A white paper titled "Should I stay or should I go? A Pragmatic Path to Keeping UK Innovation at Home" suggests that contractual commitments from investors or acquirers are needed to address the loss of jobs, laboratories, and research capability when promising technology and life sciences companies leave Britain. The proposal aims to ensure a defined UK presence for a fixed period.
Professor Gishan Dissanaike, Dean of Cambridge Judge Business School, commented, “Too many businesses are born in Britain but build their futures elsewhere. We should welcome global capital and negotiate harder to keep research, skills and high-value jobs at home. This timely whitepaper offers a practical way to do both.”
Pascal Levensohn, founder of Levensohn Venture Partners LLC and Executive Chairman of Dolby Family Ventures, argues that the debate over firms leaving the UK has conflated the health of capital markets with the robustness of the innovation ecosystem. He proposes a commercial, rather than legislative, solution to keep investment and high-quality jobs in the UK.
Levensohn distinguishes between the migration of ownership and financial returns, domicile and listing venue, and productive capability. He states that the migration or erosion of substantive UK productive capability is the avoidable national loss. The proposed solution involves the UK government, universities, founders, and the investment community seeking stronger commitments from international investors and acquirers to create jobs and maintain a meaningful UK footprint.
The paper quantifies the potential impact, estimating that if 20 of the 40 UK deep-tech companies acquired annually between 2015 and 2025 negotiated a binding commitment for 25 net new UK-based jobs sustained for five years, it could generate £312.5 million in additional gross value added annually by the fifth year, accumulating to £2.5 billion over ten years.
Precedents cited include SoftBank's undertakings when acquiring Cambridge-based Arm in 2016, which included doubling UK headcount and keeping its global headquarters in Cambridge. Arm's subsequent 2023 Nasdaq listing demonstrates that a change in listing venue does not necessarily mean a loss of UK productive capability.
The paper concludes with a call to action for UK leaders to establish a task force comprising founders, investors, acquirers, legal counsel, universities, and policy experts. The mandate would be to make footprint retention a standard market practice, ensuring that companies created in the UK maintain their roots and capabilities domestically.
