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.


Access All Areas: Markets

Businesses which engage in international trade are generally more productive and innovative. Yet evidence suggests Britain is not fulfilling its trade potential, and entrepreneurs tell us of barriers that prevent them from exporting.

In Access All Areas: Markets we examine the ways in which importing and exporting can help SMEs succeed, assess the recent trends in international trade, and provide a series of recommendations for what the government could do to ensure Britain’s small firms have the best conditions possible to flourish on the international stage.

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.

What Applied Learning Really Looks Like

Applied learning provides opportunities for young people to use their classroom learning in real-life, practical situations. This not only helps reinforce the learning but also enhances its relevance to young people, who can begin to appreciate how that learning can support future careers and life goals.

In What Applied Learning Really Looks Like, published in partnership with Young Enterprise, Anton Howes highlights several successful case studies to show teachers and policymakers what applied learning actually looks like in practice – particularly in cases where time and resources are limited. The report sets out concrete examples of applied learning in action to inspire teachers and help them articulate their vision to colleagues, managers, and parents, as well as how headteachers and senior leadership teams can support them.

APPG for Entrepreneurship: Supporting SMEs Successfully

There is a renewed focus to grow the economy at a faster rate. Achieving this will require many changes to be made, but returning productivity growth to historic trends will be essential. Within this puzzle, attention will need to be paid to small businesses in particular – which evidence suggests have dragged on overall productivity in recent years.

In Supporting SMEs Successfully, a new report published by the APPG for Entrepreneurship, we assess some of the current government support programmes for SMEs to boost their productivity. Our central finding is that while existing interventions are well intentioned, and in many cases working well for the businesses using them, more could still be done to ensure they are as effective as possible.

One In A Million

With just under a third of British entrepreneurs being women, the UK has an unusually low proportion of female entrepreneurs. This is a particularly important group, because their companies and vision will have a greater impact on the state of technology and the economy in the decades to come. Female founders are able to bring new insight, creating businesses for women, by women, that better serve their needs.

In One In A Million, we surveyed some of Britain’s most trailblazing female founders, to showcase their success, and shine a spotlight on the barriers that they continue to face as women.

Access All Areas: People

Job vacancies have spiked in the aftermath of Covid-19, and many small businesses struggle to recruit the skills they need. New technological trends, such as the advent of AI, will also disrupt the labour market, and employers and employees need to be prepared for this – so that it is an opportunity to grasp, rather than a threat to avoid.

In Access All Areas: People, we make a series of recommendations to boost the supply and quality of labour force, including reducing the cost of visas, reforming the Apprenticeship Levy, and widening the scope of tax breaks for training.

Tomorrow's Entrepreneurs

Attitudes towards entrepreneurship have shifted. Increasingly, young people see entrepreneurship as a way of changing the world instead of simply a way of making money. In Tomorrow’s Entrepreneurs, we surveyed young founders – finding, among other things, that the more money a business turns over, the more likely they are to agree that their primary aim was to tackle a social or environmental problem.

The report, published in partnership with Youth Business International, concludes with a series of recommendations on how to better support young entrepreneurs, including broader use of Challenge Prizes and Advanced Market Commitments for innovative solutions to big problems, and bringing back the Enterprise Allowance Scheme to help young entrepreneurs start their own businesses.

APPG for Entrepreneurship: Space Startups & Scaleups

The space sector has changed enormously over the last few years – increasing in importance globally for economic growth, for security, and for international partnership. As we look forward, ever more of the major challenges we face as a planet will have solutions, or parts of solutions, from space.

In Space Startups and Scaleups, a number of recommendations are made which aim to capture the opportunities on offer, and ensure British entrepreneurs in the space sector can continue to punch above their weight.

Tech Startup Manifesto 2022

Tech startups have been the British economic success story of the past decade. The tech community, just a footnote a decade ago, is now the heart of the UK’s economy. But now there are storm clouds on the horizon. For the startups, there’s a funding crisis – with valuations cut, hiring freezes imposed, and investment drying up. For the UK as a whole, there’s a macroeconomic crisis, a cost of living crisis, and an uncertain growth path for years to come.

In Tech Startup Manifesto 2022, written in partnership with The Coalition for a Digital Economy (Coadec), we explore how the new Prime Minister can navigate those storm clouds. By ensuring Britain’s tech businesses have access to the capital and people they need, and a regulatory landscape conducive to innovation, the tech sector can continue to shine in the UK.

A New Model for Science

The importance of science has rarely been higher up in our collective conscience. Medical breakthroughs, made in record time, helped tackle the Coronavirus pandemic head on, while new scientific innovations promise to reduce our contribution to climate change. Ensuring that science is carried out in the best possible way is therefore crucial. 

