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How, in your opinion, do you think the government needs to seek to protect and retain control of our technologies but also the IP of those companies that have created those technologies?

Mike: It's really important to understand one thing which is that the difficult part here is having the expertise in the country in these areas. And in the UK, through public policy over many years, has done incredibly well. We have the most fantastic science base in the UK, it's second to none. We lead the world in making inventions and discoveries in these areas. And we have the very best people. So that part which would be if we were having this discussion in another country would be what we've been talking about is done, we have a difficult bit. All we've got to do is realise that once we understand that this is strategic, we have to take a different approach to the next part of that, which is how do we convert that into economic impact, how do we convert it into something that optimises our public services and creates world influence and the ability to have some muscle in the world and be listened to? And that comes much more down to how we go from the lab to the corporate world. And that's where we've lacked in the past, some of that has been an understandable belief that the market can sort things out, and free market decisions, which in general is a very good idea, but every so often they come across along something which is very strategic that we need to take a slightly different view of. And that can actually be a technology, it could be a company, or it could even be a data set. The NHS for example has amazing datasets. Well, how do we use those do we just give them to anyone in the world that wants to create something? And if we do that on what terms? And it's that strategic thinking which is about moving Britain into this next era. And that's what we've got to start to do.

The world is obviously changing very rapidly. You've talked about the concept of sovereignty before. How would you say that's changed and how does it look in the 21st century?

Mike: I think this is the area that we have perhaps the most important debate to have. So, sovereignty was very easy back in the 1920s when you had an ironclad battleship and you could go out and rule the waves and that sort of thing. Sovereignty today is very different because sovereignty today the challenge comes in a lot more subtle way. So, for example, if you want to deliver a public service in the UK, you probably are going to have to do it through a smartphone. What's on that smartphone if you don't control your own sovereignty is either determined in California, or in Korea, or in China. And that's for basic public services. What can you do? We've had the whole debate about our network. Without getting into the details of whether China is a threat, isn't it a great shame that we couldn't have sovereign technology for something that's so fundamental to the operation of this country?

Vaccines, the ability to supply drugs, it's crucial that we have the things that we have to defend but we also have to have the ability to have the opportunity. You look at Arm, its processors are in almost everything. If someone comes along to us in this football card game of technology that now goes on and says: We want you Britain to do this and if you don't, we're pulling the plug on that. The only way in which you can defend sovereignty, the ability to actually make your own decision is to say: Well, sorry but if you're going to be like that, we'll pull the plug on that. And of course, it never happens but then everyone has a sensible conversation. Sovereignty is the ability to be able to make your own decisions and to have influence. And you have to have some key technology, you don't have to have every football card in the pack, but you have to understand that you have to have enough. And you have to have the ability to actually do things.

Tax conversations - the fact that tax receipts are all being generated in another country and no tax has been generated for the UK exchequer. And again, that's a technology standoff fundamentally at the bottom of it. What do we want to do about that? Protecting our children from harm online. Do we have enough influence at the tables to actually call how we want to do it in the UK on our own cultural basis of what we consider acceptable? We have to have technology sovereignty in these matters. We have to have enough influence and be important enough and control enough that it becomes a conversation, not a diktat.

You have said previously when talking about the UK tech sector that, and I think we've touched on this already, but the UK is akin to a country sitting on a vast oil reserve. What do you mean by this, how can we best happen to it?

Mike: Well, if you look at the index of AI for example which is probably the most strategic technology of the moment. The UK leads that from a research point of view and a research base, we have some of the best institutions in the world, we have the best university departments, we have the best researchers in the world. We could have a debate about whether MIT, Stanford, or one of the Cambridge universities was number one, it doesn't matter where we're there, we're at that table. And that's the difficult bit, that's the bit that educational system that takes years to create. And we have that, we've done it. That's the asset. Why do I think that it's still buried under the ground? Well what we haven't managed to do is take that asset and create $100 billion companies. We haven't managed to take that asset and create hundreds of thousands of jobs. We haven't taken that asset and managed to be strong in negotiations so that tax revenues for the UK from these multinational technology companies are coming into the UK. We have allowed that strategic technology, the know-how, to be dissipated elsewhere. And the thing about technology it's really important to understand is, once the centre of gravity moves, then you lose the feedback benefits. So, when you lose an Arm - for example Arm was acquired by SoftBank – a lot of work was done by the government to make sure that the R&D and everything stayed in the UK at that point, and that was good. The reason that's good is the people that are trained in Arm, when they leave Arm, they set up new businesses, they now know how to do that and how to market, how to sell, how to deal with technology. Those new businesses grow, they become bigger, they spawn off new businesses you get a virtuous circle, and that drives the economy and it drives the income for the country. When you get a situation where a company like Arm now may be sold to a third party without those assurances and the R&D lab moves to some other parts of the world then all of those benefits go. And I think we need to be fundamental in understanding first of all we have to take that into account. Not every time we're don't need to undermine the concept of free market for corporate transactions, but we at least need to have an approach like the Americans do with their CFIUS model.

