Small Wonders

Abundant energy supplies are essential to economic growth and if we’re to meet our climate objectives, much more clean generation capacity will need to be built in Britain. The arrival of revolutionary technologies like artificial intelligence – which promise to drive electricity demand upwards – will only exacerbate this requirement.

Small Modular Nuclear reactors, however, could be a solution to Britain’s power conundrum. In this report, our Research Director Eamonn Ives sets out the case for why SMRs can fuel economic growth and what needs to be done to speed up their delivery while bringing down costs.

United Growth

Britain’s regional economic divides have long been recognised, but recent efforts to solve them have achieved little at best. In this report, we survey entrepreneurs from each region of Britain to find out what challenges they face when it comes to running and growing a business, and to gauge their expectations for the future.

While many are optimistic about what’s to come, some remain worried – and a range of obstacles to growth linger over their heads. We conclude with a range of policy recommendations to enable business owners to take their business growth to the next level.

Backing Breakthrough Businesses

The Private Business Commission was launched to investigate why some companies appear to struggle to maximise their growth potential within the UK, and to advocate for policies to better incentivise and enable them to do so.

Focusing on four policy areas — funding, capital markets, taxation and employee incentives — Backing Breakthrough Businesses assesses the current business landscape for Britain’s scaling companies, before culminating with a series of recommendations to spur their growth and ensure Britain is attractive a place as possible for them to stay.

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.

Accelerate to Excel

In this year’s annual Female Founders Forum report, we take stock of what progress women entrepreneurs have made over the past several years since we started researching and campaigning on policies to remove obstacles they face in starting and growing a business.

Written by Margaret Mitchell, and featuring stories from numerous leading women entrepreneurs, among other things, we show how the amount of equity funding for female-led startups remains stubbornly low.

Risk Readiness Report 2023

Risk is part and parcel of being an entrepreneur, and the best among Britain’s startup community are those who can successfully manage and exploit uncertainty.

In our inaugural annual Risk Readiness Report, published with the international law firm Mishcon de Reya, we set out to better understand entrepreneurs’ attitudes to various questions of risk.

Operation Innovation: How to make society richer, healthier and happier

The effect of accumulated innovations has transformed the world at a pace that would have been unimaginable to our not-so-distant ancestors. Thanks to the contributions of just a few thousand innovators, society is now far richer, and better equipped to tackle pressing problems – from climate change or pandemics.

This new essay collection outlines some of the fundamental building blocks to achieving an innovative economy – including how to effectively fund research, how to properly regulate emerging industries, how to make it easier to start and scale businesses, and how to raise the status of innovating.

APPG for Entrepreneurship: Funding to Flourish: The Case for Tax Relief on Early Stage Investment

The United Kingdom has become the primary destination in Europe for equity investment. This is in no small part because of a favourable set of tax reliefs, chief among which are the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS), the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) and Venture Capital Trusts (VCTs).

Despite the government saying that it is keen to update and safeguard these schemes, none of the necessary legislation to do so has yet been passed, and uncertainty about their futures is already having a negative impact. In Funding to Flourish, Aria Babu and Sam Dumitriu make the case for tax reliefs on growth investment, and explains how the government can ensure Britain continues to have a flourishing startup ecosystem as a result.

Access All Areas: Finance

It’s no secret that access to finance is critically important for entrepreneurs to succeed. Even the best business ideas will struggle to get off the ground if there isn’t adequate quality and quantity of finance to bring them into fruition. And, amid the current cost of living pressures, this fact has never been more true.

Access All Areas: Finance is the first of five briefing papers from Enterprise Nation and The Entrepreneurs Network on key areas of policy for small business owners. It sets out three key threats to the UK’s entrepreneurial culture, and makes five recommendations to help SMEs succeed – including tax relief on skills training for the self-employed, reforms to EIS, SEIS and VCTs, and reinstating and expanding the New Entrepreneurs Allowance. 

APPG for Entrepreneurship: Sharing Economy

Over the past decade, venture capitalists have invested nearly £3.5 billion into 465 sharing and on-demand economy businesses. Although the sector has grown rapidly in the UK, sharing economy entrepreneurs have expressed concerns about the direction of policy. In particular, changes to tax and regulatory policy could have a significant impact on investment.

This APPG for Entrepreneurship report sets out the key issues that entrepreneurs in the sharing economy are worried about. It advocates for a continued level-playing field on tax and for preserving the regulatory environment that has allowed the sector to flourish, while also empowering platforms to prioritise standards.

Resilience and Recovery

COVID-19 has posed significant challenges to most companies, but our new analysis of data from Beauhurst indicates that female-led, high-growth companies have been disproportionately impacted throughout the pandemic. However, despite this impact, more than 60% of female-founded, equity-backed businesses are now operating with minimal disruption to their business, showing that female-led businesses are fighting back.

Resilience and Recovery, a new report from The Entrepreneurs Network produced in partnership with Barclays, combines discussions with female founders and original data analysis, to identify the reasons why female entrepreneurs have been disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unlocking Growth

Access to capital is vital for most businesses to realise their growth ambitions. Yet navigating the array of funding options can be challenging. Polling suggests almost one in 10 entrepreneurs are discouraged from seeking external finance, even though their businesses have real funding needs.

In Unlocking Growth, we evaluate the funding options open for SMEs and propose key reforms to boost access to capital – from simplifying Research & Development Tax Credits, to experimenting with lottery-style funding to channel more grant-funding to start-ups, to liberalising rules around investments from defined-contribution pensions by reforming the fee cap.

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. 

Here and Now

Though women make up just a fifth of business owners, we are seeing increasing numbers setting up companies, and receiving a growing share of investment. In Here and Now, we reveal that while 11% of startups that raised equity investment for the first time in 2011 were female-founded, by 2018, that figure had nearly doubled. We also show that, once funded, the percentage of female-founded startups that raised additional rounds of capital was similar to non-female-founded firms. 

In order to close the gender gap for good, our report makes recommendations for the government, schools, the media, and venture capitalists – from shining a light on female entrepreneurs, to tackling the STEM drop-off rates among girls in education.