31 May 2025

Innovation policy for 2050 while the present burns

A policy roundtable on 2030 and beyond, and the entrepreneur I met the week before.

Last month I sat in a policy roundtable on innovation strategy for 2030 and beyond. The ideas were good: AI-driven economies, smart cities, big steps in green tech. But I kept thinking about an entrepreneur I had met the week before. They could not secure basic R&D funding today, because the grant process takes 18 months. Their team had also become so focused on perfecting the technology, to meet “breakthrough” criteria, that getting a product to market had slipped down the list.

I see two problems here. We spend a lot of energy designing the future and not enough on the machinery that will get us there. And we reward long R&D cycles while the slow, unglamorous work of scaling is left to fend for itself.

What it costs

Innovation theatre. Labs chase moonshots and cannot pay their technicians. Startups reshape themselves to fit a call for proposals instead of their customers.

A wider valley of death. The gap between research and commercialisation gets deeper.

Impact that stalls. A breakthrough in a paper is not a breakthrough in someone’s life.

Three things I would ask policy makers to try

Fund the basics. Equipment, talent pipelines and fast grants deserve the same seriousness as the vision.

Reward traction, not only patents. One example: tie 30 percent of public funding to customer pilots or revenue milestones.

Close the translator gap. Place business experts in residence at research institutes, so that scientists have someone to turn results into offers.

The question I would like every innovation policy to answer is not only whether it will work in 2050, but whether it helps someone build and sell something tomorrow.

What is the biggest gap between policy and market you have seen?