In 99.9% of circumstances, a Hollywood celebrity should be the last person you turn to for policy advice, which is why I wasn’t expecting much going into an event with Uber and Edward Norton. I was planning to gloss over the policy with the hope of getting a slither of insight about his films. Luckily it turns out Norton is in the 0.01%.

Norton didn’t rely on emotive arguments, but on sound economics to argue for a better world. He wants to ensure the environmental costs of doing business are internalised by companies, and defends the creation of markets to protect environmental assets. Unlike too many environmentalists, he understood how to think at the margin and cautioned against making perfection the enemy of the good. As he has stated back in 2019 when probed about Uber:

“Does any form of car-based transportation within urban environments need to grapple with the challenges of congestion and pollution and the nature of employment? Of course. But the New York City medallion system should be cancelled tomorrow. It is not egalitarian. It is terrible economically for the drivers. It drives empty cars around polluting and congesting the city. This notion that Uber is not an improvement off of where we were is absurd. Does it need to get better? Absolutely. But there is no way you can tell me that the experience of riding in a New York taxi is anything other than debased compared to ride-sharing services.”

The critical point for Norton is that the creation of ride-hailing services put us on a path to a better world. It didn’t come overnight, but without this technological shift there was no escaping the inherent inefficiency of customers and cabbies being unable to coordinate. There is no putting the genie back in the bottle. And while there are individual losers and new policy challenges thrown up, ultimately we are much better off for this technology existing.

There are many areas of the economy that could be equally transformed. We’ve written about drones, copyright, and most recently in our Operation Innovation collection Meri Beckwith wrote an essay on clinical trials. The co-founder of Lindus Health – who has just raised money from the likes of Peter Thiel to accelerate their use of machine learning and data science to revolutionise clinical trials – paints a bleak picture of ethics committees in the UK. For example, when discussing whether to allow a clinical trial for a new drug for Stage 3 cancer to proceed, the committee, which only meets every eight weeks, spent the session complaining about the font used in various documents giving no time to discuss the drug. Beckwith suggests paying ethics committee members and making it easier to use private ethics committees like in the US.

During next week’s London Tech Week I’ll raise these and other cases at a roundtable with George Freeman, the Minister of State for Science, Technology and Innovation (who has himself identified a fair few obstacles in his TIGRR report) organised by the excellent Regulatory Horizon Council.

When it comes to regulatory hurdles like this, we rely on you – our network of thousands of founders – to let us know what conditions are like on the frontier of innovation. In turn, government relies on us, and organisations like us, to frame these individual experiences as part of a bigger picture and suggest solutions. So whether you’re a business owner, investor or anyone with knowledge of something holding business back, now is the time to get in touch.

Norton said it best upon his decision to devote more time to entrepreneurship, investing and environmentalism than acting: “I don’t want to look back on my life and see the large majority of it coloured with me playing pretend instead of actually doing things.”

Mighty Oaks
Mid-sized businesses should be Goldilocks for governments – big enough to boost productivity and create jobs, but small enough to be nimble and innovative.

However, without the resources of very large businesses to lobby government, or the weight in numbers (and therefore voters) of small businesses, they are often overlooked by policy. Compared to equity backed tech businesses, much less attention is paid to businesses that are already profitable, but aren’t (yet) large companies.

That’s why we’re hosting a roundtable for profitable businesses turning over £1 million with Shadow Minister for Small Business, Consumers and Labour Markets Seema Malhotra, and Shadow Minister for Business and Industry Bill Esterson.