Entrepreneurs must be at heart of industrial strategy

WITH the UK Government set to publish its long-awaited industrial strategy next month, there is hope that this marks the beginning of a more coherent, long-term approach to economic policy.

- DYLAN JONES-EVANS

They have promised a 10-year plan that promises to support key sectors such as clean energy, life sciences, advanced manufacturing, and creative industries while addressing deep-rooted challenges around productivity, skills, and regional imbalance.

But if Invest 2035 is to succeed where past strategies have failed, it must go beyond simply identifying priority sectors or funnelling more public money into existing institutions. It must recognise that entrepreneurship is the real engine of economic renewal and embed it as a core pillar of the UK’s industrial future.

Entrepreneurs are not peripheral actors in an industrial strategy but are central to it.

It is founders who build the firms that commercialise new technologies, create new markets, and inject dynamism into sectors that would otherwise stagnate and without them, we cannot transform research into products, regions into clusters, or policy into impact.

That is why any industrial policy must be designed not only around sectors, but around the entrepreneurs shaping them.

So how can the UK Government create an industrial strategy with entrepreneurship at its core?

Finance is the first test and entrepreneurs across the UK report a familiar story namely that it is still too hard to raise patient capital to take an idea from prototype to product and from product to scale.

As a result, too many promising companies are being forced to sell early or move abroad because they cannot find the finance to grow at home.

While the UK has made progress in early-stage investment, particularly through tax incentives such as SEIS and EIS, there remains a critical funding gap for scale-ups especially outside London and the south east of England.