Building Blocks: Our vision for securing Britain's entrepreneurial future

Britain is a great place to be an entrepreneur – with many of the world’s most successful founders calling it home. The startups they have launched make a vital contribution to the economy, providing jobs, tax revenue, innovative goods and services and more. But there is a palpable sense that we could be doing so much better. Productivity has plateaued for far too long, causing living standards to stagnate, and evidence suggests the pace of innovation has slowed.

In Building Blocks, we set out our vision statement to secure Britain’s economic future – arguing that focusing on getting the basics right first is the best way policymakers can support entrepreneurs.

Passport to Progress

Talent is evenly distributed but opportunities are not. For many gifted individuals and entrepreneurs, maximising their potential is contingent on the ability to move to where they can best deploy their skills.

In Passport to Progress: A Blueprint for the World’s Most Pro-Innovation Visa System, published in partnership with ABE, Derin Koçer explains how immigration can enhance entrepreneurship and innovation, analyses international visa frameworks, and makes a series of recommendations for improving migration systems worldwide.

Job Creators 2023

In 2019, we published research showing that half of the 100 fastest growing companies in the UK had a foreign-born founder. In Job Creators 2023, we have repeated our research — and find that the figure has shrunk to 39%.

While the headline statistic might have fallen, we believe the takeaway message remains the same — immigrants play a disproportionate role in setting up lucrative and innovative companies. As such, the UK should do more to welcome international talent to its shores, and we make a series of recommendations for how to do that.

Operation Innovation: How to make society richer, healthier and happier

The effect of accumulated innovations has transformed the world at a pace that would have been unimaginable to our not-so-distant ancestors. Thanks to the contributions of just a few thousand innovators, society is now far richer, and better equipped to tackle pressing problems – from climate change or pandemics.

This new essay collection outlines some of the fundamental building blocks to achieving an innovative economy – including how to effectively fund research, how to properly regulate emerging industries, how to make it easier to start and scale businesses, and how to raise the status of innovating.

True Potential

Immigration has made the UK economy stronger, and the current system does a good job of attracting global talent. The new High Potential Individual (HPI) visa, for instance, allows graduates of some of the world’s top overseas universities to move to the UK for up to two years without a job offer. But there is still room for improvement. 

In True Potential, Jason Sockin and Sam Dumitriu explain how the HPI visa’s methodology excludes graduates from many of the world’s top performing universities in terms of post-graduation earnings. They detail an alternative approach to eligibility, based on real-world market data from Glassdoor. Under their system, which would allow any overseas graduates who attended a university with higher potential earnings than the median-performing, currently eligible university, graduates from approximately 100 universities spanning 13 different countries would be able to access to the visa.

The Startup Manifesto

Startups are a key source of dynamism in the economy – bringing new goods and services to market, while experimenting with innovative business models. Ensuring the conditions are right for entrepreneurs to start new companies, and scale them once they have, is therefore critical.

In collaboration with The Coalition for a Digital Economy (Coadec), we have produced a manifesto to help create those conditions. The Startup Manifesto proposes 21 specific policies across three key areas: access to talent, access to investment, and regulation. 

Job Creators

Immigration is critical to the success of the UK. While just 14% of UK residents are foreign-born, 49% of the UK’s fastest-growing businesses have at least one foreign-born co-founder. These dynamic, innovative businesses bestow jobs and growth opportunities, and are vital to the strength of Britain’s economy. 

In Job Creators, Sam Dumitriu and Amelia Stewart analyse Britain’s fast-growing, immigrant-founded companies, and suggest a handful of visa reforms to allow the UK to retain its status as a top destination for entrepreneurial talent.