But secondly, we shouldn't be shy about it. A lot of this research and that fundamental science base was paid for by the taxpayer. It's reasonable that the taxpayer gets something back at that point. Taxpayers created a technology. We've got a great British company, it gets to three or $400 million, like Deep Mind in value, and then suddenly that's whisked off to California. And we lose all of the benefits of the UK economy. There's nothing wrong in saying we invested. Let's make sure that we get that benefit and the UK.

Similarly, with data in the health service, we have a national health service. It's a wonderful thing, it's a treasurer of the country, it generates vast amounts of data that people don't get in their other health services. If we're going to allow that data to be used to move technology on, then we have to think about it strategically. So, for example, if we allow a company in some other country to develop a product using that data, surely the NHS should get the cheapest possible pricing for that product when it comes to market. And at the moment, we're always been a bit too friendly with the family jewels.

What practical measures would you like to see the government implementing in the short to medium term.

Mike: I think the first thing is to signpost the vision. You know, the government needs to stand up and say, we have this amazing tech and science base, we are an incredible environment for technology world, and this is where we're going. We are going to make the UK the best place to be doing technology in the world. And we're going to do that by addressing many of the other aspects that the government can, because we're in a position to have that freedom and we're forward looking. Things like the regulatory framework is going to be optimum for these new technologies, not going to be based on historic situations. That we're going to welcome the highly skilled in to create businesses. That we're going to make sure that the funding environment here for these kind of technologies is highly advantageous. And that we're going to state this as a strategic direction. Once that is done, then I think a lot of people are going to want to see what's going to happen but that's important because you allow them to hold on. What we need to do is make sure that people are modelling where their research lab is going to be - is it going be in Europe, is it going to be in the US, or somewhere else? They now have an option to think about where the UK is going and why they would miss out on being here.

In terms of, there's a whole series of policy interventions once one takes that decision. So, if we look at the most fundamental problem. We've been incredibly successful now in our science base. We've created some great start-ups and scale technologies, let's get those to be very large businesses in the UK. And that's about getting the UK capital markets to work for those kind of businesses. It's incredible in the modern world that we don't have any high growth software businesses listed on FTSE 100, we can't go on like that, we have to fix that. But there's an effect there where, for example, the FTSE 100 manager wouldn't have no experience of software businesses. And so, you get a negative circle developing. There are a series of policy interventions we can do to break that which would be relatively straightforward and not require significant amounts of money. Some of those would be to do with how we actually get research available for those fund managers to kickstart things. Other areas would be how we change slightly the regulation around asset classes for things like insurance industry, and also helping brand that. Those changes can be done. They will move things forward quite quickly and it's a virtuous circle, one or two of those companies getting on the FTSE 100 and then the thing takes off by itself because you can't afford to be a fund manager who doesn't understand that when those companies are there because you will lose out to your competitors.

