Gordon Brown wants Britain to invent, invest in and own the future, but Kate Fleming argues his vision is narrow. She writes that his hunt for “lost Einsteins” rests on a lone genius inventing, commercialisation scaling, and the problem being solved. That may suit a cancer drug, but not the “wicked problems” of our time – social care, education, climate – which demand new technologies and practices for collaboration, distributed ownership and collective innovation.
AI and the fiction of genius-engineered solutions
Fleming says the current struggle to retrofit governance, accountability and benefit on to AI exposes the fiction of genius-engineered “solutions”. Nor do trillion-dollar companies make every household £5,000 richer, she argues. They concentrate short-term gain in a narrow founder-investor class, while the rest carry the work and cost of long-term cleanup.
She describes a vicious cycle: the government worries about big tech yet incentivises more of it, competing with Silicon Valley by doing the same – just not quite as well. Her organisation is a community interest company with an asset lock, built for competitive innovation in the public interest. Labour created this structure in 2005, but innovation policy has yet to back it. UK Research and Innovation is closed to such companies, Innovate UK deemed hers ineligible for a knowledge transfer partnership despite previous success with the University of Edinburgh, and the Advanced Research and Invention Agency backs lone inventors. The Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme and the Enterprise Investment Scheme reward only uncapped shareholder returns.
Creativity as a partner to science
Jenny Haigh argues that Gordon Brown’s analysis of Britain’s innovation ecosystem is largely correct, but one word is conspicuously absent: creativity. She says Brown has fallen for a common trap, defaulting to a vision of R&D that begins and ends with Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), leaving no place for the creative advantage that often makes true innovation possible.
The UK’s creative industries contribute £145bn to the economy annually, growing at four times the national rate. Research by the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre shows that nearly two-thirds of creative micro-firms have engaged in R&D in the past three years, outstripping every other industrial strategy priority sector. Haigh notes that the UK university producing the most student startups is University of the Arts London (UAL).
UAL startups are using lateral thinking to develop biodegradable alternatives to plastic, building tools that decarbonise supply chains, pioneering food waste fermentation technology, and creating new materials from agricultural byproducts that could transform the construction industry. They are engaging in real-world R&D to solve major global problems, yet as creative businesses with arts graduates at the helm, they are consistently excluded from the narrative and wider policy framing.
Haigh concludes that if the UK is serious about innovation driving good growth, it cannot afford a definition that excludes one of its most dynamic, inventive and internationally competitive sectors. Unlocking Britain’s full innovation potential means recognising that creativity and science are partners, not opposites.
