In contrast, Weidt said the U.K. has failed to move beyond small grants, arguing it needs to become a better customer of its “sovereign” companies or risk ceding “the great quantum computing foundations the U.K. has built over decades … to foreign players.”
“We need to see now more ambition, and we need to see more pace,” Gerald Mullally, CEO of Oxford Quantum Circuits, said, stressing that the U.K. must “act at a level of scale that is competitive relative to what we’re seeing in other nations.”
Less is more
Quantum computing is precisely the type of “critical sector where the U.K. has a global competitive edge” that the government should be getting behind, Ed Bussey, CEO of Oxford Science Enterprises, which backs university spin-outs, said.
The industry now expects the government to put money where its mouth is, the people cited above said, with one suggesting a handful of companies could get up to £50 million each under the initiative.
Procurement and government investment could also be forthcoming.
In recent weeks, the government committed to “leverage its procurement budgets to drive innovation,” including to “act as an early buyer for the best new technologies to de-risk investment, create demand, and pave the way to market.”
As part of a “strategic reset,” the U.K.’s research and development funding agency UKRI will also become more “choiceful” in allocating £7 billion for scale-ups over the next four years to companies in areas where the U.K. has genuine international advantage, its CEO Ian Chapman has said.
In a new five-year strategy, the British Business Bank also vowed to increase investment and take on greater risk “to support the most strategically important scale-up companies to stay in the U.K.”