Raising Britain’s innovation intensity to the levels seen in Sweden or Japan would eventually leave every UK household £5,000 better off and lift national income by £150bn a year, former prime minister Gordon Brown has said.
Writing for the Guardian, Brown said his calculations show higher investment in research and development would feed through into productivity gains, and that a jobs plan on the scale proposed for Scotland by Our Scottish Future would deliver about 3m new jobs across the UK.
Brown, who was prime minister from 2007 to 2010, made the case ahead of the Innovation Nation Conference in Manchester, which he said is being addressed by the prime minister, Andy Burnham.
He argued the coming decade is almost certain to bring the greatest scientific breakthroughs in a century, and framed the central question as whether advances in AI, quantum computing and biology can tackle cancer, find ways to treat or prevent dementia, and overcome growing resistance to antibiotics. He also asked whether sustainable answers can be found for energy needs alongside environmental protection, and whether AI can reshape education, health and social care for millions while strengthening modern manufacturing.
While the United States and China are the obvious innovation powerhouses, Brown wrote that the UK holds substantial assets of its own. He cited four of the world’s top 10 universities and 16 of the top 100, five of which rank in Europe’s top 10 for spin-outs, meaning startups built on intellectual property generated by university research.
With under 1% of the global population, he said, the UK produces 6% of the world’s research papers, close to 9% of citations and 12% of the most highly cited research. He pointed to AlphaFold, which predicts protein behaviour, viral-vector vaccine technology and AI that detects cancer as reliably as radiologists as evidence of that research strength, and noted Britain already sits at the intersection of AI, quantum computing and synthetic biology.
Polling carried out for the conference found 75% of people agree innovation is essential to creating UK economic growth, Brown wrote. He described as disappointing the finding that only 36% of the British public believes the country is a world leader in science.
Brown said innovation should be moved to the forefront of government policy and of the 10-year plan the government is preparing. He identified the main obstacles: the UK performs well at startups and spin-outs but is slow to turn startups into scale-ups, and slower still to turn scale-ups into global success stories. Per head of population, he wrote, the US has twice as many $1bn companies and nearly three times as many worth $10bn or more, and three-quarters of venture capital investment in UK scale-ups comes from overseas.
Addressing that, he wrote, requires government to keep clearing bottlenecks. Speakers from future-facing companies at the conference were expected to set out steps including ensuring firms can access growth capital from UK investors, new investor incentives, and public-private partnerships along the lines of those in Germany, France and Italy, capitalised by the British Business Bank and the national wealth fund. Brown also called for competition policy that favours new entrants over vested interests, aligned with a favourable tax regime such as research and development credits open to companies of all sizes.
Research for the conference identified 127 innovative clusters spanning every region and nation of the UK, Brown wrote, many of which would succeed with long-term support for infrastructure, skills training and R&D backing from UK Research and Innovation. Harnessing that potential would require more power devolved to mayors and regional authorities so they can act locally while retaining access to global markets, he added.
Brown said Britain does not lack genius or great assets, and that every nation must do more to find its “lost Einsteins” — young people in lower-income areas with talent but not yet the opportunity to demonstrate it. He called for a “chain of hope” linking people to intellectual discovery and deployment, to startups and scale-ups, and to global leadership, all aligned around a shared national purpose.
He recalled that 64 years ago John F Kennedy committed the US to a nationwide effort to reach the moon first, but noted the space initiative was not Kennedy’s first choice: the president had wanted a national project everyone could feel part of and said he would have preferred an Earth-based one had he found a project with equal power to inspire.
Britain, Brown concluded, can choose to be the innovation nation, and the Manchester event sends a message that the country intends to be in the global vanguard — not because it is easy, but even though it is hard. The challenge, he wrote, is to do more than invent the future: Britain must invest in it, manufacture it and, wherever possible, own it.
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