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.

Can the UK Become Competitive on Text-and-Data Mining for AI?

Data is the raw resource upon which AI is trained, and the regulations for how data can be used will have significant consequences for the roll out and quality of AI. There is currently a great deal of legal uncertainty about commercial text-and-data mining (TDM) in the UK, and other countries have moved faster than the UK at securing the legal foundations for training AI.

In this short paper, Dr Anton Howes explains what approaches are being taken with regards to TDM around the world, and what British policymakers could learn from them in order to ensure the UK is a competitive place for AI to be developed.

Risk Readiness Report 2023

Risk is part and parcel of being an entrepreneur, and the best among Britain’s startup community are those who can successfully manage and exploit uncertainty.

In our inaugural annual Risk Readiness Report, published with the international law firm Mishcon de Reya, we set out to better understand entrepreneurs’ attitudes to various questions of risk.

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.

Digitise the Skies

From inspecting infrastructure, to delivering goods, to growing crops, aerial drones promise to transform our economy. In Digitise the Skies, however, authors Anton Howes and Sam Dumitriu explain that their potential might not be realised without government intervention to make all recreational aircraft electronically visible to drones. 

In this report, we propose that the government should foot the one-off £10 million bill for equipping the UK’s recreational aircraft with onboard communication devices, noting that the minimal investment could remove a major barrier to the advancement of drone technology and drone-led services. It also recommends creating a Parliamentary Under Secretary of State position within the Department for Transport to specifically oversee the growth of the drone industry, and unlock the potential of our skies.

Better Together: The Procompetitive Effects of Mergers in Tech

As part of its efforts to promote competition within digital markets, the government is considering major changes to the UK’s merger control regime. As currently proposed, the changes would make it significantly harder for digital platforms deemed to have strategic market status, to acquire British startups.

In Better Together, authors Sam Bowman and Sam Dumitriu explain how mergers in tech can enhance competition and why proposals to lower the burden of proof used by the CMA to block mergers involving digital firms with strategic market status risk harming the UK’s startup ecosystem.

The Way of the Future: Supercharging UK Science and Innovation

Innovation has the potential to transform almost every aspect of our lives for the better, from the healthcare we receive and the food we eat, to the way we travel and how we interact with public services. At the same time, many economists believe we have experienced a great stagnation – with growth in total factor productivity stalling.

A new joint essay collection from The Entrepreneurs Network and The Tony Blair Institute sets out 10 radical science and innovation policy ideas to meet the ambition of making the UK a science superpower.

Conflicting Missions: The risks of the digital markets unit to competition and innovation

At the end of 2020, the UK government announced plans to create a Digital Markets Unit (DMU) charged with implementing an ex ante regulatory regime for certain digital platforms. This paper evaluates the challenges that the DMU will face, and argues that without a clear vision for what success looks like and how to manage the trade-offs involved, the DMU could easily become a hindrance to competition and innovation, instead of a positive force. 

The authors – Sam Bowman, Sam Dumitriu and Aria Babu – provide a series of recommendations throughout Conflicting Missions to mitigate potential risks posed by the creation of the DMU, to ensure Britain can remain as competitive, innovative, and entrepreneurial as possible.

Making the UK the best place in the world for AI innovation

The UK is a world leader in AI innovation, and is home to top universities and cutting edge businesses. But there’s no room for complacency, and without further pro-innovation policies, we will miss out on the AI opportunity.

In our new report, former Office for AI Adviser Séb Krier sets out how the UK can do this – recommending, among other things, that the government opens up public datasets, permitting for-profit data and text mining, and working closely with the EU to improve GDPR.  

Fixing Copyright

Unlike other intellectual property rights, copyrighted works enjoy extraordinary privileges, and the advent of recent technological changes is now making it significantly easier for rightsholders to identify infringers and threaten them with prosecution. 

In Fixing Copyright, Anton Howes explains how the current copyright regime could have a chilling effect on the encouragement of creative work, and entrepreneurship more generally. He makes a series of recommendations which would strike a better balance between protecting individuals’ work while ensuring that creative freedoms prevail.

Green Entrepreneurship

Environmental sustainability has shot up the political agenda in recent years. Consumers are increasingly demanding greener alternatives, and innovative companies are developing them.

In Green Entrepreneurship, Eamonn Ives examines how entrepreneurs are helping to deliver not only a more sustainable tomorrow, but also economic growth, exports, and jobs. Throughout the report, he provides a number of policy recommendations which the government could adopt to accelerate the green transition and reap the opportunities it offers.

Cashing Out

New technologies mean it has never been easier to avoid having to use cash, and the transition to a ‘cashless economy’ presents interesting opportunities – for individuals, businesses and the government. But parts of the press have decried the thought of cash vanishing from daily life, and in certain places around the world, attempts to slow the move away from cash are gaining traction. 

In Cashing Out, Fred de Fossard looks at the rise of cashless commerce, argues that politicians should embrace the phenomenon, and recommends efforts to enable going cashless would be a better way to allay any existing fears around a cashless economy. 

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.