Recently, Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, visited the United Kingdom. He praised the country’s intellect and its universities, then said that “if there was a million ways to win, you find the one reason not to do it”. His comments affirmed something I’ve known all along, from a decade of being in the UK and watching how the country handles people my age: we have to work twice as hard, for half as much of the innovation we want to inject into British culture.

By “we” I mean innovators of all stripes. In the arts, fashion and design. In STEM. In academia. In politics. Huang was talking about founders and entrepreneurial culture, and he has NVIDIA’s money behind him. But the people I’m talking about are just about everyone else: people with no machinery behind them, no venture backing, no nothing. It’s a demographic constellation that has arguably much more to lose when the machinery keeps saying “no, no, no” through its culture.

Jensen Huang isn’t the only CEO to say so. Recently, a clip of Stripe’s CEO was trending on Instagram. Someone in the audience asked why he built Stripe in the US rather than the UK. I’m paraphrasing from memory, but his answer was that he couldn’t have built it here. The culture would have pushed it out, culturally, psychologically and materially. In Britain, what he was doing seemed impossible. In the US, it wasn’t just casually possible, it was also cool. The comment thread which comprised people who had recently left the UK, rarely unified, agreed with him. So did I.

It reminded me of a dinner on the sidelines of COP26 in Glasgow in 2021. COP26 was the twenty-sixth United Nations climate change conference, the annual summit where governments negotiate what the world will do about climate change.

After the formal meetings one day, a group of us, across nations, made plans to sit down at a long table and have dinner in a reserved room. I was sat next to a senior British official. The formal part of the day was over, so people could finally be candid, and he was candid towards the dining table. He started enumerating his frustrations with his own colleagues and his own culture.

They were stuck in a deliberative loop, he said. In formal meetings, he and his colleagues would talk an issue through, consider every side, and reach the point where it was time to act. And at ninety-nine per cent, just before crossing the action point, someone would always chime in: wait, before we commit, there’s this one thing and this one thing and this one thing. And the conversation would start again. A tautological cycle. He was extremely frustrated. Why, he asked, do we need to debate everything to the point of almost nihilism?

His frustration makes sense. Deliberation is the bedrock of any democracy, but the purpose of deliberation is always to consolidate toward some volitional choice. Some act of political will. Some act of measured, intentional choice. So when you’re stalling at the first half of the steps, refusing to cross the final threshold of action, you’re ironically being undemocratic. You’re ironically undoing the very purpose of deliberation.

I’d met the same refusal to cross that threshold before, in a very senior climate scientist I once tried to give a platform to. He has won one of the most celebrated prizes in science. I offered him resources and an audience, since I was in charge of a pivotal climate project at the moment, and this project had major legs to stand on. We wanted his expertise, and I asked him to speak to the public (through a programme we had been preparing) about what he knew. The project required a volitional act – a flourish of political will – on his part.

But he was afraid to. He was afraid to take the platform. Making any kind of statement, he felt, might foreclose the discourse on climate change. Even if his knowledge was certain about it, even if in the grand scheme of things his particular thematic wasn’t the most controversial part about climate change. He just didn’t want to be touched by public scrutiny or the domino effect of taking a stance.

I found this perplexing. He had spent decades accumulating expertise and knowledge. He had some of the highest recognition his field can give. And I am fairly sure that if other people had been offered that platform, they would have taken it.

See, a judgement can be provisional and still be very useful. You can say what the evidence supports, what remains unknown or untenable, and why you’d rather pursue one course but not the other. And other people can disagree. But the discourse is meant to continue. If you abstain entirely, decisions are being made with or without you, and the world is altogether deprived without your one expert voice.

Past a certain point, this kind of restraint stops being a moral virtue. It becomes a vicious and pernicious stalling. Withholding what you know, when you know more than almost anyone, is not humility anymore. It’s not a kind of coyness that should be put on a pedestal; it’s a fawning. It’s a fear response. It’s a lack of courage, a lack of decisiveness, a shortage of volitional energy, presented as care for the discourse.

