-grown protein, insect protein, AI — but only time and experimentation will tell if these can be scaled to effect

Three Big Ideas #54

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

This week, Eamonn Ives ponders the productivity impacts of a pledge to end working from home, Mann Virdee discusses how and when institutional reform is required, and Jessie May Green argues innovation will be essential if Britain is to strengthen its defences against ecosystem degradation.

Power of Ten

The Government needs you. Specifically, they want your views as part of a call for evidence into the future of tax for entrepreneurs, which closes soon. This is your chance to influence it by completing our latest Entrepreneurs Survey.

Investment tax reliefs, employee share schemes, and the tax treatment of founder exits are all under consideration. Your responses will directly shape the evidence we submit.

Beyond this, your answer will inform how the Government, political parties and the media understand entrepreneurs. Your views will also set the agenda for what we work and campaign on.

It only takes around 10 minutes to complete, but will be felt in the policies that impact you and your business for years to come.

Master Stroke

Time entrepreneurs spend on administrative compliance is time they don’t spend growing their companies. Fragmented and opaque processes also enable fraud and slow down access to finance. There is a solution: The Master Key.

In our latest paper, published with Enterprise Nation and Xero, we make the case for a Unique Business Identifier combined with Verified Credentials — a “Master Key” that puts entrepreneurs in control.

Countries like Singapore, Australia and New Zealand already use this model, and the UK has laid much of the legislative groundwork. The final steps could deliver a productivity boost for Britain’s 5.7 million SMEs.

It’s time for Britain to beat bureaucracy.

Cool Operator

Our latest UK AI Fieldbook interview (supported by OpenAI) features our formidable Adviser Rodolfo Rosini of Vaire Computing.

As well as explaining Rodolfo’s audacious aim of near-zero energy computing, Mann Virdee draws out policy lessons from the frontline of building a foundational hardware company: use the state as an early customer rather than grants, fund measurable outcomes not academic approaches, and fix the UK’s scaling gap by improving capital markets and easing entry for top technical talent.

Read, like and subscribe here (especially if you need a clear explainer on reversible computing).

STEM the Flow

The Government is considering a Migration Advisory Committee recommendation to remove the PhD salary discount under the Skilled Worker visa. Today, firms can hire immigrant STEM PhDs from £33,400, but this would rise to £41,700 absent the discount. If you’ve hired — or are considering hiring — STEM PhDs via this route, please complete this short form.

Stamp it Out

As every economist (worthy of the name) knows, Stamp Duty Land Tax acts as a major barrier to mobility, discouraging moves for work, limiting firms’ ability to recruit across regions and reducing labour-market flexibility. That’s why we’re backing our Adviser Andrew Dixon OBE’s petition calling for a full Independent Review of Stamp Duty. You might want to as well.

Good Advice

As our WhatsApp Community already knows, we’ve soft-launched a website page directing founders to support. Support for UK Entrepreneurs (SEO rules everything around me) does exactly what it says on the tin — but it’s still a work in progress, and we’d like your help building it out.

We’d especially welcome suggestions from: entrepreneurs who’ve benefited from great advice, investors who share useful resources, public sector teams running overlooked support, operators who see recurring founder problems, advisers who help navigate complexity, ecosystem builders who connect people to the right help, and providers offering something special to our community.

Onyertrain

Are you plugged into Birmingham’s or Exeter’s entrepreneurial ecosystem? If not, here’s your chance to meet (nearly) everyone who matters locally — and others like you.

Our Ecosystem Builders events are deliberately light-touch but designed for deep connections. If you’re travelling in, you can also work from the space for the day, so it won’t interrupt your workflow (and you get to spend the day with us).

Birmingham is on 5 March (find out more here), and Exeter is on 24 April (find out more here).

Cool Runnings

In our latest interview for our UK AI Fieldbook series, Mann Virdee speaks to Rodolfo Rosini about how reversible computing can overcome the energy bottleneck to power the next generation of AI

Ideas to Impact

One of the best things about running The Entrepreneurs Network is meeting genuinely extraordinary people at our events each week — people building incredible businesses that restore my faith in human ingenuity and our ability to tackle the world’s most pressing problems. It’s a privilege to spend time among people like this.

That was certainly true on Tuesday, when we hosted the launch of our latest Female Founders Forum report, Ideas to Impact, in partnership with Barclays. To pick just three examples from a room of 150 phenomenal female founders: Wenmiao Yu of Quantum Dice is building cryptographic infrastructure for a post-quantum world, using quantum mechanics to secure everything from financial networks to national systems. Di Gilpin of Smart Green Shipping is cutting emissions from global shipping through wind-assisted propulsion. Magdalene Ho of Traxion Biotech is developing breakthrough therapeutics for neurological conditions. I could go on (over one hundred more times).

Victoria Collins MP, Science, Innovation and Technology Spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats, speaking at the launch

Policymakers would do well to tap into that ambition. On current trends, women may not reach parity with men in founding university spinouts until 2060. I won’t rehearse all ten recommendations here, but I will briefly summarise the three I set out today in Forbes.

First, the report argues that time — not talent — is the binding constraint, and that universities need to grant academics credible ways to de-risk career pauses. We propose Commercialisation Fellowships: time-limited buy-outs that allow academics to build companies without jeopardising publications, promotions or REF outputs. With no formal mechanism to pause an academic career, entrepreneurship can feel like a one-way door — particularly for women, who even today still shoulder the majority of caring responsibilities. A recognised, reversible pathway would make spinning out feel less risky.

