Investment in innovation has to be a long term strategy while the UK’s fixed term parliamentary system and the need to grab headlines encourage short term thinking.
The evidence is piling up for all to see.
Firstly, research by the Big Innovation Centre has emphasised, if it were needed, that there is a “systemic failure” holding back the economy shown in part by the worsening of access to finance to SMEs and in particular to those developing entirely new products and processes.
Yet these new innovative SMEs are the most likely to create new markets and achieve rapid growth, so have a disproportionate impact on employment and the national economy.
The point was reinforced by Tony Robinson OBE, a successful micro-business owner with more than 25 years’ experience and co-owner of Enterprise Rockers, which supports micro enterprises. In an article in the Daily Telegraph business pages, he says that despite the UK’s 4.5million micro businesses providing 32% of private sector employment and 20% of its turnover: “…95% of all government employment support and training funding goes to the largest 5% of UK businesses.”
Sir Hossein Yassaie, CEO of Imagination Technologies, has also weighed in, comparing planned support for innovation in S. Korea over the long term to what happens in the UK, where much of industry has been sold to overseas owners: “…The Government changes and everything is short term…. I think we really need to stop all that.”
In his view, also quoted in the Telegraph, instead questions need to be asked now about what we need to do today to be in markets in ten years’ time and imagination now is the key to future success.
Politicians need to put in place support that is genuinely aimed at SMEs that is more than rhetoric and not prone to change by a new Government, or they need to provide real short-term incentives to investors in innovation that will have the same effect over the longer term.
Examples of such incentives might be to provide soft loans, or offer matched funding alongside new share capital. We don’t want politicians trying to be clever as they have been with the flawed Enterprise Finance Guarantee Scheme which was never going to stimulate business.
It is a great pity that ‘highly regarded’ economists like the BBC’s Stephanie Flanders, who I understand also advises the Government, are unaware of the Small Firms Loan Guarantee Scheme that for approximately 15 years drove much of growth by SMEs in the 1980s and 90s. I asked her recently, and she had never heard of it.
This makes me think that economists like to operate at a theoretical and strategic level rather than try to understand what really makes SMEs tick so they can develop tactical stimuli that promote SME growth. Quantitative Easing is another example of theory not working for SMEs.
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