Tomorrow's Entrepreneurs

Attitudes towards entrepreneurship have shifted. Increasingly, young people see entrepreneurship as a way of changing the world instead of simply a way of making money. In Tomorrow’s Entrepreneurs, we surveyed young founders – finding, among other things, that the more money a business turns over, the more likely they are to agree that their primary aim was to tackle a social or environmental problem.

The report, published in partnership with Youth Business International, concludes with a series of recommendations on how to better support young entrepreneurs, including broader use of Challenge Prizes and Advanced Market Commitments for innovative solutions to big problems, and bringing back the Enterprise Allowance Scheme to help young entrepreneurs start their own businesses.

APPG for Entrepreneurship: Space Startups & Scaleups

The space sector has changed enormously over the last few years – increasing in importance globally for economic growth, for security, and for international partnership. As we look forward, ever more of the major challenges we face as a planet will have solutions, or parts of solutions, from space.

In Space Startups and Scaleups, a number of recommendations are made which aim to capture the opportunities on offer, and ensure British entrepreneurs in the space sector can continue to punch above their weight.

Tech Startup Manifesto 2022

Tech startups have been the British economic success story of the past decade. The tech community, just a footnote a decade ago, is now the heart of the UK’s economy. But now there are storm clouds on the horizon. For the startups, there’s a funding crisis – with valuations cut, hiring freezes imposed, and investment drying up. For the UK as a whole, there’s a macroeconomic crisis, a cost of living crisis, and an uncertain growth path for years to come.

In Tech Startup Manifesto 2022, written in partnership with The Coalition for a Digital Economy (Coadec), we explore how the new Prime Minister can navigate those storm clouds. By ensuring Britain’s tech businesses have access to the capital and people they need, and a regulatory landscape conducive to innovation, the tech sector can continue to shine in the UK.

A New Model for Science

The importance of science has rarely been higher up in our collective conscience. Medical breakthroughs, made in record time, helped tackle the Coronavirus pandemic head on, while new scientific innovations promise to reduce our contribution to climate change. Ensuring that science is carried out in the best possible way is therefore crucial. 

Focused research organisations (FROs) are an emerging model for transformative science projects which could complement how scientific research is conducted. In A New Model for Science, co-published with the Tony Blair Institute and Convergent Research, we examine what FROs are, and how they could give entrepreneurs, scientists, and engineers a new path for developing the sorts of transformative technologies which will be required to tackle pressing public problems. 

Access All Areas: Government

Government bodies account for over a tenth of all spending in the economy. Their procurement budgets therefore represent lucrative opportunities for businesses large and small alike. Despite the enthusiasm towards them, the government often struggles to adequately support smaller businesses throughout the procurement process – with only 10% of total government spending ultimately going to SMEs. 

In Access All Areas: Government, published with Enterprise Nation, Aria Babu and Emma Jones look at the barriers SMEs face when trying to sell to the government, and how they might be tackled. Recommendations they make include writing tenders in a way which allows for more innovation from suppliers, working to connect SMEs with previously successful bidders, and better signposting of upcoming procurement to increase certainty over the pipeline of opportunities an SME could bid for.

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.

APPG for Entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurship Education

How can we equip young people with the skills to succeed in a fast-changing world of work? Entrepreneurship Education, a new paper by Finn Conway for the APPG for Entrepreneurship, explains the benefits of teaching young people how to start and grow a business. The report reveals that while young people have a huge desire to work for themselves, entrepreneurship education in schools is not integrated into the curriculum.

The report calls on the government to develop and publish a Youth Entrepreneurship Strategy for Schools, which would set out key skills it wants young people to develop, and to provide funding to encourage entrepreneurs from more representative backgrounds to visit and engage with schools.

Procurement and Innovation

For years, the government has stressed its commitment to helping SMEs succeed. One of the ways in which it does this most obviously is through the money it directly spends on them when procuring goods and services. However, as Chris Haley, Sam Dumitriu, and Aria Babu explain in a new report, under the status quo, the government makes it hard for SMEs and startups to compete with large incumbents, even when they have a better product. 

In Procurement and Innovation, the authors outline what challenges SMEs currently face when bidding for government contracts, before making a series of recommendations on how to mitigate such issues.

Access All Areas: Finance

It’s no secret that access to finance is critically important for entrepreneurs to succeed. Even the best business ideas will struggle to get off the ground if there isn’t adequate quality and quantity of finance to bring them into fruition. And, amid the current cost of living pressures, this fact has never been more true.

Access All Areas: Finance is the first of five briefing papers from Enterprise Nation and The Entrepreneurs Network on key areas of policy for small business owners. It sets out three key threats to the UK’s entrepreneurial culture, and makes five recommendations to help SMEs succeed – including tax relief on skills training for the self-employed, reforms to EIS, SEIS and VCTs, and reinstating and expanding the New Entrepreneurs Allowance. 

Strong Foundations

Due largely to its rigid planning system, the UK suffers enormously from expensive housing and office space. This erodes the budgets of households and businesses alike, but it also harms the economy in other ways. By placing limits on agglomeration, we see fewer of the benefits it can bring for innovation, productivity, jobs, and more. 

In Strong Foundations, Aria Babu proposes a series of recommendations – from Street Votes, to Green Belt reform, to amending Change of Use rules – in order to expand the supply of housing, offices, and lab space, to ensure the economy can be as dynamic and productive as possible.

APPG for Entrepreneurship: Sharing Economy

Over the past decade, venture capitalists have invested nearly £3.5 billion into 465 sharing and on-demand economy businesses. Although the sector has grown rapidly in the UK, sharing economy entrepreneurs have expressed concerns about the direction of policy. In particular, changes to tax and regulatory policy could have a significant impact on investment.

This APPG for Entrepreneurship report sets out the key issues that entrepreneurs in the sharing economy are worried about. It advocates for a continued level-playing field on tax and for preserving the regulatory environment that has allowed the sector to flourish, while also empowering platforms to prioritise standards.

Inspiring Innovation

In Inspiring Innovation, the latest Female Founders Forum report produced in partnership with Barclays, Aria Babu looks at female entrepreneurship in the high-growth sectors such as e-commerce, fintech, and greentech.

She makes three broad recommendations for boosting female entrepreneurship, namely: closing the gender funding gap, which currently sees female founders raising only 15% of all equity finance; tackling STEM drop-off rates, which have resulted in just 17% of tech workers being women; and providing more female role models, given that mentorship has proven to be an effective way of encouraging women to start and scale businesses.

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.

Knocking Down Barriers: Empowering business builders in the UK’s most deprived communities

New business creation will play a vital role in the post-pandemic economic recovery and the wider levelling up agenda. It also represents a powerful opportunity to strengthen and support people in some of Britain’s most deprived communities and increase their earnings through more fulfilling work.

In Knocking Down Barriers, we surveyed people in some of Newcastle and London’s most deprived areas. While we found no shortage of entrepreneurial potential, we did identify financial and confidence barriers to success – and recommend the government focuses its attention on helping people to overcome these.

Honours for Innovators

Raising invention’s status and prestige was crucial to how Britain first got its reputation during the Industrial Revolution as the best place to innovate. Invention came to be seen as a viable and attractive career path, not just financially but in terms of the social standing that could result from it – something that was purposefully cultivated by those seeking to improve the country’s technological prospects.

In Honours for Innovators, authored by Anton Howes and Ned Donovan, the case is made for establishing a new order of chivalry, specifically designed to encourage invention and raise the status of being an innovator in the eyes of the public. The paper sets out the details of how the order might be organised, how its recipients might be chosen, and the costs of setting up and running the order.

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.