Sometimes we need to turn to the past as a guide to the future. That’s why this week we published Blueprint for a New Great Exhibition, a report by our Head of Innovation Research, Dr Anton Howes.

As I wrote in Forbes, exhibitions of industry have a long and successful history of being used by policymakers to showcase and inspire innovation. Recent attempts to replicate such exhibitions, however, have not always lived up to their goals – and have been far removed from the momentous success of events such as the Great Exhibition of 1851.

This isn’t jingoistic yearning for a long-gone ideal. It’s about applying what has worked in the past to the modern world. As Anton writes, visitors would “see drone deliveries in action, take rides in driverless cars, actually use the latest in virtual reality technology, play with prototype augmented reality devices, and see organ tissue and metals and electronics being 3D-printed in front of them. They would see industrial manufacturing robots in action, have a taste of lab-grown meat at the food stalls, meet cloned animals brought back from extinction, and themselves perform feats of extraordinary strength wearing the exoskeletons that are already in use in factories and warehouses. Visitors would naturally get to meet the inventors and scientists and engineers who developed it all, too. They would browse the latest in fashion, art, and architecture, seeing them alongside historical examples. And the whole thing would be powered using only the cutting edge of clean energy technology, much like how the great new Corliss Engine drove the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, or how Westinghouse’s alternating current powered the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Visitors might also be able to view air CO2 removal machines in action.”

While focused on the future, the paper makes the case that it shouldn’t be online. Perhaps one day such an event is best hosted in the metaverse – but that day isn’t imminent. Showcasing innovations of driverless cars, lab-grown meat and drone delivery online would be an abstraction that subtracts significantly from the goal of inspiring innovation.

We think it should be privately funded – and not just because of the state of public finances. The recent UNBOXED festival – dubbed the ‘Festival of Brexit’ – could be a Harvard Business School case study in failure: bureaucratic, politicised, and lacking in clarity of vision and oversight. The Great Exhibition of 1851, for example, albeit organised under the direction of a Royal Commission to give it official credibility while maintaining some arms-length distance from the government, was privately financed.

The Great Exhibition was centred around the prefabricated majesty of Sir Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, which was moved from Hyde Park to an area of London now (unsurprisingly) known as Crystal Palace, but was sadly destroyed in a fire in 1936. Previous World’s Fair structures with an enduring legacy include the Eiffel Tower in Paris (1889), the Space Needle in Seattle (1962), and the Atomium in Brussels (1958). We would need an equally majestic building today and played around with Midjourney to come up with some AI-generated designs to poll the public on Twitter (I’m still annoyed the glass building didn’t win, proving these things aren’t best decided by committee).

Our next reports will cover things like reforming visas and spinout policies, and unlocking commercial space for startups and institutional funding for deeptech policy. But the culture of innovation also matters. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

Job Creators II
We're busy crunching the numbers, updating our incredibly influential Job Creators report, in which we looked at the fastest-growing companies by valuation, finding that half the fastest growing companies have at least one foreign-born founder. It got significant press coverage, including the second page of the Financial Times, and the headline statistic has been used by the Prime Minister on a number of occasions. We're open to partnering with a sponsor on this. Get in touch if you're keen to help.

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