We have talent so why can’t Britain create a Zuckerberg or a Jobs?

When it comes to start-ups, Britain isn’t a patch on America, or even Ireland for that matter, says Steven Cutts

Acorn Computers is long gone but its influence is still palpable today (Getty Images)

For some people in our society, the economy is a fixed thing. It’s there, it’s always been there and it isn’t going to go anywhere in a hurry. In a place such as Switzerland, people debate how to use the mountains, not how to create them. The mountains are there and it took no effort to create them. This was very much our attitude to the manufacturing industry in post-war Britain, so much so that we often described ourselves as a developed country. As if an end point called development had already been reached and the future was about something else.

But this is misleading. Industry is forever in flux. Companies are born, they live and – in the end - they all die. Just a few years ago, an apparently secure blue-chip company called Kodak filed for bankruptcy. In a time of rapid technological change, Kodak was slow to adapt and ultimately that same hesitancy would ultimately prove its nemesis.

If we look at medical imaging in the 20th century, it’s always been a source of frustration to many a patriotic scientist that we failed to discover x-rays. That honour went to the German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen, who discovered them by accident. Many people in this country were playing with x-rays at the time, but the x-rays themselves were invisible. Beyond plain x-rays, all three of the other major imaging modalities were developed partly or even completely within the United Kingdom.