Second, we argue for scaling what already works instead of endlessly piloting new schemes. Programmes such as Innovate UK’s ICURe show that salary-supported time and structured market discovery increase both spinout success and female participation. ICURe replaces informal, network-driven entrepreneurship with evidence-based customer discovery, yet remains heavily oversubscribed. Expanding proven programmes would do far more for access than creating a proliferation of small initiatives.

Third, the report calls for better data to expose hidden barriers. Current spinout statistics are patchy and over-aggregated, masking where women drop out. Requiring universities to publish gender-disaggregated data on equity, leadership and survival rates would allow much sharper diagnosis. The HESA Spinout Register is a step forward, but without demographic detail it cannot show who truly benefits.

As Juliet Gouldman, Director at Barclays Business Banking and a member of the Invest in Women Taskforce, wrote in her foreword:

“If we get this right, the UK wins: more world-class research translates into businesses, more high-quality jobs across the regions, and a stronger pipeline of diverse founders building solutions the world needs.”

I’ll end with a quote from the foreword of Seema Malhotra MP, Minister for Equalities: “If we are to deliver on our Mission for Growth, we cannot afford to leave any talent sitting on the sidelines.” Hear, hear!

Data Intelligence

James Titcomb at The Telegraph has given the Government’s £4.1 million AI Skills Hub a fairly robust kicking (paywall). You can make up your own mind by signing up here, but after having a look myself, I’m left wondering what exactly that £4.1 million was spent on.

By contrast, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, working with Number 10 Data Science, has just released an excellent public tracker for delivery of the AI Opportunities Action Plan. It clearly breaks down each commitment and shows which have been met — with progress currently standing at 76%. The Government should do this as standard for every major policy announcement.

Crossed Wires

Subscribers to our Policy Updates received a briefing on the back of a private roundtable dinner with the Rt Hon Claire Coutinho MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, which we hosted with Mishcon de Reya.

The overwhelming feeling around the table was not hostility to decarbonisation, but frustration with a system that has lost sight of cost, speed and integration. Britain has ended up with some of the cleanest electricity in the world, but also some of the most expensive — and that cost is increasingly incompatible with building and scaling companies here.

Expect more insights from these events. I think it’s the least we can do given that demand for these events often outstrips supply by a factor of fifteen.

Three Big Ideas #53

📜 Eamonn Ives, Research Director

One of the lazier tropes in political economy debates is that the United States is a free-market paragon, while in Europe it’s government bureaucrats who have their hands on the economic steering wheel.

New research, in which economists Jiandong Ju, Yuankun Li and Shang-Jin Wei review every Act of Congress and Presidential Order since the early 1970s, punctures this myth. They calculate that in an average year, 5.4 laws and 3.4 Presidential Orders are passed containing new industrial policies. Their finding that the US has long practised industrial policy holds true across parties, and they also show that the policies passed have meaningful economic impact — as evidenced in stock market reactions and changes in firms’ performance.

Of course, one easy retort is that without establishing how European governments compare, it’s hard to know whether passing 5.4 laws or 3.4 Presidential Orders a year is a little or a lot. To invoke the academic’s favourite turn of phrase: further research is required.

More interesting to my mind, however, is another part of the paper. The authors note that “many U.S. industrial policies incorporate design features that help mitigate potential drawbacks, such as explicit expiration dates and pilot programs for emerging technologies.” In other words, these measures are often time-bound, experimental, and contain built-in mechanisms that make them easier to reverse.

British policymakers should take note. Our statute books are littered with examples where well-meaning but outdated policies persist despite having limited — or even net negative — utility to wider society.

I don’t think the correct lesson to learn is that every new policy passed ought to be automatically subject to review, or only rolled out after small-scale trials have been completed. Predictability, after all, has a beauty of its own — allowing entrepreneurs and investors alike to plan effectively. Rapid adaptability matters too, especially if we’re trying to lock in a first-mover advantage in emerging industries.

Nonetheless, at the margin, when it comes to designing measures to support innovation, we should be minded to look across the Atlantic for inspiration. Intervene narrowly, experiment openly, and design off-ramps so that inertia doesn’t end up masquerading as strategy. Above all, ensure policies incentivise firms to build for the market, not for the subsidy.

♻️ Philip Salter, Founder

The Economist has written a necessary defence of London as an entrepreneurial hub, rightly describing it as “the rest of the world’s startup capital” (outside the US, of course).

The facts speak for themselves:

“It has produced more unicorns ($1bn-plus startups) than Berlin, Paris and Tokyo combined. Their alumni are now spawning a second generation of firms. London is the world’s fourth-largest venture hub, according to Dealroom, a data provider, and it is moving away from other capitals. In 2025 its startups raised $17.7bn, behind only the Bay Area, New York and Los Angeles.”

This is something many of us — particularly those deep in the weeds of trying to drive policy change — can sometimes take for granted.

Pleasingly, The Economist cites our finding that more than half of Britain’s fastest-growing startups were founded by immigrants, a result regular readers of our work will be familiar with. But today I want to focus on another theme of the article that is equally important: entrepreneurial recycling.

