Three Big Ideas #51
Innovation insights, speaking up for free speech, and learning-through-doing
Welcome to our final Three Big Ideas of 2025, in which we reflect on some of the stories, trends and wider concepts related to entrepreneurship and innovation which stuck with us the most this year.
💬 Eamonn Ives, Research Director
There are some values we hold which appear so self-evidently worthwhile that it almost seems unnecessary to say so. Perhaps precisely because of that, they are also the ones most vulnerable to a determined challenger interrogating them.
In 2025, freedom of speech increasingly felt like one such value. High-profile cases abounded of people facing harsh consequences for harmlessly expressing their viewpoints. These were not just dramatic exceptions to the rule either – plenty of datasets show how freedom of expression in different guises has been in retreat across the world for decades.
Why this should matter for entrepreneurship might not be immediately obvious – but it does, and it should concern us all.
At its core, entrepreneurship is an act of discovery. It depends on founders questioning incumbents, testing unfashionable ideas, arguing against prevailing assumptions and persuading others to take risks with them. That takes more than just capital and skills. It requires a social environment where deviation from the status quo is not merely tolerated, but encouraged and indeed celebrated when it results in new, useful things.
History teaches us the value of toleration. It should be no surprise that many of the places that nurtured the Scientific Revolution during the 16th and 17th centuries went on to profit most from the Industrial Revolution that ensued. Similarly, we have repeatedly seen how émigrés fleeing persecution can transform the strength of their adopted nations’ economies – from industrial French Huguenots arriving in Britain, to Jewish scientists forced out of Central Europe contributing to the ongoing success of the United States.
Freedom of expression is therefore not only a civic concern, but an economic one as well. Though it’s patently true that exceptional founders can succeed even under illiberal regimes, I’d happily wager that the likelihood they will do so is lower. If we care about long-term dynamism in our economy, freedom of speech is something we ought to speak a lot more about.
🏅 Philip Salter, Founder
In the world of ideas, the big news of 2025 was the awarding of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt – three thinkers who, in different ways, helped explain how innovation becomes self-sustaining and why some places manage to turn new ideas into rising living standards.
Mokyr argues that lasting innovation depends on a steady flow of useful knowledge: both the scientific principles that explain how the world works and the practical know-how to turn those principles into working technologies. Britain, in the 18th century, offered an unusually fertile combination – a critical mass of skilled artisans, curious engineers and institutions flexible enough to let ideas spread and take root.
Aghion and Howitt’s breakthrough came in 1992, when they took Joseph Schumpeter’s insight about constant technological replacement and built the first growth model that properly captured it. Their article demonstrated mathematically how the incessant replacement – or Perennial Gale, if you will – of old technologies by new ones can yield sustained economic growth.
Before that, mainstream growth theory more or less ignored the churn of firms and the incentives that drive innovators. By embedding innovation into a realistic, dynamic economy, Aghion and Howitt opened the door to analysing everything from optimal R&D subsidies to the role of monopoly power – work that now underpins much of modern innovation policy.
This year’s prize should also remind us that entrepreneurs sit at the centre of this story. Entrepreneurship is not simply a route to personal or investor wealth; it is the mechanism through which societies discover better ways of doing things. Britain’s first innovation-driven growth era was powered by inventors, investors, engineers and tinkerers who embraced experimentation and were willing to break with convention.
Politics and policy played their part. While not perfect, our Parliament, as Mokyr shows, proved itself capable of brokering compromises and allowing policy shifts that prevented vested interests from blocking technologies that threatened them. That openness was a decisive advantage – and one of the reasons the Industrial Revolution took off here.Something to ponder upon as we head into 2026.
⚙️ Mann Virdee, Senior Researcher
What skills does it take to thrive in a modern economy? Many of us were taught to master the same types of skillsets in our careers – producing reports, spreadsheets and slide decks. We’re led to believe these will bring lifelong success and prosperity.
But it turns out that’s not true. AI can now do those tasks better than we can and it’s only going to improve. There are tough times ahead, particularly for those whose job is largely to read and write.
There’s an important aspect to this that’s not talked about enough. Focusing on such a narrow skillset means we’re losing other capabilities, such as the hands-on work of construction, manufacturing and DIY. That’s not just some feel-good zen philosophy about reconnecting with nature, it’s also a crucial part of how innovation works.
That idea has been at the heart of several pieces that have stayed in my mind this year, which collectively make a compelling case that there’s no substitute for hands-on learning-through-doing.
Dan Wang argues that process knowledge is being lost by offshoring supply chains, which in turn harms countries’ entrepreneurial ecosystems. The process of building, iterating, innovating, and improving manufacturing gets lost, and it’s just as important as the ‘Eureka’ moment in the lab. Libby Purves meanwhile makes the case that the decline in manual cars represents the loss of the ‘last necessary skills of physicality for the overeducated majority who don’t have a craft requiring routine dexterity’.
We’re fixated with removing friction and optimising our lives – but that very quest may inadvertently be eroding the competencies that make us creative, entrepreneurial and resilient. Without the friction of physical labour or complex coordination, our ability to iterate and problem-solve atrophies.
We don’t know what skills will be important in the future. In a rapidly changing world, conventional wisdom about the types of capabilities young people should focus on has been proven wrong time and time again. If we want to empower people to be entrepreneurial, we need to help them equip themselves with a broad foundation – including physical problem solving.
For a generation that experiences the present as an ‘anticipated memory’ and faces the challenge of increased automation, the best competitive advantage is re-engaging with the physical and the complex wherever and whenever we can.