Three Big Ideas #24
Shrinking ultraviolet light’s price tag, coordination crises, and ripples across the Atlantic
Welcome to our weekly Three Big Ideas roundup, in which we serve up a curated selection of ideas (and our takes on them) in entrepreneurship, innovation, science and technology, handpicked by the team.
🦠 Eamonn Ives, Research Director
Scale insensitivity is one of the biggest failure modes in politics today. All too often, policymakers will inadequately assess the scale of an issue, and then craft a response that is either utterly underwhelming or extremely excessive. A paradigmatic example is the fixation of lawmakers to ban just about every form of disposable plastic to prevent ocean pollution, despite the fact that Europe – let alone the UK – contributes just 0.6% of total plastic waste that ends up in our seas.
One genuinely life-or-death problem that we have so far mustered a very much underwhelming response to is pathogens that spread through the air. As I learnt from Blueprint Biosecurity’s Richard Williamson’s piece for Works in Progress:
“Airborne infectious diseases remain one of humanity's biggest challenges: The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed an estimated 27 million lives. Tuberculosis kills 1.6 million people annually. One billion people are infected by influenza every year, leading to millions of serious illnesses and hundreds of thousands of deaths.”
Aside from the human tragedies behind these statistics, airborne diseases also pose enormous economic costs. Finding solutions to mitigating them would represent perhaps one of the highest impact things an individual could possibly be working on right now. Fortunately, Williamson points to an intervention that could be just that – far-UVC, a form of ultraviolet light which appears to be a powerful germicide while still being safe for humans. A watershed study of far-UVC showed that it can slash concentrations of airborne bacteria by 98.4%, equivalent to totally refreshing the air in a room 184 times every hour compared to standard ventilation.
One obstacle to the wider deployment of far-UVC systems is their cost, which can render them prohibitively expensive outside of specialist applications such as in hospitals. Just as I wrote before about the need to crack cheap air conditioning, bringing down the price of far-UVC also seems like a challenge where a brainy entrepreneur could do an inordinate amount of good in the world.
⛓️💥 Anastasia Bektimirova, Head of Science and Technology
In a report released today, the National Audit Office (NAO) finds that Britain’s Industrial Strategy is being held back by poor Whitehall coordination. It warns that the Department for Business and Trade (DBT), which is leading on the development and delivery of the Industrial Strategy, is finding it difficult to coordinate with the ten other relevant departments, citing immature relationships and limited evaluation capabilities. As the NAO puts it: “DBT faces challenges in its relationships with departments who view growth as integral to their own work and therefore have a different approach to growth and prioritisation in those sectors.”
This disconnect is causing “frustration” among businesses that are trying to navigate government support. This was illustrated at last week’s Business and Trade Committee evidence session by Steve Brierley, Founder and CEO of Riverlane, a Cambridge-based quantum computing company:
“DSIT [the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology] is doing a great job in bringing together the Quantum Strategy. The challenge with quantum though is that it impacts so many different departments – it’s impacting defence, life sciences, advanced manufacturing, clean energy – it cuts across a lot of these pillars. The challenge then is: does everyone think it’s someone else’s job to figure this out?”
These concerns are not new. Focusing specifically on meeting national science and technology objectives, a report I co-authored back in 2023 argued that the creation of DSIT was a positive step but insufficient without addressing broader coordination challenges. The report identified this as a critical factor in becoming a science superpower, recommending several solutions, including appointing a Permanent Secretary-level official to lead the National Science and Technology Council, giving the DSIT Secretary power to approve R&D spending across departments, moving universities from the Department for Education to DSIT, and establishing formal mechanisms to align regulatory bodies.
Today’s findings from the NAO are yet another warning sign that even well-designed strategies for specific technologies or sectors risk falling short of their potential to drive economic growth and meaningful innovation if there isn’t effective cross-government coordination. We need the government to not just create ambitious policies, but to rethink how it organises itself to deliver them effectively.
🌊 Jessie May Green, Researcher
Despite being a UK-based company, the pharmaceutical firm GSK has paused various activities relating to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) following Executive Orders from US President Donald Trump. Onlookers may reasonably wonder, will this set a precedent for other British businesses, even if they’re separated from America by thousands of miles of Atlantic Ocean?
Though not legally obligated, many British companies may be eager to please the new President due to the importance of the US market. Indeed, Emma Walmsley, GSK’s CEO, said they were obliged to make the changes given that the USA is their largest market and the US Government is their top customer.
Commenting to The Guardian, employment lawyer Sarah Tahamtani said: “I can’t imagine a situation where a UK employer would be bound by an executive order in the US.” However, Tahamtani notes that Trump’s orders could shift ‘the general mood’, potentially creating ripple effects that impact the way UK businesses approach DEI.
Thankfully, these decisions do ultimately lie with individual companies, not heads of state. I’m sure the founders reading this can attest to the benefits of a diverse workforce. Broadly speaking, CEOs tend to know what’s best for their staff – and it’s with them where responsibility should rest.
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