Entrepreneurial hubs develop through a self-reinforcing cycle in which successful startup employees use their experience, networks and wealth to become founders and investors themselves. Policymakers currently pay too little attention to this process. That is likely because, despite its disproportionate impact, entrepreneurial recycling operates at a relatively small scale: it depends on a small number of individuals exploiting tacit knowledge that is inaccessible to outsiders.

This matters for politicians and policymakers who should be focused on growth — in other words, all of them. In particular, spinouts from productive, larger firms tend to also start bigger and grow faster. At the extreme, this dynamic produces the so-called ‘Mafia effect’, most famously associated with PayPal and Skype. It is not a matter of chance that alumni from these two companies went on to found LinkedIn, YouTube, SpaceX, Palantir, Starship, Wise, and more.

We might be on the verge of our own Mafia here. As The Economist notes, former staff of Revolut and Wise have already founded more than 230 startups. It will be fascinating to see how this plays out over the coming years — and, crucially, how many choose to remain in the UK.

⚡ Mann Virdee, Senior Researcher

There is a common meme about entry level jobs requiring five years of work experience. That paradox, absurd as it is seemingly pervasive, also describes the way Britain decides which businesses to connect up to the grid.

Towards the end of last year, the National Energy System Operator changed its approach to connecting businesses to the grid from a “first-come, first serve” model to one better described as “first ready and needed, first connected.” While logical in theory to clear a huge backlog that had built up over years, it presents a new Catch-22 for founders.

Before securing a power connection, companies are now required to demonstrate their readiness by proving land and planning approvals. But for most ventures, land and planning requires investment – and that investment is dependent on securing a power connection.

As we discussed in a recent policy roundtable, some energy intensive companies are responding by exploring the potential of generating the power they need behind the meter, bypassing the grid altogether. This approach also allows firms to circumvent expensive long-haul wiring and rising energy costs.

While that may be good for those companies and their individual resilience, it makes balancing the energy system at a macro level much more difficult. That’s because it becomes a lot harder to forecast demand, and large amounts of capacity can disconnect or reconnect at short notice.

Britain’s grid is already in a parlous state. Unless the connection process is streamlined to account for the realities of early-stage investment, the ‘first ready’ concept may inadvertently push the country’s most promising industries off the grid entirely, turning things from bad to worse. This should give the government the wake up call it needs to act.

Three Big Ideas #53

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

This week, Eamonn Ives unpacks a new economics paper on doing industrial policy better, Philip Salter discusses the economic impacts of entrepreneur mafias, and Mann Virdee argues that policymakers need to think hard about Britain’s grid connection conundra.

Re-Energising British Businesses

At our roundtable with Rt Hon Claire Coutinho MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, founders warn that high costs, slow institutions and a fragmented grid are undermining Britain’s ability to build and scale energy-intensive businesses

Fee Movement

Year after year after year — report after report after report — we have made the case that Britain’s exorbitant visa fees are a false economy: raising little compared to the economic damage caused by deterring talented individuals who would otherwise be contributing to the country’s coffers.

It was therefore pleasing to hear Rachel Reeves announce in Davos this week that the Government is planning to “reimburse visa fees for select trailblazers in deep tech sectors and those joining the most promising UK companies in priority sectors.” Some like to quote the line that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” but in the battle of ideas, persistence can pay off.

At our last count, we found it costs nearly seven times as much for a skilled worker to come to the UK for five years with a spouse and a dependant compared to Australia, more than 12 times as much as Canada, and over eighty-six times — yes! Eighty-six — as much as Germany.

As friend of the network Lauren Gilbert explained in a brilliant article last month, Britain’s visa fees reduce welfare and revenue because they are misaligned with the elasticity of migrant supply across income groups. Put simply, high-skilled workers have a lot more choice on where to move to, so fees matter more to them. This means the current system raises little revenue, fails to deter the migrants policymakers claim to worry about, all while discouraging those who generate the largest fiscal surplus.

For those paying attention, this has been trailed for months. While there is always an element of playing to the crowd, Rachel Reeves has repeatedly stated that she understands that access to talent is a big deal for entrepreneurs when addressing them.

The Chancellor, of course, is right to trade in a little income on fees so the best and brightest aren’t put off coming to the UK. It can’t be said enough that 54% of the UK’s fastest-growing companies have at least one foreign-born founder or co-founder.

Now there’s just the small matter of the four other policy recommendations from our most recent Job Creators report. Namely: protecting fast-track settlement for exceptional talent; reforming the Global Talent visa to attract world-class operators; making the Innovator Founder visa more functional; and designing a selective Spinout visa for graduates and academics.

Simons Says

It was recently revealed that the Government dropped its plans for mandatory digital ID in the UK. Regular readers will be all too familiar with my views on the potential of Britain as a digital state (the uninitiated might want to read this).

To be clear, a digital identity system doesn’t need to be mandatory to succeed. Instead, we just need to make it so useful and compelling that only those with particularly strong ideological objections choose to opt out. That strikes the right balance for the UK between being both a liberal society with an efficient state that actually works for people. (Critically, for those with fundamental concerns, a well-designed system offers stronger protections, clearer oversight and greater control over personal data than the status quo.)

This week I discussed this directly with Josh Simons MP, Minister for Digital Government and Data, and have since been approached by several people who have followed our work on this. This is a policy area we will now return to in earnest. If you are an expert, entrepreneur, or simply have a serious interest in digital identity, please do get in touch.