He is also the clearest case of a paradox I keep observing among the senior gatekeepers of Britain’s established institutions: tenured academics, senior officials, the people who sit on funding panels. You’re expected to scale their mountains first. Accumulate certain credentials, climb the hierarchy, earn the legitimacy, and only then may you exercise your right to speak.

So you do scale them, because you’re trying to give their way of life a chance. You give their modality the benefit of the doubt. But once you’ve reached the top, ready to consolidate a position, you encounter people who hold all the legitimacy the system can give—and they still won’t decide. You’ve climbed towards an authority that is reluctant to exercise itself.

You’ve wasted the vertical ascent for nothing.

Their seat at the top is reward for a lifetime of deferring.

Who pays for the risk

Innovation means closing a question before anyone has formulated the proof to the answer. That makes it a gamble, whether the bet is on a new literary form, a new media format, a new climate policy or a new way to employ fashion workers. And someone has to pay for the gamble. Risk is built into the costing of anything new. It’s a line item in the budget, as real as rent or materials, and whichever gatekeeper says yes is the one who pays it. So when an institution hates risk, it isn’t being prudent. It has quietly decided not to pay for innovation, while still saying it wants it.

From the top, refusing to pay doesn’t feel like refusing. At the top of Britain’s established institutions, delay reads as virtue. Holding off looks protective: the responsible gatekeeper keeping reckless innovators from careening us all toward a future of irreversibility. From inside, the colleague who reopens a decision at ninety-nine per cent and the expert who won’t speak can both believe they are guarding something. And nobody at the top pays for it. A senior academic who defers stays comfortably employed. A panel that postpones loses nothing.

But refusing the risk doesn’t make it disappear. It moves down, onto the person waiting for a yes. An unfamiliar idea needs time and money before anyone can show that it works, so when the people holding the resources keep postponing, the innovator carries the risk alone and has to produce the very proof the support was meant to pay for. That’s the twice as hard. Meanwhile the younger researcher or independent inventor is spending their savings, running down a contract, taking other work to keep the project alive. What looks like caution in one room is a shrinking set of possibilities in another. Over time, the system selects for people who can afford to wait, and for projects familiar enough to need little persuasion. The stranger idea gets shrunk into something recognisable, or abandoned. That’s the half as much.

The incentives

None of this is news to the people at the top, and the ambition to fix it exists. The government wants to make the corridor between Oxford and Cambridge the UK’s “Silicon Valley”, with up to £800 million for land and infrastructure to back new homes, labs and workspaces. A new philanthropic fund, UK Dynamism, anchor-funded by XTX Markets, has launched to back the country’s “believers and builders”. Its own diagnosis reads like this essay’s: an economy “paralysed by process, caution and the elimination of risk”, and a culture that cuts ambition down instead of rewarding success. And ARIA, the government’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency, funds high-risk research knowing some of it will fail, and organises its teams around problems rather than disciplines.

This kind of stimulus is direly needed. Whether it works remains to be seen, because money announced from the top doesn’t change what happens in the room.

Below the announcements, the material incentives are thin. The British Business Bank found that UK venture capital investment was 32% lower than in the US over 2023 to 2025, adjusted for the size of the economy, though a few exceptionally large US deals inflate that comparison. In my experience, grants for innovation of any kind, in the arts as much as in technology, are smaller here too. For someone building something, the size of the cheque translates into time: how long you can work, who you can pay, how many attempts you get before you have to stop and look for money again.

And what gets funded is extremely narrow: what’s tried and tested, what’s mimetic, improvements to product categories that are evergreen, like food and drink. The kind of talent funders don’t understand, they don’t fund. It’s the same habit again, at the level of money: funders want the answer proved before they commit.

So innovation here is standardised, which is an oxymoron. You’re not producing innovation. You’re producing a thin copy of it. And a copy doesn’t give you the real benefits of actual innovation.

