April 2025

President Trump’s tariffs have made the origin of manufactured products a subject of keen interest and debate. Which has led me to reconsider a question that I’ve been pondering for some time:

Why is it that the UK, home to the world’s leading inventors for several centuries, consistently fails to commercialise the items that its citizens invent?

There is no doubt that the UK could benefit from the additional revenue that would flow from the development of an array of home-grown multi-national businesses. If we compare the position of the United States, we can see that mountains of money flow into the US from most other countries of the world – think of your own contribution to those revenue streams: your Netflix subscription, your Amazon orders, visits to Starbucks and McDonalds, most of your app-based purchases, etc.

Having lived in both the UK (where I was born, and where I started my first business) and the US (where I now live), I’m aware of different cultural attitude towards business creation in each of the two countries. For example, in the US a significant proportion of schoolchildren express a desire to start a business – not so much in the UK. In the US, entrepreneurial success is, largely, celebrated – it is, after all, one pathway to the ‘American dream’. Whilst attitudes are changing in the UK, there is still a sense that business aspirations are somewhat silly or unrealistic.

There is no shortage of great ideas in the UK. The country has invented more of the world’s commercially successful products than any other single country. For example, in 1926 John Logie Baird, a Scottish inventor, demonstrated the world’s first television. He went on to invent the first colour television system. Despite these world firsts for the UK, television set production was eventually lost to electronics manufacturers in South Korea (LG and Samsung), Japan (Sony) and China (TCL and Hisense).

And while it’s true that the UK produces high quality TV shows, it lacks significant production facilities for feature-length films, and in a recent noteworthy development has transferred the James Bond franchise production rights to a US company (Amazon MGM). Further, all commercially viable streaming services are US-based.

Let’s look at some other examples. Over the last few hundred years, UK citizens invented a startlingly large proportion of products and services used (or developed) across the world, a small selection of which includes the following: the reflecting telescope (Isaac Newton, 1668), the steam engine (Thomas Newcomen, 1698), the toothbrush (William Addis, 1770), railway engines and carriages (Richard Trevithick, 1804), tin cans (Peter Durand, 1810), fire extinguishers (William Manby, 1818), cement (Joseph Aspdin, 1824), the hydrogen cell (William Grove, 1838), pneumatic tyres (Robert Thomson, 1847), chocolate bars (J S Fry, 1847), torpedoes (Robert Whitehead, 1866), thermos flasks (Sir James Dewar, 1892), vitamins (discovered by Frederick Hopkins, 1912), jet engines (Frank Whittle, 1929), cats eyes reflective road studs (Percy Shew, 1934), the hovercraft (Christopher Cockerell, 1953), the automatic kettle (Russel Hobbs, 1955), the ATM cash dispenser (John Shepard-Baron, 1967), home computers (Sir Clive Sinclair, 1980), the World Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee, 1989), Viagra (Peter Dunn, 1993),

With the exception of the jet engine (the world’s leading ones are manufactured in Derbyshire by Rolls-Royce, and are attached to the majority of Boeing and Airbus aircraft), none of the above-listed items are manufactured in the UK, or controlled by UK companies, any longer.

Which leads to the question:

Given that the UK is great at inventing new stuff, how can it improve its commercial exploitation?

To my mind, the solution lies with government. To bridge the gap between invention and commercial success, the UK should set up, and adequately fund, a Task Force for the exploitation of UK inventions.

When a UK resident wins the lottery, a team of wellbeing advisers is immediately dispatched to help the winner adjust to the psychological and financial transition. I’m suggesting that the UK government does the same thing with viable new businesses or inventions.

All universities and business start-ups should be contacted by the Task Force and offered the benefits of its services. The Task Force will have expertise in entrepreneurship and international trade, and it will be adequately funded. It will advise on protection of ideas, on steps to monetise those ideas, as well as managing compliance issues and other legal challenges. It should bring its expertise to bear as regards educating fledgling businesses towards global aspirations.

What about ‘Innovate UK’ you may ask. The work of Innovate UK (which provides advice and support for certain sectors) is good, as far as it goes. But it’s not a proactive service. They won’t seek you out if you don’t seek them out. Actually, I’d not heard of Innovate UK until they became a client of one of my businesses. So, the Task Force could be a new standalone service, or it could be a special team within Innovate UK. Either way, the investment could pay great dividends for the country in the years to come.

For example, while the UK invented the World Wide Web, its commercial exploitation has clearly and indisputably occurred in the United States - the five most-visited websites worldwide are Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Wikipedia. These companies could have been British ones, and if they were the tax take for the UK government would be in a different position to that which it is in currently.

I read this week that, in a world first, King’s College London has grown a human tooth in a laboratory. Where do we think that this invention will eventually be commercially exploited? How might your answer be different were the Task Force to swoop in?