Get on Board

Over the next month we’ll be adding some new names to the Advisory Board of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Entrepreneurship. This is made up of business groups, trade bodies, advocacy groups, ecosystem bodies and research institutes. If that’s you and you want to get involved, drop Eamonn Ives an email.

Votes in Confidence

This week, Xero published a paper as part of their Financial Confidence Taskforce, which I was delighted to chair. It argues that Britain is missing out on a generation of startups because many would-be entrepreneurs lack financial literacy. The paper is intended to feed directly into the Government’s Maple Review.

As was reported by the Daily Mail, nearly two in five small business owners say they do not know whether they were profitable last month, with more than half struggling with cash flow management. Younger entrepreneurs were most doubtful of their financial management skills and knowledge, with 35% of 18–34 year-olds agreeing that they lack the financial skills needed to manage their business.

The report reflects the collective views of the expert Taskforce and is well worth reading in full, but I want to focus on a couple of themes close to my heart.

The first is bureaucracy. As the paper makes clear, complexity does not just impose administrative costs; it actively erodes confidence. Simplifying tax and regulation should therefore be seen not only as a deregulatory exercise, but as a confidence-building intervention for Britain’s entrepreneurs.

If I were in a position of power in a Government looking for a way to make a meaningful difference — while also winning the sizeable small business vote — I would promise to go some way to dismantling the bureaucratic state. As I’ve written before, this is possible.

That said, the paper also makes clear that there are ways to support business owners even within the current levels of bureaucracy.

Crucially, confidence is not a function of information alone; it is built through repeated practice in realistic settings. This brings us back to education. Our What Applied Learning Really Looks Like report with Young Enterprise argues that abstract teaching disengages pupils when they cannot see real-world relevance, and that confidence and capability emerge only when learning is applied in realistic contexts. There is a clear through-line from applied learning in childhood to entrepreneurial confidence in adulthood. Schools should embed financial and commercial reasoning early, before attitudes towards money, risk and work become fixed.

However, there will always be those for whom schooling does not provide these skills, which means we need to ensure that support is available later on. Xero’s Unlock Your Numbers programme is one example. But I would be keen to hear about other resources you think are essential. We will soon launch a carefully curated hub of places and people where entrepreneurs in our network can get help, and so might end up recommending your suggested resources to thousands of founders. Do drop me an email.

Every Ounce

In the latest instalment of our UK AI Fieldbook series, our Research Director Eamonn Ives spoke with Benedikt Thüngen, Co-Founder of Sanome, about how AI is helping clinicians avert medical crises before they arise.

In An Ounce of Prediction, which I recommend reading in full, the pair explore how AI could enable clinicians to identify serious health deterioration earlier — shifting healthcare from reactive treatment to preventative intervention — while also unpacking the practical, regulatory and policy challenges of scaling this kind of innovation within the NHS.

These interviews matter because they sit at the intersection of policy and entrepreneurial experience. They give founders space to explain their innovations in a level of detail rarely afforded elsewhere, while also surfacing the real-world constraints they face to help policymakers understand what is actually happening on the ground.

We are grateful to OpenAI for their support of the UK AI Fieldbook series. We are keen to expand it into other sectors and themes, so if you work for an organisation interested in supporting in-depth interviews of this kind, please get in touch.

Right Place

We believe in experimentation, which is why we are trialling two new event formats.

First, on 29 January, we will host a day of co-working for around 20 tech entrepreneurs at Fora: The Jellicoe. The day will begin with a 10am meetup, coffee and short introductions, but the intention is to allow serendipity to take the lead as participants work there for the day.

While this pilot is focused on tech entrepreneurs with employees, we plan to run similar sessions with different cohorts over the course of the year. Request a place here.

Second, on 24 February we’ll host an audience with the Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt MP. There will be space for around 40 of our Patrons, Advisers and Supporters (join us here). Unlike a fireside chat where the chair gets to dominate, the bulk of the questions here will come directly from the great and the good in attendance.

You can submit your questions for Jeremy when you apply. Given he’s a successfully exited entrepreneur, I expect a few to cover business as well as politics. Request a place here.

Three Big Ideas #52

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

This week, Eamonn Ives makes the case for slightly deluded optimism, Philip Salter discusses how AI could challenge monopolists, and Labour Together’s James Howat sets out a plan to build Britain’s answer to Silicon Valley.

Three Big Ideas #52

☀️ Eamonn Ives, Research Director

In a recent blog post, the ever-reliable Hannah Ritchie makes an interesting observation — that many of us are “individually optimistic, but collectively pessimistic.” She draws on a range of data that show how wide gulfs can exist between how people perceive how they themselves are doing versus how they think life is going for their fellow compatriots.

While reading, it occurred to me that a similar divergence has repeatedly shown up in our own surveys of founders. Last time out, fully 59% told us they were optimistic about the year ahead for their own business, even though just 8% thought the same about the economy as a whole. I wouldn’t dare criticise our esteemed respondents, but with the best will in the world, I can’t help but think there will have been some wishful thinking behind those results.

Then I thought to myself, “so what?” Suppose the 84% of founders who are pessimistic about the next 12 months for Britain’s economy are right. Would we be better off if they perfectly mirrored that sentiment about their own businesses? I hardly think so. If you’re one of the brave individuals who has taken the risk to start a company and do something different, it helps to be positive — even if that also means being a little Pollyannaish.

