Gordon Brown: “Britain has the talent to become the innovation nation”

Gordon Brown

Britain has a growth problem, but it also has the scientific and creative strengths to do something about it. We should be much more confident about those strengths, and much more determined to turn them into successful companies. Innovation must become central to our understanding of how the country will earn its living.

We have done a great deal to put growth on the agenda. Planning, infrastructure, housing, skills and employability all matter. The employment prospects of young people are particularly important. But there is a missing element in the discussion: the power of innovation as a main driver of growth. For too long, we have had a blind spot about it.

When Harold Wilson spoke of the white heat of the technological revolution, science was at the centre of his vision of a new Britain. He wanted modernisation and the clearing out of deadwood from boardrooms. It was an ambitious account of what the country could become through the power of science. Yet the difficulty was turning that ambition into achievements he could demonstrate.

Concorde had been planned before his government, but was not operating until the following decade. The TSR-2 aircraft was cancelled. The promise of technological transformation was easier to articulate than to fulfil. That experience should make us serious about what is required to turn innovation into economic success, rather than simply enthusiastic about the language of modernisation.

I believe we now have many of the elements needed to become the innovation nation again. We have strong legal and stable institutions. We have scientific capability and financial expertise. We have the prospect of important changes in technical education. What we need is to bring these elements together, recognising that none of them will realise its full potential in isolation.

We also have to challenge the pessimism about what Britain can do. In the polling we have undertaken, 36 per cent of people thought that Britain no longer had a leadership role in world science. I do not believe that judgement is right. There is a depression about our prospects that we need to puncture by showing the innovative country that exists today.

We have a history of invention of which we can be proud. As a Scot, I have heard plenty of stories celebrating the contributions of Scottish inventors. But a list of past achievements is not enough. We have a present-day success story to tell, and it is on that success that we must build.

Consider medical technology. We have enormous potential, extending well beyond vaccines. Precision medicine is opening up possibilities, and artificial intelligence is being applied to medicine, including radiology. These are areas in which scientific advances can support the development of internationally competitive businesses. Our strength extends across life sciences, rather than being confined to one narrow branch of medicine.

Environmental technologies offer another field of opportunity. We have strengths in wind and wave technology, and in other parts of the energy economy. We have fallen behind in solar, where China has taken the lead, but that should not obscure the areas in which British companies have real capabilities. Nuclear fusion is also part of the energy equation, with excellent companies on which to build.

Information technology provides further evidence of what is possible. Successful companies have already been formed, and there is great potential in the intersection of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and synthetic biology. The meeting of these fields could be one of the great sources of new companies in the future.

I have been involved in a project called decoding biology, and I see enormous potential in work on the sequencing of proteins and related developments. These are possibilities that should make us look forward. We should be asking how to develop them, how to support the people involved and how to ensure that the companies emerging from such work can grow.

Advanced manufacturing belongs in this picture too. So do the creative arts. Film, music and media are part of the country’s economic strengths, with the English language an important advantage. Our account of innovation must be broad enough to recognise the range of activities in which Britain can succeed.

The starting point in our universities is strong. We have institutions with outstanding international reputations and substantial research output. That is a success story in its own right. It also gives us a basis for the university spin-offs that can turn research into businesses. We are good at creating start-ups and spin-offs; the question is what happens next.

The opportunities are not confined to the familiar centres of scientific achievement. Some of the poorest parts of the country have great potential if we invest in technical education. The development of those skills is part of the effort to make Britain an innovative nation. It matters both to the economy and to the prospects of people whose abilities need encouragement.

We also have to do more to encourage women into science and technology. There is interest among girls at school in studying technology, yet the participation of women in invention remains far too limited. That should prompt us to think about the encouragement required to ensure that interest can become a contribution to scientific and technological progress.

The economic objective is clear. Britain grew at around two and a half per cent a year in the 1990s and early 2000s. Over the subsequent period, growth has been closer to one per cent. We need to move from that weaker performance towards growth of two per cent. Internationally competitive companies, with world-beating products and processes, are central to achieving it.

Export growth can follow from that competitiveness, and jobs can flow from clusters of innovation. But the existence of good research does not automatically guarantee that the companies it creates will achieve the scale we need. We must pay attention to the connections between science, skills and finance. Our financial expertise has to become support that growing companies can actually obtain.

This is why the difference between a successful start-up and a successful scale-up matters so much. We can take considerable pride in the research coming out of our universities while still asking why more of the businesses it generates do not grow substantially here. The strength of the first stage does not remove the weakness of the next. To improve our growth rate, we have to look at the whole process, including the finance that enables an innovative company to become an internationally competitive one.

At present, too many businesses feel that the finance they require is available only if they go to America. That is a serious weakness in our effort to turn scientific capability into sustained economic growth. We should want entrepreneurs to have confidence that they can stay in Britain and find the support necessary to develop their companies.

Becoming the innovation nation is a practical task. Scientists, entrepreneurs, educators and people in finance are all part of the same effort. We need to tell the world what Britain can do, demonstrate that we are acting on it and create a national endeavour that people can support. The talent and the ideas are here. We must bring the elements together so that their promise becomes growth.