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Engineering growth: Enabling world-class UK entrepreneurship in the low-carbon economy
report
posted on 2020-04-30, 12:50 authored by Erkko Autio, Robert WebbThe UK faces two challenges over the coming years: transitioning to a low-carbon energy system while continuing to
grow our economy. This will require close collaboration between industry, government and society. But chiefly, it will
require innovation to ensure we meet the needs of a growing population in a smarter, more sustainable way. Innovation
is created throughout the economy. What has become clear over the past few decades, however, is that entrepreneurs
and small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) have proved to be a highly efficient innovation engine within our
economy. In low-carbon they represent 91.5% of the UK market, and are disproportionately likely to innovate compared
to peers in other sectors.
The game-changing technologies that will lead the transition to a lower-carbon energy system rely on individuals
with technical skills in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM), and bringing these to market requires
entrepreneurial skills.
In the coming years the UK low-carbon sector will need to recruit an additional 50,000 people with STEM skills
annually by 2023. This shortage is compounded by a weakness in the UK’s entrepreneurial culture which prevents
some of the most ground-breaking and promising low-carbon ventures from scaling up.
Because, while the UK has created a comparatively higher quantity of low-carbon start-up ventures, we lag significantly
behind the US in scale-up performance. There is a very real threat that the highest potential low-carbon businesses
generated in the UK will look elsewhere to attain true scale.
This new research commissioned by Shell Springboard and written by Imperial College Business School focuses on
the structures and ecosystems which enable low-carbon enterprise in the UK.
Funding
Commissioned by: Shell Springboard Programme
History
School
- Loughborough University London
Publisher
Imperial College Business SchoolVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publication date
2015-02-11Language
- en