This isn’t an ode to blissful ignorance and unwarranted bullishness. Successful entrepreneurs are those who know when to stick as well as twist. But there’s an ocean of difference between realism and fatalism. As Ritchie concludes:

“If we think that nothing can be done to improve things, we’re unlikely to try. This is one reason why I try to emphasise that there are things that each of us can do to make the world a better place. We don’t have to just sit on our hands. Without a sense of agency, we can become cynical and fatalistic that anything can change.”

🌱 Philip Salter, Founder

In December, a paper titled AI as “Co-founder”: GenAI for Entrepreneurship was released that deserved far more attention outside academia. It provides rare, large-scale evidence that generative AI is already reshaping entrepreneurship in ways that cut against many popular assumptions about AI and market power.

The authors exploit the sudden release of ChatGPT as a global shock, comparing firm creation before and after its launch across neighbouring locations within the same city in China that differed in pre-existing AI-specific human capital. They identify a large, causal increase in small-firm entry — amounting to roughly 400,000 additional firms over two years, or around 6% of all new firms created nationally in the post-ChatGPT period — driven by reduced experience, financing and managerial constraints.

This result was not a given. Many have predicted that AI would reinforce concentration, entrenching large incumbents and reducing competition. Instead, the evidence points in the opposite direction: AI appears to act as a pro-competitive technology, compressing the minimum viable scale of entry and allowing individuals and small teams to replicate capabilities that previously required significant capital and labour.

This brings to mind the predictions of James Wise, Partner at Balderton Capital and Chair of the government’s Sovereign AI Unit, in his book Start-Up Century. Wise argues that the 20th-century model of working for a single large firm for most of one’s career is breaking down. Just as automation once shifted workers from farms to factories, AI and digital tools are now automating layers of corporate middle management and administrative work, pushing more people toward independent and entrepreneurial paths.

While this shift raises real challenges for individuals and policymakers alike, it also creates an opportunity for more people to exercise agency, pursue their own interests and build livelihoods through entrepreneurship.

🏘️ James Howat, Chief Economist, Labour Together

The 100-mile corridor between Oxford and Cambridge is one of the most exciting stretches of land on the planet. It serves as a crucible for British innovation and prosperity, yet even here the usual horsemen of stagnation hold us back: local politics, planning regulations, and financing (or lack thereof).

A new report authored by Labour Together and the Centre for British Progress details how we could rid ourselves of this unholy trinity and triple the GDP of the ‘Ox-Cam Corridor’. We call our plan Project Hawking.

Project Hawking would create a single development corporation — Hawking DevCo — and grant it supreme planning authority within the Ox-Cam Corridor. This would allow it to overrule any decision by local authorities within its boundaries that it believes undermines its mission, enabling it to deliver new infrastructure at pace.

It should also be afforded powerful land value capture tools — such as levying taxes on undeveloped land or congestion charges — which we believe could make the entire project self-funding. By buying land cheaply and granting planning permission and selling it for 100x multiples, Hawking DevCo would become a low-risk money-printing machine.

Government after government has promised to turn the Ox-Cam Corridor into a British Silicon Valley. Yet none have matched their ambitious rhetoric with workable plans. Ministers should give their backing to Project Hawking, and allow this small corner of England to pay massive dividends for the entire United Kingdom.

An Ounce of Prediction

In our latest interview for our UK AI Fieldbook series, Eamonn Ives speaks to Benedikt Thüngen about how AI is helping clinicians to avert medical crises before they arise.

High Networked Individuals

Entrepreneurial networks matter. Despite popular portrayals to the contrary, entrepreneurship is far less about cut-throat competition than it is about cooperation, shared knowledge and mutual support. This reality was reinforced by recent research we conducted with American Express for their Peer Power study.

Featured in The Times and City A.M. among others, you would be forgiven for taking the headline finding for granted: 94% of SME leaders in Britain believe that supporting their peers is critical to driving business success. Yet it’s easy to forget that most people aren’t business owners and don’t have close family members who run companies. For the majority, entrepreneurship remains something observed at a distance.

As a result, many people form their views about business through television and the mainstream media, which are more likely to present business through the lens of scandal than as a process of value creation. When entrepreneurship does appear on screen, it is often distorted and combative. A decade ago, 75% of entrepreneurs reported having a negative view of The Apprentice and Dragons’ Den — and there’s little reason to think that has materially changed. (That said, with fewer than half of 16–24-year-olds watching broadcast TV in an average week, the influence of these shows is already waning.)

But as everyone reading this will know, running a business is mostly about cooperation — whether that’s with employees, customers, suppliers or other founders. It makes business sense too. The Peer Power survey also found that 86% of those with strong networks said their businesses were profitable last year, compared with 66% of those with weaker networks.

The consequences of this framing are visible in public attitudes. According to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, trust in British businesses stands at just 51%. More striking still, 70% of Britons hold a moderate or high grievance against business, government and the rich. Businesses are not widely seen as a good in themselves: as many as 88% say they have an obligation to provide good-paying local jobs, while 86% say they should train and reskill workers.

These tensions are reflected in founders’ own perceptions of the media. As our Out of Focus report showed, entrepreneurs overwhelmingly believe Britain’s media fails to represent entrepreneurship accurately or fairly. Coverage is seen as narrow and misaligned with founders’ priorities, with nearly three-quarters saying the issues that matter most to them are underreported. Too much attention is given to unicorns, funding rounds and sensational stories, and too little to the realities of building and sustaining a business.

