The coming 10 years are almost certain to be the decade that sees the greatest scientific breakthroughs in a century. The question is whether advances now under way in AI, quantum computing and biology can address cancer, find ways to treat or prevent dementia, and overcome the growing resistance to antibiotics. Can we find sustainable ways to address our energy needs and protect the environment at the same time?
Can AI transform the way we deliver education, health and social care to the benefit of millions, as well as advance modern manufacturing strength? And what role can Britain’s inventors, investors and industrialists play in developing these transformative technologies? While the US and China are the world’s obvious innovation powerhouses, the UK also has enormous assets, as the Innovation Nation Conference in Manchester addressed by the prime minister, Andy Burnham, will hear today.
We are home to four of the world’s top 10 universities and 16 of the top 100, five of which are in Europe’s top 10 for spin-outs, startups based on intellectual property produced through a university’s research. With less than 1% of the world’s population, the UK produces 6% of the world’s research papers, nearly 9% of citations and 12% of the most highly cited research. Our research expertise is one of the many reasons we have been at the forefront of recent inventions: from AlphaFold, which predicts how proteins behave, to viral-vector vaccine technology and AI that detects cancer as reliably as radiologists.
Britain already sits at the intersection of AI, quantum computing and synthetic biology. The question then is: why, having led the first Industrial Revolution, should the UK not be the world’s great innovation nation once again? We know the public have an entrepreneurial spirit, and back this vision.
New polling for this week’s conference finds that 75% of people agree that innovation is essential for creating UK economic growth. But it is disappointing that only 36% of the British public believes the country is a world leader in science. It is time for innovation to move to the forefront of government policy and the 10-year plan the government is preparing.
If we were to raise Britain to Swedish or Japanese levels of innovation intensity we would, over time, leave every household £5,000 better off (according to my calculations), and increase our national income by £150bn a year as higher investment in research and development feeds through into productivity. And a jobs plan on the scale that Our Scottish Future has proposed for Scotland would mean about 3m new jobs across the UK. We can identify the major hurdles to overcome.
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