The coming 10 years are almost certain to be the decade that sees the greatest scientific breakthroughs in a century. The question is whether advances now under way in AI, quantum computing and biology can address cancer, find ways to treat or prevent dementia, and overcome the growing resistance to antibiotics. Can we find sustainable ways to address our energy needs and protect the environment at the same time? Can AI transform the way we deliver education, health and social care to the benefit of millions, as well as advance modern manufacturing strength? And what role can Britain’s inventors, investors and industrialists play in developing these transformative technologies?
While the US and China are the world’s obvious innovation powerhouses, the UK also has enormous assets, as the Innovation Nation Conference in Manchester addressed by the prime minister, Andy Burnham, will hear today. We are home to four of the world’s top 10 universities and 16 of the top 100, five of which are in Europe’s top 10 for spin-outs, startups based on intellectual property produced through a university’s research. With less than 1% of the world’s population, the UK produces 6% of the world’s research papers, nearly 9% of citations and 12% of the most highly cited research.
Our research expertise is one of the many reasons we have been at the forefront of recent inventions: from AlphaFold, which predicts how proteins behave, to viral-vector vaccine technology and AI that detects cancer as reliably as radiologists. Britain already sits at the intersection of AI, quantum computing and synthetic biology. The question then is: why, having led the first Industrial Revolution, should the UK not be the world’s great innovation nation once again?
We know the public have an entrepreneurial spirit, and back this vision. New polling for this week’s conference finds that 75% of people agree that innovation is essential for creating UK economic growth.
But it is disappointing that only 36% of the British public believes the country is a world leader in science. It is time for innovation to move to the forefront of government policy and the 10-year plan the government is preparing. If we were to raise Britain to Swedish or Japanese levels of innovation intensity we would, over time, leave every household £5,000 better off (according to my calculations), and increase our national income by £150bn a year as higher investment in research and development feeds through into productivity. And a jobs plan on the scale that Our Scottish Future has proposed for Scotland would mean about 3m new jobs across the UK.
We can identify the major hurdles to overcome. While the UK is good at startups and spin-outs, we are slow to turn startups into scale-ups, and even slower to turn scale-ups into global success stories. Per head of population, the US has double the number of $1bn companies and nearly three times as many $10bn-plus companies than the UK. And even when we do scale up at home, three-quarters of venture capital investment comes from overseas.
Turning this around will require a government to keep tackling the bottlenecks that are inevitably created from innovation. Speakers from future-facing companies at today’s conference will set out the steps that we need to consider. These will range from making sure firms can access the money they need to grow from UK investors, to new incentives for investors, to public-private partnerships – as happens in Germany, France and Italy – capitalised by the British Business Bank and the national wealth fund. Competition policy must favour new entrants against vested interests and be aligned with a favourable tax regime, such as through research and development credits that favour companies of all sizes.
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Research for the conference has identified 127 innovative clusters covering every region and nation of the UK, many of which will succeed if we are willing to give long-term support to the infrastructure, skills training and research and development support from UK Research and Innovation they need to grow. In order to harness this potential, more power needs to be devolved to enable mayors and regional authorities to act locally while ensuring access to global markets.
Britain does not lack genius or great assets. Every nation, including ours, must do more to find its “lost Einsteins” – the young people in lower-income areas who have the talent but not yet the opportunity to show their creative genius. What we need now is to create a chain of hope that connects all people to intellectual discovery and deployment, to startups and scale-ups, and to global leadership – all aligned around a shared national purpose.
Sixty-four years ago, John F Kennedy declared that the US would lead a nationwide effort to be first on the moon. But the space initiative was not his first choice. He had wanted a national project that everybody could feel part of, and revealed he would have preferred to have chosen a project on Earth – if he could have found one with the same power to inspire a national mission that the whole population could enthusiastically embrace.
Today, we can choose to be the innovation nation. “This generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age,” said Kennedy of the US. And this generation of Britons has no intention of being left behind as the age of AI accelerates. Today’s event, spearheaded by the prime minister in Manchester – itself a city of innovation – will send a message that we mean to be in the global vanguard; not because, as Kennedy said, it is easy to do, but even though it is hard. For the challenge now is to do more than invent the future. We must invest in it, manufacture it and, wherever possible, own it here in Britain.