And yet, despite all this, Edelman’s data also suggest that business remains the only UK institution seen as both competent and ethical overall. By contrast, government is viewed as incompetent and unethical, the media as unethical and not very competent, and NGOs as ethical but not very competent.

None of this means we should import wholesale a stereotypical American attitude to business. But it does suggest something important: entrepreneurs have played a critical role throughout history, and continue to do so today, largely through cooperation rather than conflict. Recognising that — in how we talk about business, report on it and understand it — would be a good place to start.

Call on You

Despite the plethora of consultations affecting businesses — which subscribers to our APPG for Entrepreneurship newsletter are alerted to each month — it’s rare for us to recommend that our network of thousands respond to one. After all, consultations take time, and they are not always the best use of it.

But HM Treasury’s Tax Support for Entrepreneurs: Call for Evidence is the exception that proves the rule. It was launched alongside the Budget and will remain open until 28 February.

We know from experience that tax is one of the most important issues for entrepreneurs in our network. This call for evidence seeks your views on the effectiveness of existing tax incentives, the wider tax system for founders and scaling firms, and how the UK can better support these companies to start, scale and stay in the UK.

You might, for example, have a view on how tax cliff edges affect real-world scaling decisions. Treasury officials may understand these in theory, but only entrepreneurs can explain how they shape their behaviour: delaying hiring, selling early, relocating headquarters, or avoiding certain investors altogether.

Or you might be able to shed light on what genuinely determines whether founders reinvest after a successful exit. Again, only entrepreneurs can explain the factors — both financial and non-financial — that drive reinvestment decisions.

Or perhaps you can explain whether Business Asset Disposal Relief — or Entrepreneurs’ Relief before it — meaningfully influences your behaviour. BADR is frequently debated, but rarely grounded in direct entrepreneurial testimony. The Treasury wants to know whether it actually affects decisions to start, grow, sell or reinvest.

You do not need to answer every question. What officials are looking for is first-hand experience (e.g. this happened to my company when we hit X threshold), behavioural insight (e.g. this policy changed how we hired, raised capital or exited), specific examples (e.g. we lost a senior hire because our equity offer was no longer competitive once we outgrew the relevant scheme), and clear causality (e.g. we did Y because of Z tax rule).

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Pulling Rank

Let’s start the year on a positive note. Not grounded in hope, but in data. Despite the challenges, the UK remains one of the best places in the world to start and grow a business. Across multiple independent rankings, produced by different institutions using different methodologies, the UK sits comfortably in the global top tier. We aren’t at the frontier on every single metric — but we’re very close on many.

On innovation, the UK ranks sixth globally in the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Global Innovation Index, which aggregates around 80 indicators — spanning institutions, human capital, infrastructure, market sophistication and innovation outputs. We perform especially well at turning innovation inputs into new technologies, creative goods and commercially viable ideas.

Caveats aside, Britain also leads in science. On the Nature Index, which tracks high-quality publications in leading journals, the UK ranks fourth globally. Four of the top five research institutions in Europe are British. On Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researchers 2025 list, the UK ranks third worldwide, reflecting a deep concentration of researchers whose work sits in the global top 1%.

Britain is a magnet for top talent too. INSEAD’s Global Talent Competitiveness Index places the UK firmly among the world’s leaders. In the latest Times Higher Education Rankings, two of the global top five universities are British — Oxford ranked first and Cambridge joint third. The QS World University Rankings also place two institutions in the top five, with Imperial ranked second and Oxford joint fourth.

This depth of knowledge shows up in the structure of the economy itself. On Harvard’s Economic Complexity Index, the UK sits in the top tier of advanced economies. It captures how diversified and sophisticated a country’s exports are, which is a proxy for accumulated, hard-to-replicate productive knowledge. On the Government AI Readiness Index, the UK ranks second globally, behind only the United States. It highlights strong policy coordination out of Westminster, including the AI Opportunities Action Plan, alongside major research partnerships with the EU and US.

It is easier to run a company in the UK than in most other countries. The Global Business Complexity Index deems the UK to have one of the least complex business environments in the world, based on performance across 292 indicators covering tax, accounting, payroll, human resources and entity management.

By international standards, the UK also remains one of the most open services markets in the world. According to the OECD Services Trade Restrictiveness Index, the UK ranks second overall among 51 economies analysed. London meanwhile ranks second globally in the Global Financial Centres Index. This depth of finance translates into scale: London attracted more VC investment in 2025 than Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Munich and Madrid combined, while the UK ranks fourth globally for unicorns on the Hurun Global Unicorn Index, behind only the United States, China and India.

It might not always feel like it, but the UK remains well governed. On the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index, it ranks fourteenth out of 143 countries analysed. For an economy built on services, contracts and intangible assets, that matters enormously. Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index tells a similar story, placing the UK firmly within the “very clean” tier of public-sector environments.

These are not cherry-picked statistics. After reviewing around 70 international rankings, I filtered hard for robustness and relevance. Echoing our Research Director Eamonn Ives, there are always methodological criticisms to make with these kinds of rankings, but taken as a whole they paint a fair picture. On many of the hardest-to-build dimensions — innovation, research, services openness, finance and the rule of law — the UK consistently sits in the leading pack.

