Which country has done the most to fight coronavirus? With a delayed lockdown, botched testing regime, track and trace failings, and one of the highest death rates per million, the UK probably wouldn’t be top of your list. But perhaps it should. Noted economist Tyler Cowen makes a strong case for why the UK’s response to COVID-19 has actually been world-class – at least in one crucial way.
Cowen specifically thinks the UK’s biomedical response has been remarkable, and that’s what matters most to the world. Whether this week’s preliminary results that the Oxford developed vaccine induces an immune reaction, or the trials of the cheap steroid dexamethasone, which have gone on to save lives around the world, he ranks the UK’s response number one.
While the UK and US are maligned across the world for their poor public health responses, Cowen thinks it’s interesting how few people lecture the Australians or the South Koreans for not having a better biomedical research establishment: “It is yet another sign of how societies tend to undervalue innovation — which makes the UK’s contribution all the more important.”
Being a world-leader has involved a lot of public and private sector R&D funding, and the government plans to double R&D to £22bn per year within five years. The challenge though, as set out in a recent Public First paper, will be sustaining this commitment in the face of fiscal events, elections and economic uncertainties.
Commissioned by the Wellcome Trust and Campaign for Science and Engineering, the report sets out how to practically garner support for continued spending. One idea is to encourage individuals and organisations from specific sectors to form coalitions, such as an ‘Entrepreneurs for Research’ group, which could make the case for why research funding matters to them or their business.
For most economists, the case for public funding for R&D is obvious: economic spillovers. The famous estimate from William Nordhaus is that innovators are only able to capture 2.2% of the total value to society of new inventions. This both explains why innovators are so important to society and should be celebrated, but also why some public funding is needed (ie. it can't be easily captured and is so not adequately incentivised)
History teaches us that in the battle of ideas, too often the wrong ones win out. Perhaps we need more than economic arguments. Perhaps we need that Entrepreneurs for Research group to ensure the UK continues to play a leading role in future global challenges.
Cap or trade
Creator Fund has a report out this week which finds that 57% of founders who’ve passed through the venture capital firm’s doors have a foreign-born founder. This chimes with our research which found that 49% of the UK’s fastest-growing startups have at least one foreign-born co-founder.
Encouragingly, given the context of COVID, healthcare startups lead the way, with 16% of university startups in healthcare and a further 4% in biotech. There are lots of interesting facts in the pithy report, including areas where the Creator Fund’s investors would like to see more activity from university startups: improving clinical trials, culture meat and leather, gaming, technology solution for the elderly, and B2B SaaS startups.
The report finds Chinese students are most likely to start a company. As Chinese founder Shawn Du says: “I came here to Imperial to study because I wanted to start a company and thought the UK had the best talent for building my team.”
Yesterday, Onward, a think tank closely aligned with Theresa May’s leadership, put out a report arguing for fewer foreign students in UK universities – specifically Chinese students. Onward thinks British students are being crowded out by Chinese students. This is wrongheaded, as all the evidence shows that foreign students effectively subsidise more places for British students and research activity in our universities.
In no other sector would anyone dare to call on the government to cap a successful British export of a UK product or service on such flimsy evidence. If there are impediments for the higher education sector in scaling to increase places, let's focus on those instead of capping exports.
Turning away the next generation of foreign-born founders would be a bad policy at the best of times – it would be tragic now.
GovStart 2020
PUBLIC has just opened its sixth-month growth programme to help tech startups transform the public sector. It takes startups at different stages and in various sectors, working with products that have powerful public sector applications, providing them with the tailored support, strategy and networks. Applications close in mid-August. Find out more here.
Apprenticeships
For the hundreds of you signed up to our Policy Updates, you might have seen one earlier today on the latest announcements around apprenticeships. It was written by Tim Smith from WhiteHat. It covers details on bonuses for hiring apprentices, greater access for SMEs and the dropping of the 50% university ‘target’. Read it here, and sign up to future updates here. And if you're an expert who would like to help entrepreneurs know how changes to legislation will impact their business, get in touch.
Entrepreneurs for Research