Focused research organisations (FROs) are an emerging model for transformative science projects which could complement how scientific research is conducted. In A New Model for Science, co-published with the Tony Blair Institute and Convergent Research, we examine what FROs are, and how they could give entrepreneurs, scientists, and engineers a new path for developing the sorts of transformative technologies which will be required to tackle pressing public problems. 

Access All Areas: Government

Government bodies account for over a tenth of all spending in the economy. Their procurement budgets therefore represent lucrative opportunities for businesses large and small alike. Despite the enthusiasm towards them, the government often struggles to adequately support smaller businesses throughout the procurement process – with only 10% of total government spending ultimately going to SMEs. 

In Access All Areas: Government, published with Enterprise Nation, Aria Babu and Emma Jones look at the barriers SMEs face when trying to sell to the government, and how they might be tackled. Recommendations they make include writing tenders in a way which allows for more innovation from suppliers, working to connect SMEs with previously successful bidders, and better signposting of upcoming procurement to increase certainty over the pipeline of opportunities an SME could bid for.

True Potential

Immigration has made the UK economy stronger, and the current system does a good job of attracting global talent. The new High Potential Individual (HPI) visa, for instance, allows graduates of some of the world’s top overseas universities to move to the UK for up to two years without a job offer. But there is still room for improvement. 

In True Potential, Jason Sockin and Sam Dumitriu explain how the HPI visa’s methodology excludes graduates from many of the world’s top performing universities in terms of post-graduation earnings. They detail an alternative approach to eligibility, based on real-world market data from Glassdoor. Under their system, which would allow any overseas graduates who attended a university with higher potential earnings than the median-performing, currently eligible university, graduates from approximately 100 universities spanning 13 different countries would be able to access to the visa.

APPG for Entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurship Education

How can we equip young people with the skills to succeed in a fast-changing world of work? Entrepreneurship Education, a new paper by Finn Conway for the APPG for Entrepreneurship, explains the benefits of teaching young people how to start and grow a business. The report reveals that while young people have a huge desire to work for themselves, entrepreneurship education in schools is not integrated into the curriculum.

The report calls on the government to develop and publish a Youth Entrepreneurship Strategy for Schools, which would set out key skills it wants young people to develop, and to provide funding to encourage entrepreneurs from more representative backgrounds to visit and engage with schools.

Procurement and Innovation

For years, the government has stressed its commitment to helping SMEs succeed. One of the ways in which it does this most obviously is through the money it directly spends on them when procuring goods and services. However, as Chris Haley, Sam Dumitriu, and Aria Babu explain in a new report, under the status quo, the government makes it hard for SMEs and startups to compete with large incumbents, even when they have a better product. 

In Procurement and Innovation, the authors outline what challenges SMEs currently face when bidding for government contracts, before making a series of recommendations on how to mitigate such issues.

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. 

Strong Foundations

Due largely to its rigid planning system, the UK suffers enormously from expensive housing and office space. This erodes the budgets of households and businesses alike, but it also harms the economy in other ways. By placing limits on agglomeration, we see fewer of the benefits it can bring for innovation, productivity, jobs, and more. 

In Strong Foundations, Aria Babu proposes a series of recommendations – from Street Votes, to Green Belt reform, to amending Change of Use rules – in order to expand the supply of housing, offices, and lab space, to ensure the economy can be as dynamic and productive as possible.

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.

Inspiring Innovation

In Inspiring Innovation, the latest Female Founders Forum report produced in partnership with Barclays, Aria Babu looks at female entrepreneurship in the high-growth sectors such as e-commerce, fintech, and greentech.

She makes three broad recommendations for boosting female entrepreneurship, namely: closing the gender funding gap, which currently sees female founders raising only 15% of all equity finance; tackling STEM drop-off rates, which have resulted in just 17% of tech workers being women; and providing more female role models, given that mentorship has proven to be an effective way of encouraging women to start and scale businesses.

Digitise the Skies

From inspecting infrastructure, to delivering goods, to growing crops, aerial drones promise to transform our economy. In Digitise the Skies, however, authors Anton Howes and Sam Dumitriu explain that their potential might not be realised without government intervention to make all recreational aircraft electronically visible to drones. 

In this report, we propose that the government should foot the one-off £10 million bill for equipping the UK’s recreational aircraft with onboard communication devices, noting that the minimal investment could remove a major barrier to the advancement of drone technology and drone-led services. It also recommends creating a Parliamentary Under Secretary of State position within the Department for Transport to specifically oversee the growth of the drone industry, and unlock the potential of our skies.