Gordon Brown Calls for Innovation to Become the Centerpiece of British Policy: £5,000 Per Family

Scientific Assets That Aren't Pulling Their Weight

Britain is sitting on a gold mine. With less than 1% of the world's population, the country produces 6% of all scientific papers, nearly 9% of all citations, and 12% of the world's most-cited research. British universities include 4 of the planet's top 10 institutions and 16 of the top 100. Five of those universities rank among Europe's top 10 for spin-outs — startups launched on the back of university research.

Examples of innovations where Britain has led the way include AlphaFold (a technology for predicting protein behavior), viral vector vaccines, and AI systems for cancer diagnosis with accuracy comparable to radiologists. The country already sits at the intersection of three major technology frontiers — AI, quantum computing, and synthetic biology.

But there's a core problem: Britain excels at creating startups but struggles to turn them into scalable companies, and those companies into global leaders. Per capita, the US has twice as many $1 billion companies and almost three times as many companies valued at $10 billion or more. And when British companies do scale, three-quarters of the venture capital involved comes from abroad.

The Numbers Meant to Motivate

Gordon Brown, who served as Britain's prime minister from 2007 to 2010, laid out a simple calculation. If the country raised its innovation intensity to the level of Sweden or Japan, every household would eventually become £5,000 richer per year, and national income would rise by £150 billion annually. A jobs plan similar to the one Our Scottish Future proposed for Scotland would create roughly 3 million new positions across the UK.

In a survey conducted for the Innovation Nation Conference, hosted in Manchester by Mayor Andy Burnham, 75% of Britons agreed that innovation is essential for economic growth. But only 36% believe the country is a world leader in science.

What to Do: Concrete Steps

Brown proposed a set of measures to address the bottlenecks:

• Financing: Give companies access to capital from British investors, create new incentives for investors, and build public-private partnerships modeled on Germany, France, and Italy, channeled through the British Business Bank and a national wealth fund
• Tax policy: R&D tax relief for companies of all sizes
• Competition: Antitrust policy should protect new companies from entrenched incumbents
• Regional development: 127 innovation clusters across the UK could grow given sustained support for infrastructure, training, and research funding from UK Research and Innovation
• Decentralization: Greater powers for mayors and regional authorities to act locally, backed by guaranteed access to global markets

A National Mission, Like Kennedy's

Brown drew a parallel with John F. Kennedy's speech 64 years ago about going to the Moon. Kennedy later admitted he wished he could have chosen a national project capable of inspiring the public, but found nothing better than space. Today, Britain can choose a different goal — becoming a nation of innovation. It won't be easy, but it's necessary to avoid falling behind in an age of accelerating artificial intelligence. The challenge isn't simply to invent the future, but to invest in it, build it, and, wherever possible, own it here in Britain.