“so
what policy ideas have you got, what’s your big idea?”
I started working on the Entrepreneurship
Charter for Cambridge (a joint project between me and my local MP) in mid
2010. I had just been introducing myself
to the people in the shared MPs offices and was asked this question. I think
it’s a very dangerous question to have an answer to, and here’s why.
My first experience of innovation policy
was when I worked for the communications regulator Ofcom. One of my jobs was to
try to resolve the following problem:
If someone wants to develop a new
innovative use of spectrum they apply for a testing and development license.
When they want to expand and deploy a prototype, so long as they don’t charge,
that’s still a testing and development license. When they want to deploy a
commercial service, they have to purchase spectrum. Someone, almost certainly, would
have been granted this spectrum already, and they have no obligation the sell
or share it. The inventor has invested resources for that spectrum in
particular and has no mechanism to access it on a commercial basis. The
innovation is suffocated, investment squandered.
What was my big idea for solving this problem?
I went round and talked to all the people in the area about the problem, did
some internal searches on our archives and looked at what other countries were
doing. What I discovered made my job a lot easier.
This had been ‘solved’ by at least two people
before me in the last 5 years – in Ofcom! They put together slides, flow charts
and some supporting documents. That wasn’t it though, the first instance of
this problem, and a solution was “the wireless telegraphy act” – 1904, which someone found for me when
they heard that I was looking into how old the problem was. Handy stuff.
The other question that I asked was; is
there really something going wrong? Is this a problem that it is easy to say it
exists? Anyone will argue for a helping hand from government, and it is easy to
argue that an existing system hampers innovation (something I’ll get onto in a
later post). Is there something really there?
In this case, interestingly, there was no data, just anecdotes.
With “the plural of anecdote is not data”
ringing in my mind, all that I had to do was collect the past solutions and
look at why they failed. I know they failed in some way because if they had
succeeded completely I wouldn’t have been asked to look at solving the problem!
Then just re-design them in a way that would not fail for the reasons already
discovered, and add a step to the process to collect data (so that the scale of
the issue could be assessed in the future).
The first thing you get told when starting
academic research, is that the problem you’re investigating is not new. There
isn’t “no existing work” in the field, that phrase is you not doing your job
properly. If you do identify a gap, you have to justify it with evidence – and
lots of it. I love applying this to policy.
Except in policy it’s easier! The number of
people you can talk to for ideas is so much bigger than in academia. So many
problems have been solved before in many different ways (inside and outside any
given country). So many people experience them. So many people have vested
interests in solving them (real and imaginary ones).
For the entrepreneurship charter this made
the job very simple: We would just go and talk to people and find out what
their problems were, and what improvements could be made to existing policies.
Then we would draw up an overall framework into which we could classify them,
create a rejection criteria (why we would include some ideas and not others)
and do some further analysis on the costs and implementation – usually tweaking
existing schemes.
So… What was my answer to “what policy
ideas have you got, what’s your big idea?”. It was that I didn’t have any, just
that I hoped that I had the ability and resources to find and evaluate some. As
it turned out, we got some fairly good ways of evaluating potential policies
from the people we talked to!
It is all too easy to presume that a
problem is new, or that because no solution is currently present that a solution
has not been found in some form – or that it is indeed a problem. This is
almost always never the case, and the great thing is, it makes the job of
solving it much easier.
My next post will be about a problem that
has been around for a while (and has been solved in the UK before) – the small
business funding gap, AKA the Macmillan gap circa 1931.
I will leave you with another ongoing problem:
The problem of the youth of today:
“What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders,
they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed
with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?”
Plato, 4th century BC
Addendum: I was once
accused of writing a policy document that was “… just Thatcher, Major, Blair,
Brown all over again” I know it was meant as a criticism, but I find it genuinely
difficult to see it as such.
