'Would you move to Dubai?’ It’s a question I’ve been asked countless times since the Budget last month. Returning the question has prompted many yeses, with people citing warmer climes, lower taxes and the city’s entrepreneurial mindset.
That same mindset can be fostered here. Britain is a cradle of imagination and lateral thinking: it is here that Mary Shelley invented science fiction, Charles Darwin came up with evolution and Thomas Saint created the world’s first patented sewing machine. Why, then, does it seem as if we’re falling behind? It could be that we’re looking for answers in the wrong places. I, for one, would urge us to look to the country. Take Hardy or Wordsworth, whose minds were altered by the beauty of Dorset and the Lake District; or Newton, who first imagined there might be such a thing as gravity in an orchard. Entrepreneurialism is not confined to glass buildings in Canary Wharf.
I had the good fortune of travelling to New York last month: a temple of entrepreneurship if there ever were one. It’s not exactly bucolic, yet I was struck by the importance that life beyond the city holds for citizens there. I met a man in a bar who was developing a biodegradable version of cardboard and spent time with a friend who, this week, launched a collection of skirts made entirely of second-hand shirts that would otherwise have ended up in landfill.
Kameron Cooper was driven by her interest in zero-waste garmentry.
These are environmentally conscious ideas — but, more importantly, they are simple. For Kameron Cooper, whose ‘shkirts’ retail for $130 apiece (about £98), the project was driven by her interest in zero-waste garmentry. ‘I wanted to create an item that reassembled existing fabric,’ she explains, ‘rather than cutting and pasting different parts.’ She turned cuffs into cummerbunds and the result is magnificent.
Americans are very good at going ahead and doing things. It’s not so much a question of red tape — there being less of it — as of risk appetite among its citizens. The author Scott Galloway believes this is genetic: Americans are descended from immigrants who were brave enough to set sail for new lands. By this logic, they are to us what London foxes are to their rural brethren. Natural selection has enhanced their raw opportunism.
Yet risk needn’t frighten us. The former managing director of Condé Nast, Albert Read, suggested in his book The Imagination Muscle (Little, Brown Book Group, £12.99) that creative thinking needs structure to thrive. It is within familiarity (our own back garden, say) that the most fertile ideas are unleashed. So, no, sorry — I won’t be going to Dubai.
