The question for governments and investors is whether a founding idea will create a company large enough in terms of revenues, profits or employees.

The iconic image most people have of entrepreneurialism is of a founder working away in her garage, office or laboratory coming up with an innovative idea to help make the world a better place and then becoming rich by building the company. The question for governments and investors is whether the founding idea is worth enough to build the company large enough in terms of revenues, profits or employees to impact the world. States around the world are looking at helping both ends by encouraging people to develop their ideas and start a company and then providing them with the money and resources to scale up, but without reducing the entrepreneurial spirit or crowding out private capital through unnecessary or misguided interventions. It is a difficult balance to strike. But read between the lines of the UK government’s consultation on patient capital – money invested long-term in businesses to help them scale up to large companies employing at least 250 people – and it seems that the emphasis inside government and among its advisers is that more value and focus should be on investors scaling up the business rather than those coming up with the idea and helping the entrepreneur set up an enterprise. That seems to be the big question underlying the UK Treasury’s review of patient capital – Financing Growth in Innovative Firms – which asks whether “a material number of firms in the UK lack the long-term finance that they need to scale up successfully”. It also goes across a similar review being carried out on university startups and spinouts by the UK’s Department for Business Energy & Industrial Strategy – expected to report in about four months – and the broader industrial strategy set out in a green paper last year. Following an earlier editorial in our sister magazine Global Corporate Venturing – Finding a venture investment edge – one insider to the UK’s spate of reviews, papers and consultations summed up the thinking thus: “The value of a patent is less because the pace of change is higher. The bigger risk is in commercialisation.” Equally, the adviser said avoiding entropy and improving the innovation toolkit for these larger companies if they became public was also important. “It is a changing world of money. [Western] public companies are mediocre, lacking vision and are uninvestible.” By contrast, the leading venture investors are increasingly Asia-based corporations active in China and the US and which combine pace and size…

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