One could look at this wealth of evidence and conclude that everything is going swimmingly. To do so would be short-sighted. For a start, we aren’t the clear leaders in much, so there’s plenty of room for improvement in many areas. Second, competitor economies are swiftly catching up. Staying ahead of them now depends as much on new initiatives as on discipline. We need to double down on allowing existing strengths to compound, remove avoidable frictions and come up with innovative policies to lead the world. More on that in the year to come.

Three Big Ideas #51

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

This week, Eamonn Ives speaks up for free speech, Philip Salter opines on the innovation insights shed by 2025’s Nobel Prize in Economics winners, and Mann Virdee argues we need to broaden our skillsets in the changing economy.

Three Big Ideas #51

💬 Eamonn Ives, Research Director

There are some values we hold which appear so self-evidently worthwhile that it almost seems unnecessary to say so. Perhaps precisely because of that, they are also the ones most vulnerable to a determined challenger interrogating them.

In 2025, freedom of speech increasingly felt like one such value. High-profile cases abounded of people facing harsh consequences for harmlessly expressing their viewpoints. These were not just dramatic exceptions to the rule either – plenty of datasets show how freedom of expression in different guises has been in retreat across the world for decades.

Why this should matter for entrepreneurship might not be immediately obvious – but it does, and it should concern us all.

At its core, entrepreneurship is an act of discovery. It depends on founders questioning incumbents, testing unfashionable ideas, arguing against prevailing assumptions and persuading others to take risks with them. That takes more than just capital and skills. It requires a social environment where deviation from the status quo is not merely tolerated, but encouraged and indeed celebrated when it results in new, useful things.

History teaches us the value of toleration. It should be no surprise that many of the places that nurtured the Scientific Revolution during the 16th and 17th centuries went on to profit most from the Industrial Revolution that ensued. Similarly, we have repeatedly seen how émigrés fleeing persecution can transform the strength of their adopted nations’ economies – from industrial French Huguenots arriving in Britain, to Jewish scientists forced out of Central Europe contributing to the ongoing success of the United States.

Freedom of expression is therefore not only a civic concern, but an economic one as well. Though it’s patently true that exceptional founders can succeed even under illiberal regimes, I’d happily wager that the likelihood they will do so is lower. If we care about long-term dynamism in our economy, freedom of speech is something we ought to speak a lot more about.

🏅 Philip Salter, Founder

In the world of ideas, the big news of 2025 was the awarding of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt – three thinkers who, in different ways, helped explain how innovation becomes self-sustaining and why some places manage to turn new ideas into rising living standards.

Mokyr argues that lasting innovation depends on a steady flow of useful knowledge: both the scientific principles that explain how the world works and the practical know-how to turn those principles into working technologies. Britain, in the 18th century, offered an unusually fertile combination – a critical mass of skilled artisans, curious engineers and institutions flexible enough to let ideas spread and take root.

Aghion and Howitt’s breakthrough came in 1992, when they took Joseph Schumpeter’s insight about constant technological replacement and built the first growth model that properly captured it. Their article demonstrated mathematically how the incessant replacement – or Perennial Gale, if you will – of old technologies by new ones can yield sustained economic growth.

Before that, mainstream growth theory more or less ignored the churn of firms and the incentives that drive innovators. By embedding innovation into a realistic, dynamic economy, Aghion and Howitt opened the door to analysing everything from optimal R&D subsidies to the role of monopoly power – work that now underpins much of modern innovation policy.

This year’s prize should also remind us that entrepreneurs sit at the centre of this story. Entrepreneurship is not simply a route to personal or investor wealth; it is the mechanism through which societies discover better ways of doing things. Britain’s first innovation-driven growth era was powered by inventors, investors, engineers and tinkerers who embraced experimentation and were willing to break with convention.

Politics and policy played their part. While not perfect, our Parliament, as Mokyr shows, proved itself capable of brokering compromises and allowing policy shifts that prevented vested interests from blocking technologies that threatened them. That openness was a decisive advantage – and one of the reasons the Industrial Revolution took off here. Something to ponder upon as we head into 2026.

⚙️ Mann Virdee, Senior Researcher

What skills does it take to thrive in a modern economy? Many of us were taught to master the same types of skillsets in our careers – producing reports, spreadsheets and slide decks. We’re led to believe these will bring lifelong success and prosperity.

But it turns out that’s not true. AI can now do those tasks better than we can and it’s only going to improve. There are tough times ahead, particularly for those whose job is largely to read and write.

There’s an important aspect to this that’s not talked about enough. Focusing on such a narrow skillset means we’re losing other capabilities, such as the hands-on work of construction, manufacturing and DIY. That’s not just some feel-good zen philosophy about reconnecting with nature, it’s also a crucial part of how innovation works.

That idea has been at the heart of several pieces that have stayed in my mind this year, which collectively make a compelling case that there’s no substitute for hands-on learning-through-doing.

Dan Wang argues that process knowledge is being lost by offshoring supply chains, which in turn harms countries’ entrepreneurial ecosystems. The process of building, iterating, innovating, and improving manufacturing gets lost, and it’s just as important as the ‘Eureka’ moment in the lab. Libby Purves meanwhile makes the case that the decline in manual cars represents the loss of the ‘last necessary skills of physicality for the overeducated majority who don’t have a craft requiring routine dexterity’.

We’re fixated with removing friction and optimising our lives – but that very quest may inadvertently be eroding the competencies that make us creative, entrepreneurial and resilient. Without the friction of physical labour or complex coordination, our ability to iterate and problem-solve atrophies.

