Three Budget pleas from a tech entrepreneur
With a few key measures, the government could could demonstrate that it’s behind entrepreneurs this Budget, writes John Cotterell
This week it’s Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW), and my company, Endava, is very pleased to be taking part as a lead partner. We’re backing GEW because we’re 100 per cent behind the cause of promoting entrepreneurship.
With a few key measures in this Budget, the government could demonstrate that it is too.
Endava has been around for 25 years. We’re a US-listed company operating in 26 countries and employing 12,000 people, but we were once a UK start-up too and I am still very much an entrepreneur.
I grew up knowing I wanted to run a company. I trained as a civil engineer, but the only part of engineering that I found interesting was the client conversations and the shaping of things with architects. I realised I wanted to be in business, so I did an MBA and came out of that looking for exciting growing industries, one of which was IT services. After a few years in IT, I saw the opportunity to do big, fully integrated projects and I had a vision of how to tackle them, so I set up Endava in 2000.
We grew fast, especially after listing in the US in 2018. Believe me, there have been challenges all along the way – that’s what it is to run a business, every day – but the entrepreneurial spirit remains. It’s what allows us to embrace disruption as we now use agentic AI to transform our own and our clients’ business systems.
We’ve recently been making changes in our own business to embrace what AI can do for us, and all around us we see the incredible talent and innovation that exists in the field. AI-led start-ups are popping up with brilliant new applications. Like all start-ups, their challenge is to scale and become the companies that really make a difference, through the innovation and employment they provide.
We’re helping the most promising in our market: our new Dava.Rise partnership programme is dedicated to finding the best new AI start-ups and helping them offer their applications to the leading enterprise clients that we serve. In effect, we’re bridging the gap that might otherwise separate start-ups and enterprises around compliance and integration, while helping the best ideas find application at scale.
Three wishes for the Budget
There’s plenty that the UK government could also do in this Budget to help our entrepreneurs. Focusing on the tech sector, where we in the UK are exceptionally good at the innovation part, the government should focus on playing its part in helping tech entrepreneurs set up and then, crucially, scale up.
Here are three things at the top of my list:
Firstly, let’s have some kind of tax incentive that encourages the flow of growth-stage capital, rather than just encouraging start-ups. Expanding the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) to cover scale-ups would be a start. The scale-up ecosystem needs larger-ticket, patient capital. Other corporate tax incentives like broadening tax credits for R&D would also help.
Secondly, use the Regulatory Innovation Office (RIO) and regulatory ‘sandboxes’ to remove barriers for scaling tech firms – we know that this especially helps AI, data and fintech firms. Let’s simplify and clarify regulations around technology investment, data, intellectual property and competition so scale-ups face fewer surprises and more predictability.
Thirdly, keep building the regional ecosystems and infrastructure that can attract and retain tech start-ups. It’s been great to see the government support the Oxford-Cambridge ‘Golden triangle’. We need more of the same, with the digital infrastructure that can support the compute, cloud and connectivity needs of AI and big data.
We know there is no shortage of tech talent and potential here in the UK – we just need to seed it, scale it and retain it. This Global Entrepreneurship Week, here’s to the entrepreneurs who have the courage to start a venture and here’s to giving them the means to succeed, for the benefit of us all.
John Cotterell is the founder and CEO of Endava