Even when a funder invites new ideas, it asks you to explain them through categories that already exist. The parade of verbs is recurrent: name the market, supply comparators, identify product-market fit, segment your audience. Those questions can be useful. They become a problem when the category is the thing you’re inventing.

That is my situation with Uncommon Future Press. It is a publishing house in the widest sense: films, games, performance, exhibitions and books, a press that pays for every work it takes in, with its own way of tracing how ideas travel. Calling it an academic press makes it easy to place, and leaves out most of what it is. Sometimes the unfamiliar part is the contribution.

Against Cambridge, not because of it

I learned this most closely in academia, with an American funder behind me and Cambridge’s traditions in front of me.

In my busiest year, Hollywood producers approached me about bringing my work to the screen. I was advised to turn them down, because “academics just don’t make films”. Ironically, the academic sitting right beside the person who said it was an academic who made films. The rule, it turned out, only applied to juniors. Another senior academic’s suggestion was, frankly, hilarious: why not film my field sites on my phone and send the studio the raw footage? In what universe does a Hollywood studio want amateur raw footage?

Funny as they are, neither moment was malice. Both were a missing skill set. Senior academics here are rarely taught how to carry an idea out of the journal and into the world, and the know-how isn’t in the ether the way it is in American innovation culture, where turning research into a company, a product or a film is normal. It’s telling that I made some of my own inventions in Asia, where this know-how felt more normal than it does here. So here, a Hollywood offer looks like a distraction rather than a door.

The institution doesn’t teach it because it doesn’t reward it. Lord Stern’s government-commissioned review of the national research assessment found that it pushes researchers towards the short term and away from risk, and that interdisciplinary work was regarded less favourably. In Wellcome’s survey of more than 4,000 researchers, three quarters of them in the UK, 75% agreed that creativity was being stifled by the emphasis on impact.

It also hears critique as disloyalty. When I raised familiar criticisms of academia’s institutional design, a senior faculty member called me “anti-academic”. It was as if he had sudden amnesia: he forgot that I chose academia, that I teach, that my contribution is to knowledge itself. When I criticised Critical Legal Thinking, I became, of all things, “anti-critical thought”. But every invention starts as a critique of what exists, followed by a proposal: this design doesn’t work, so here is another. He heard the first half as an attack and never reached the second. It’s the COP26 stall in a different room.

There was also a palpable fear in my first supervisors of not pleasing every camp within academia. Any flames had to be put out. But innovation needs flames, and innovation is never polite. That alone makes the culture intrinsically inhospitable to it.

So I reshuffled my supervision. Every achievement I’ve made at Cambridge came not because of Cambridge, but against it.

And it isn’t only academia. There is a similar politeness in the UK’s innovation culture. Fintech is the country’s most funded sector, and look at what its billion-dollar companies do: digital banking, payment processing, insurance, price comparison, consumer lending. They make an existing system smoother. They don’t propose a different one. When a British company does propose a different one, it tends to leave. DeepMind was sold to Google in 2014. Arm was sold to SoftBank in 2016 and now lists in New York. The outliers get ejected here too.

Fighting someone else’s limited imagination

For the ones who stay, the cost isn’t only money and time. It’s energy. There’s a point at which you spend more energy explaining why something should be possible than finding out whether it works. If you’re busy fighting somebody else’s limited imagination, you don’t have the energy left to actually do the thing. You can spend an afternoon answering an objection, or an afternoon improving a prototype. Sometimes the objection makes the prototype better. Sometimes it takes the prototype’s place altogether.

Closing the question is your job. Persuading everyone else to stop reopening it is a second job, and the second job is the one that drains you. A smaller pot of money does even less when reaching it takes round after round of explanation.

Over time, this shapes what people attempt. A project with a familiar name is easier to explain. A modest extension of an existing model is easier to evaluate. People learn which ambitions can pass through the system, and adjust. The institution gets very good at selecting work it already knows how to recognise.

Multiplied across everyone trying to build something here, that drain is a national cost. The ideas are here. What’s missing is a culture that lets people close questions, so the ideas can become things.