We don’t know what skills will be important in the future. In a rapidly changing world, conventional wisdom about the types of capabilities young people should focus on has been proven wrong time and time again. If we want to empower people to be entrepreneurial, we need to help them equip themselves with a broad foundation – including physical problem solving.

For a generation that experiences the present as an ‘anticipated memory’ and faces the challenge of increased automation, the best competitive advantage is re-engaging with the physical and the complex wherever and whenever we can.

‘Tis the Reason

Season’s Greetings! I promised myself that I wouldn’t end the year harping on about the dynamism-denting Employment Rights Bill, tempting as that is. Instead, let’s discuss some highlights, ways you can get more involved, and how you can support us in 2026.

Although we’ve taken to describing ourselves as a business group and community, we remain first – and probably foremost – a think tank. Our research is the bedrock of why we’re taken seriously. And 2025 was another feast for policy-minded readers. Of everything we published, here are three reports with the broadest appeal – ideal reading with a mince pie in hand.

In Ambition Unlimited, we captured the voices of young founders across the UK, showing that ambition alone isn’t enough. Outdated tax and investment incentives, burdensome regulation, and restrictive immigration rules are still holding back the next generation of innovators.

In Full Speed Ahead, we revealed that the UK’s accelerator and incubator landscape remains fragmented and often ineffective despite significant public investment – with weak evaluation, inconsistent standards and programmes that don’t always match what founders actually need.

Then finally in Job Creators 2025, we once again showed just how central international founders are to the UK’s fastest-growing companies. This year, 54% of Britain’s top 100 high-growth firms have at least one foreign-born founder. The report set out clear recommendations to ensure the UK stays open and attractive to the entrepreneurial talent that drives jobs, innovation and economic dynamism.

Ring Out

Our biggest internal innovation this year has been launching regular surveys of our network. Each wave has generated strong media coverage, but my favourite was this City A.M. piece arguing that government simply didn’t “get entrepreneurs.” Whether they’re now taking notice is ultimately for you to judge.

We genuinely couldn’t do this work without you. We want to grow this into a major strand of what we do, so if you’re an entrepreneur, please consider joining our survey panel. No one else can reach the founders in our network.

Claus for Thought

This year we moved our newsletters to Substack. Alongside Perennial Gale, we now regularly share ideas, analysis and interviews through Network Effects. For founders wanting timely insight into what’s emerging from Westminster that may shape your business, our Policy Updates have you covered, and Eamonn also provides a sharp, impartial monthly briefing through the APPG for Entrepreneurship newsletter.

If you fancy some thoughtful holiday reading, try my conversation with John Fingleton CBE, or our interview with Station F director Roxanne Varza — both rich with insight into how to support entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Room at the Inn?

We hosted 42 public events in 2025 – along with several private ones – to bring thousands of entrepreneurs together with front-benchers, back-benchers, advisers and civil servants from across the political spectrum.

When we started, we were happy just to see that people were willing to turn up to our events. Thankfully, that’s now the least of our worries – although we’re noticing that demand regularly outstrips supply, which creates problems of its own. We will never operate as a closed membership group – the best rooms require the most relevant people – but we will continue to reserve places for Advisers and Supporters (see below on how to join).

Wrapping Up

To close, here are five golden requests. I don’t expect everyone to do all of them – but if you can manage one or two, it would genuinely help our work.

First: join us for free as a Member. We now have more than 10,000 entrepreneurs in the network, and signing up helps us to understand what matters most to you. It also lets you express interest in writing for us or joining our private WhatsApp groups.

Second: we believe the UK can and should be the best place in the world to start and grow a business. If you agree, add your name to our Mission Statement.

Third: join our WhatsApp Community. We won’t inundate you, aiming to send an average of just one update a week, including sharing journalist requests directly with founders and the wider ecosystem.

Fourth: please share this newsletter. Believe it or not, there are still people out there who aren’t subscribed to this. We don’t have a budget to appear alongside the latest John Lewis or Coca-Cola Christmas adverts. Forwarding this to one or two people genuinely helps us grow.

Finally – the big one – consider becoming a Supporter, Adviser, Patron, or Corporate Partner. We know it’s not for everyone. If you’re just starting out or watching every pound, please don’t feel any pressure. But if £120 a year is manageable, and you value being part of a community that brings founders and the wider ecosystem together – while strengthening the environment for entrepreneurs across the UK – becoming a Supporter is a meaningful way to help that work continue, with priority access to our events along the way.

While we already have big plans for 2026, many of our best ideas come from our readers, so if you have thoughts on what we should do, or what we could do together, I’d love to hear from you.

Ultimately, our work is in service of entrepreneurs. Everything we do comes back to individual founders whose contributions to society are all too often underappreciated. Politicians can talk endlessly about growth, but entrepreneurs are the hinge on which progress swings.

This will be the last Perennial Gale of the year. But true to this newsletter’s name, we’ll be back on 2 January. For those who’ll miss our policy presents, join Network Effects to hear the three biggest ideas in entrepreneurship before the year is out.

Three Big Ideas #50

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

This week, Eamonn Ives goes in to bat for GDP, Mann Virdee reflects on reasons to be optimistic as we go into 2026, and James Graham of the Prosperity Institute argues that financial crime regulations are not fit for purpose.