Building Britain’s National Data Library

Public services in the UK are data-rich but insight-poor. Vast volumes of data are siloed, difficult to access, and end up underutilised. The National Data Library could change this by making public data faster to access and easier to use. To ensure it is a success, however, it requires a clear vision and a concrete plan.

In collaboration with the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, our Head of Science and Technology Anastasia Bektimirova publishes a joint paper Governing in the Age of AI: Building Britain’s National Data Library. It sets out short- (within six months), medium- (within three years) and long-term (within five years) reforms to build an infrastructure that could accelerate academic research, drive commercial R&D innovation, enable evidence-based policy design, and transform public service delivery across the UK.

Building on this paper, Anastasia and the Tony Blair Institute developed a dedicated platform to crowdsource ideas for what would be the most valuable datasets that the National Data Library could facilitate, and discover which data-related bottlenecks it could address as a priority. It is a living project, designed to grow and become more useful over time.

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.

Empowering the Future

Technological advancements are rapidly transforming the job market, necessitating fresh approaches to prepare the next generation for future opportunities. Enterprise education can sit at the heart of ensuring young people have the skills necessary to flourish.

In Empowering the Future, written in partnership with Youth Business International, Philip Salter highlights some of the key policies we think are required to achieve this.

Building Blocks

Britain is a great place to be an entrepreneur – with many of the world’s most successful founders calling it home. The startups they have launched make a vital contribution to the economy, providing jobs, tax revenue, innovative goods and services and more. But there is a palpable sense that we could be doing so much better. Productivity has plateaued for far too long, causing living standards to stagnate, and evidence suggests the pace of innovation has slowed.

In Building Blocks, we set out our vision statement to secure Britain’s economic future – arguing that focusing on getting the basics right first is the best way policymakers can support entrepreneurs.

Can the UK Become Competitive on Text-and-Data Mining for AI?

Data is the raw resource upon which AI is trained, and the regulations for how data can be used will have significant consequences for the roll out and quality of AI. There is currently a great deal of legal uncertainty about commercial text-and-data mining (TDM) in the UK, and other countries have moved faster than the UK at securing the legal foundations for training AI.

In this short paper, Dr Anton Howes explains what approaches are being taken with regards to TDM around the world, and what British policymakers could learn from them in order to ensure the UK is a competitive place for AI to be developed.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

The Way of the Future: Supercharging UK Science and Innovation

Innovation has the potential to transform almost every aspect of our lives for the better, from the healthcare we receive and the food we eat, to the way we travel and how we interact with public services. At the same time, many economists believe we have experienced a great stagnation – with growth in total factor productivity stalling.

A new joint essay collection from The Entrepreneurs Network and The Tony Blair Institute sets out 10 radical science and innovation policy ideas to meet the ambition of making the UK a science superpower.

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.

Making the UK the best place in the world for AI innovation

The UK is a world leader in AI innovation, and is home to top universities and cutting edge businesses. But there’s no room for complacency, and without further pro-innovation policies, we will miss out on the AI opportunity.

In our new report, former Office for AI Adviser Séb Krier sets out how the UK can do this – recommending, among other things, that the government opens up public datasets, permitting for-profit data and text mining, and working closely with the EU to improve GDPR.  

Green Entrepreneurship

Environmental sustainability has shot up the political agenda in recent years. Consumers are increasingly demanding greener alternatives, and innovative companies are developing them.

In Green Entrepreneurship, Eamonn Ives examines how entrepreneurs are helping to deliver not only a more sustainable tomorrow, but also economic growth, exports, and jobs. Throughout the report, he provides a number of policy recommendations which the government could adopt to accelerate the green transition and reap the opportunities it offers.

The Case for Remote Work

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the case for short-term remote work is obvious. But the case for long-term remote work is also much stronger than is typically thought. Remote work allows firms to hire from outside their local labour market, which may mean they can employ more productive workers, and the benefits of workers clustering together have shrunk or disappeared entirely. 

The Case for Remote Work, written by Matt Clancy, assesses the evidence base around remote working, before suggesting a handful of policies which governments could implement to capture the benefits posed by a greater shift to remote working.

Upgrade

Digital technology has enabled businesses to continue trading in the most difficult of circumstances. As the UK economy recovers and reopens, increasing the rate of digital adoption by SMEs will be vital.

Although Britain is a world-leader in innovation, too often best practices are not spreading to all SMEs. In Upgrade, we argue that poor take-up of digital technologies by small businesses is a central element in our pre-COVID productivity crisis, and that increasing uptake will be vital to the economic recovery. We also quantify the £16.6bn cost to the UK economy of this digital gap and show what closing that gap would mean in terms of increased productivity.

Cashing Out

New technologies mean it has never been easier to avoid having to use cash, and the transition to a ‘cashless economy’ presents interesting opportunities – for individuals, businesses and the government. But parts of the press have decried the thought of cash vanishing from daily life, and in certain places around the world, attempts to slow the move away from cash are gaining traction. 

In Cashing Out, Fred de Fossard looks at the rise of cashless commerce, argues that politicians should embrace the phenomenon, and recommends efforts to enable going cashless would be a better way to allay any existing fears around a cashless economy.