Breaking through Britain’s innovation barrier

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2024 on Sunday 20 October at Church House, Westminster.

ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION

Britain has famously been a nation of inventors and innovators. From the breakthroughs of the Industrial Revolution through huge inventions like television and the telephone to designing cool consumer products like the iPhone and cutting-edge microchips, British ingenuity has been world-leading.

Yet it seems as if innovation has slowed down in recent years, and particularly so in the UK. It feels like there has been little or nothing that could be called ‘revolutionary’ since the rise of the smartphone. High-profile US tech investor, Peter Thiel, has claimed that innovation in America is ‘somewhere between dire straits and dead’.

One prominent American economist, Robert Gordon, has argued that the burst of innovation from the Second Industrial Revolution – from 1870 to 1900, and encompassing everything from electricity to chemicals, petroleum to communications – provided a sustained period of rising living standards through most of the twentieth century. Since then, the impact of the more modest innovations of the information-technology revolution has already petered out.

If innovation has slowed down, why? For some commentators, put simply, all the really important stuff has been invented – all we can do is tweak and improve. We’ve already learned to fly, communicate almost instantly over huge distances, create and manipulate materials, and so on. Other factors might be the time lag before a new technology really comes into its own and whether globalisation – and the availability of cheap labour elsewhere in the world – has dampened the drive to innovate. Some point to excessive regulation, a ‘safety first’ culture and the obsession with the environment over human progress as other potential factors.

And perhaps such pessimism is overblown. We don’t need to travel across the world now to meet people – we can do it online very well for a fraction of the cost in time and money. We may still travel in metal boxes with four wheels, but our cars increasingly do much of the hard work for us, even if the truly driverless car is still a long way off. If we want to enjoy nicotine, we now have a plethora of different ways to do so – from vaping to heat-not-burn technology – that means there are finally satisfying and safer alternatives to the tobacco cigarette.

Is innovation really in the doldrums? To the extent that that is true, how can we realise the potential of human ingenuity today?

SPEAKERS
Duncan Cunningham
UK and Ireland external affairs director, Philip Morris Limited

Kevin McCullagh
founder, Plan; innovation strategist and writer

Mercy Muroki
columnist, the Sun; former policy fellow to minister for women and equalities and business and trade secretary

Dr Nikos Sotirakopoulos
visiting fellow, Ayn Rand Institute; instructor, Ayn Rand University; author, Identity Politics and Tribalism: the new culture wars

CHAIR
Timandra Harkness
journalist, writer and broadcaster; author, Technology is Not the Problem and Big Data: does size matter?; presenter, Radio 4's FutureProofing and How to Disagree