Three Big Ideas #29
Cheap turps, unshackling public data, and carbon bluffs
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
Last week, I hopped on a Eurostar to Brussels to attend the Lisbon Council’s Scaling Europe Summit. The headline act was Stripe’s President and Co-Founder John Collison, who, as an Irishman who’s done a pretty decent job of growing a company, is better placed than most to give his view on what countries this side of the Atlantic should be doing to close the scaleup gap with America.
During a panel session, he invoked a possibly apocryphal but definitely apt Pablo Picasso saying: “When art critics get together, they talk about form and structure and meaning. When artists get together, they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.” Rather than getting into the intricacies of paint thinner, however, Collison was making the point that founders should do more to ensure they’re heard when policymakers are trying to improve the business environment.
As someone who certainly falls more into the ‘art critic’ side of the equation in this extended metaphor, but who nonetheless wants to help ‘artists’ as much as possible, I wholeheartedly agree. When it comes to trying to boost the economy, too often people who are detached from the fundamental, nuts and bolts realities of running businesses wield the most influence. Too often, vague platitudes are confidently trotted out as solutions to knotty problems.
When I think of some of the best policy influencing we’ve done over the years, it has often come from founders talking us through exactly what banal rule or specific regulatory quirk is holding their business back. While it’s our job to devise the policy workaround, we won’t always know what needs to be worked around without founders telling us first. Put another way, if you think your turpentine can be made cheaper, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
🚆 Philip Salter, Founder
Like many Londoners, I’ve become a little too obsessed with a Live Tube Map built by Ben James. Its beauty lies, mostly, in its simplicity: showing exactly where every tube train is at any given time.
As Time Out reports: “Hover over the moving trains and a little information box pops up telling you the exact model of the train, where it’s going to and from, the percentage of its journey that it’s completed and the exact times (to the second) that it is expected at its next two or three stops.”
I’m old enough to remember printing off maps from the Transport for London (TfL) website to navigate around the city. Nowadays, the data underlying what was once a basic platform now powers a range of applications, including Citymapper, Moovit, Santander Cycle, and many others.
As much as I love the Live Tube Map – and as much as we should celebrate the success of TfL’s open data – it’s also a stark reminder of how much of our public data remains underutilised. The Head of Data for London, Greater London Authority sums it up well: “Unfortunately, some great projects still fail because we cannot share the data needed to solve the problem. Whether we are hampered by technical infrastructure, legal barriers, capability, capacity, or resourcing, that is still a wasted opportunity to improve the city and benefit Londoners.”
If we don’t act quickly we’ll fall further behind. Even Germany is moving towards the ‘public money, public data’ principle, potentially legislating to ensure all data collected with public funding should be made available for public use and benefit.
Unshackling public data will free public-spirited technologists and entrepreneurs to build services we didn’t even know we needed. If you have an idea for what you would like to build with government data let us know.
🌍 Jessie May Green, Events and APPG for Entrepreneurship Coordinator
Carbon credits were introduced with the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, inspired by the ‘cap-and-trade’ system for sulfur dioxide emissions that successfully tackled the US and Europe’s acid rain problem. In a carbon market, total greenhouse gas emissions are capped, and any party that comes in below their individual cap receives a ‘carbon credit’, which they are free to trade to a higher-emitting party that is exceeding their own cap.
The UN intended carbon credits to be a meaningful way for countries to voluntarily meet their climate targets, but new research by Carbon Market Watch has found that only one in 27 international carbon credits will likely represent a real emissions reduction. So, what’s going wrong here?
While in theory this presents an elegant and economically efficient way to decarbonise, a couple of problems crop up in practice. First, some parties are inappropriately granted credits based on questionable supporting evidence, and, second, others are guilty of ‘double counting’ – when both the credit-seller and the credit-buyer logs the emissions reduction, which misrepresents the overall change that has taken place.
Not only do Carbon Market Watch point out that historic carbon credits lack efficacy, they also warn that familiar flaws are set to persist in the new and improved framework. With the European Commission currently considering counting international carbon credits towards its 2040 climate goal, and with nearly two thirds (63%) of large UK businesses planning to use carbon credits to meet their own sustainability targets, this is important to know – and to fix.