Entrepreneurs Unwrapped

Understanding how Britain thinks about entrepreneurship is vital if we are to build a society which enables and encourages more people to launch a business. In Entrepreneurs Unwrapped, kindly supported by American Express, we sought to do exactly that.

By surveying both those who have never started a business and current founders, we painted a picture of what Britain really thinks about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship, and revealed where similarities and contrasts can be drawn between the two groups.

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.

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.

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.

The Startup Manifesto

Startups are a key source of dynamism in the economy – bringing new goods and services to market, while experimenting with innovative business models. Ensuring the conditions are right for entrepreneurs to start new companies, and scale them once they have, is therefore critical.

In collaboration with The Coalition for a Digital Economy (Coadec), we have produced a manifesto to help create those conditions. The Startup Manifesto proposes 21 specific policies across three key areas: access to talent, access to investment, and regulation.