You have full access to this article via your institution.
Shoreditch in east London is a hub for technology companies and vibrant street art.Credit: Kathy DeWitt/Alamy
People who have lived and worked in the east London neighbourhood of Shoreditch might recall a time when they had to contend with periodic police roadblocks and the whirring sound of helicopters. This was after 2010, when David Cameron became prime minister, and started visiting the area. Cameron and his team were lured by an ecosystem of technology companies in a part of the city known for its vibrant street art and playfully called Silicon Roundabout. These companies included relative newcomers such as Mind Candy, which made Moshi Monsters — a children’s computer game — as well as more mature companies such as maritime satellite giant Inmarsat. Shoreditch is where Cameron and his travelling entourage thought that they would find the United Kingdom’s answer to Google or Facebook. Fast-forward 15 years, and the country still seems to be chasing — but not yet realizing — its dream of an economy fuelled by a bigger and more dynamic technology sector.
Can UK science really spawn a $1-trillion company?
That’s not to downplay the successes. The United Kingdom is ranked fourth in the world (behind the United States, China and India) for its number of tech unicorns — start-up companies that are now valued at more than US$1 billion but are not publicly listed. Most of these are in London and the southeast of England. But the United Kingdom lacks companies the size of US technology giants such as NVIDIA (valued at $5 trillion), Apple, Microsoft (each valued at $4 trillion) or Alphabet (the parent holding company of Google worth $3.3 trillion).
The UK government wants to create its first trillion-dollar tech company by 2035. As Nature’s news team reports, not everyone thinks that this is the right target for stimulating economic growth (see Nature https://doi.org/qd39; 2025). As the winners of this year’s Nobel prize in economic science demonstrated, smaller companies are more likely to bring new, disruptive technologies to market than are bigger firms. When large companies get even bigger they tend to want to consolidate their presence, and they do this partly by absorbing smaller, innovative, high-growth companies — as most of today’s tech giants have done. Lawmakers in both Europe and the United States are examining whether some of the biggest tech companies are engaging in anti-competitive practices to maintain dominance. There are some studies that suggest that when large companies break up, it unleashes innovation (R. Showalter and L. Edelson Univ. Chicago Bus. Law Rev. 4.1, 143–188; 2025).
Economics Nobel prize won by researchers who showed how science boosts growth
Still, there is no doubt that governments view the biggest companies as signs of national economic strength. In the United Kingdom, parliamentarians are worried that the country is struggling to hold on to both its biggest and its most innovative corporations. DeepMind, a pioneering artificial-intelligence firm based in London, was sold to US-based Google in 2014. In 2016, the Japanese investment and technology giant Softbank in Tokyo bought chip-designer ARM, which is based in Cambridge, UK. On 3 November, shareholders of pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca based in Cambridge (worth $276 billion) approved a listing on the New York Stock Exchange. At the same time, AstraZeneca has scaled back planned expansions of research and vaccine facilities in the United Kingdom.
On 5 November, the UK House of Lords published a report that warns of the threat to growth posed by science-based firms leaving the country, and the nation’s failure to scale up more home-grown companies (see go.nature.com/4r2rwsp). The report makes several recommendations, including providing universities with consistent and sustainable funding and immigration policies that attract the brightest and best researchers and students, no matter where they were born.
The report also says that, although the United Kingdom is good at creating companies, these firms lack access to the finances that would help them go to the next level. It recommends that pension funds invest more in high-growth technology companies that have the potential to scale up. Another suggestion is to create a top-level government committee with a laser-like focus on scaling up companies. It would be chaired by the prime minister and meet frequently to coordinate action across government.
Pharmaceutical giants pull out of UK: why it matters for global science
These suggestions — from witnesses who gave evidence for the report — do not necessarily reflect a consensus of the available research on the topic. Pension funds, for example, would provide a welcome injection of capital, but it’s not clear whether a lack of funding from this source is currently holding UK companies back. And, although a high-level committee would certainly put the issue of a trillion-dollar company high on the government’s agenda, such planned government involvement is not generally the key driver of company expansion, at least in the modern age. The other unknown that surrounds this idea is whether such a committee would survive a change of government.
That being said, the attention that science, technology, innovation and prosperity are receiving in the United Kingdom is welcomed. Indeed, every country needs to be actively thinking about how to successfully harness science to fuel innovation. It will result in well-funded universities that encourage and nurture curious minds; policies that reward research and entrepreneurship; and injections of capital at various stages of company formation, from start-ups to giants. It will mean breaking the cycle of focus on short-term results.
Silicon Roundabout’s light has faded. The area is no longer a focus for top ministers. Its story offers a valuable lesson for today: policymakers’ focus on innovation shouldn’t be ‘here today, gone tomorrow’. They need to be committed for the long term.
