Details Location: London Salary: £28,000-£32,000 depending on experience Duration: Permanent Application closing date: 14 April 2023 The Entrepreneurs Network is a think tank which champions Britain’s most ambitious entrepreneurs. We are an independent, non-partisan organisation, and support entrepreneurs by: Producing cutting-edge research into the best policies to support entrepreneurship; Campaigning for policy changes that will help entrepreneurship flourish; Hosting regular events to bridge the gap between entrepreneurs and policymakers; Updating entrepreneurs on how pol ..read more

A week can feel like an awfully long time. Last Friday, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was collapsing. Following a sleep-deprived weekend for Ministers, Treasury officials, and a fair few entrepreneurs, a deal was struck with HSBC for SVB UK. Anyone reading this who helped hammer a deal together before the market opened on Monday deserves a huge pat on the back. Speed was critical – credit where credit is due. Then we had the Spring Budget, which was very pro-business – just not for all businesses. First and perhaps foremost, we’re big fans of full expensing, which we think will incentivise produ ..read more

This week the government released the Science and Technology Framework, or in current lingo its “plan to cement the UK’s place as a science and technology superpower by 2030.” It covers a lot of ground, but I want to focus on one announcement which we’ve been working on. As part of the smorgasbord of plans, Rishi announced the government will be “testing different models of funding science, to support a range of innovative institutional models, such as Focused Research Organisations (known as FROs), working with industry and philanthropic partners to open up new funding for UK research. For e ..read more

The Windsor Framework agreement is good news for entrepreneurs and innovation. While Boris Johnson will find it hard to vote for Sunak’s deal, he’s feeling increasingly isolated. Even Steve Baker MP – the self-styled “hard man of Brexit” – is exhausted. Britain’s innovators were in a buoyant mood for the Campaign for Science and Engineering’s (CaSE) annual lecture. Despite news that the Treasury was taking back £1.6bn promised for science, this was overshadowed by the prospect that the UK would soon be back in the €95.5bn (over six years to 2027) Horizon Europe research programme. The CaSE l ..read more

With the Budget now just nineteen days away, regular readers will know we put out a letter to entrepreneurs making the case for why the Chancellor should extend and enhance the Enterprise Investment Schemes, SEIS and EIS, and Venture Capital Trusts (VCTs). This isn’t a big ask. After all, at the Autumn Statement last November, Jeremy Hunt confirmed the Government would be expanding the generosity and availability of SEIS, and the government “sees the value of extending” EIS and VCTs. But legislation needs passing and the longer the Government delays the more uncertainty entrepreneurs and the ..read more

I spoke at the Cambridge Union in a debate with the motion “This House would prioritise economic growth over everything else”. You can watch the debate here. The post below is a blog post written from my notes. I think the concept of growth can be very abstract. It’s easy for our eyes to glaze over amid all the chatter of percentage point changes and figures with varying amounts of zeros after them. And, don’t get me wrong, there will be numbers in the blog post. But I’d like to humanise it for a moment. My mum was raised in absolute poverty. She never talks about it in those terms, but she h ..read more

What do you think of the Enterprise Investment Schemes or Venture Capital Trusts? If you were a Member of Parliament back in 2017, odds are, you wouldn’t have heard of them: 61% weren’t aware of the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS), 54% were clueless about Venture Capital Trusts (VCTs), and 43% didn’t know their Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) from their elbow. I’m not sure what percentage of the current crop of MPs would have heard of the schemes, but we’re acutely aware of how important they are to entrepreneurs. That’s why we’ll soon put out a paper through the All-Party Parlia ..read more

This week the Prime Minister disrupted Whitehall, creating four new departments: the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ); a combined Department for Business and Trade (DBT, or DBaT if you prefer); the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT); and a “refocused” Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). Given where the Conservative Party stands in the polls, some have called it rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. But this is unfair. Everyone says they want politicians to look beyond the election cycle – we can’t have it both ways. Particularly ..read more

Another week; another speech about innovation. Today Jeremy Hunt set out his “long-term vision to grow the economy” at Bloomberg. The Chancellor struck the right tone, but there was nothing particularly innovative about his speech. He may have dropped his four 'E' priorities: 'Enterprise, Education, Employment and Everywhere', but no new policies. We have more than a few policies ready and waiting for him, his colleagues and his opposition, for that matter. On the education front, we had a report out this week with Young Enterprise on the value of Applied Learning – that is, the val ..read more

In Davos this week, the Business Secretary Grant Shapps announced that the UK will launch a Scale-Up Summit “to bring together key frontier tech, development and finance figures who have accelerated tech businesses from start-ups to scale-ups.” Shapps wants to hear from those in the UK and beyond – from California to Tallinn – who have achieved high growth, unicorn status and experienced multiple exits, to “build networks and share expertise.” It’s still in the planning stages. We’ll be sharing our advice on how to make this successful, but I have some initial thoughts based on my experience ..read more