If we look at other areas, how do we get the companies that we do have, how do we get them to really get out there and sell? Well, we have to kill this zombie effect. We have to look at Innovate UK and make sure that, whilst it's very open to allowing people to create great products and prototypes, fundamentally, you cannot be an Innovate UK zombie. So, we need to change the basis there so that after a while you have to show that you're producing a product, even if not been very successful initially that's okay but you've actually done it. So, that's an example. Research Council's - make sure we have the right mechanism for killing things. We're great at starting them. Let's kill some things. There are technologies that we fund because they were big in the 60s. Well it's done. There are much more interesting ones to do, so we can have a slightly different approach there. And we need to no longer to be squeamish about the idea that if the taxpayers funding research, we certainly should protect blue sky research, but it's reasonable for us to ask the question: you've done this amazing thing, what can it be useful for? And the government started this very successfully where it tightened up the ref system so that universities had to say what the impact of what they were doing were. Let's carry on with that, let's not be squeamish. If we actually look at other aspects of universities. At the moment, sometimes every university has a different mechanism for getting IP out into a corporate -why? Some of them charge ridiculous royalty levels because they're trying to recoup money for the university, but they kill the possibility of a deal. Others, for 70k start-up, want to do 100k of legal fees. This should be one size fits all, mandated by the government, standard contracts, so you reduce the friction. If someone wants to take something out of a university lab and make a company and employ people in the UK and perhaps ultimately world class business, there should be no parochial friction because some university chancellor thinks that they can make a little bit more money by negotiating or wasting vast amounts of money on legal fees. Let's make it frictionless. And if that money from that success comes back into the universities, that's great.

But these are all little examples. Another crucial one: how do we make UK the technology place to be? Well, regulation. Let's see a regulatory framework which acknowledges modern personalised medicine. That isn't based on cohorts. That does allow more risk taking, for example, when people have terminal diseases, so that personalised medicine can move forward in these very difficult situations. Autonomous vehicles: probably the biggest block to autonomous vehicles are things like a legal and insurance framework around them, not to do the technology. Now, that problem was solved once before for the airlines. The reason we have airliners in the sky is that we have conventions about liability. And so you can actually fly an airliner. If you couldn't do that, it would be impossible. So, we need to be brave and we need to say look, if ensemble autonomous vehicles are safer than my dad driving, hen, we're not going to have a lawyer free for all, we're going to have a basis like we have in other industries set up so that provided that, the ensemble is safe, you can actually operate in the way that you would in any mature industry, just as when a human hits another human in the car. So, there's a little bit of bravery needed, but you do that and then the UK becomes the place to go. It becomes the place to do your autonomous vehicle research, to set up your autonomous vehicle business. We need to go down these key technologies that we're seeing and not just say, how do we encourage technology, but how do we encourage the legal framework?

Privacy is a key issue. How do we create the right balance to allow technologies to be used? On the one hand we have to protect, for example, in the NHS patient data and the confidential patients. But on the other hand, if we use that data, we can save a lot of lives and make the NHS much more efficient, or we need to be prepared to come up with opt-in schemes for people. Most people in this country actually when you give them a proper explanation are happy for the information for us to save people's lives. So, there's lots of little things and it's a question of bringing it all together. So, this is all part of a strategy which is about the UK is going to be ahead in these areas and it's going to be the place in the world to come to do these things.

You touched earlier on there about sort of our preeminent science base and how advanced it is in the UK. Looking at that from a curriculum perspective, what does the UK need to be doing to ensure that we retain that advantage?

Mike: Well, I think it's very important to say that there are things in the modern world that are more useful than others. Now, that some people would fall off their chair if you said that. The idea that we shouldn't be training lots of people in, you know, reading ancient languages, and somehow that's not as worth as much to the UK as an engineer, has for a long time been this sort of carved in stone concept. It's utterly wrong. The taxpayer is paying for this. Now. whilst I would still want to make sure we have some people in the UK studying defunct languages, what we need are people who actually have skills. And the trick here is to understand the definition of skills is very broad. Okay, we're not just talking about science graduates, we're talking about arts graduates, but we're talking about people that are doing skills which give them abilities for the modern world. Some of these things are generic, you know, you can look at a history curriculum from a point of view of understanding risk. You know, when you look at great historical events and the decisions that leaders had to make -Churchill was weighing risk, he was doing it in various ways, how do we look at that? I would love to see a history curriculum which was about what risks were being weighed when this decision was made? Were those decisions made on a rational basis, even if they turned out that the dice went the other way? That way you'd have people who had a curriculum that was preparing them for the modern world where it's about risk and probability and subtlety of decision making. So again, we need to understand where things are going, and we need to realise that the world is changing.

You've had tremendous success in the UK building several world leading tech companies – Autonomy, Darktrace. What advice would you have for entrepreneurs who are starting out now or in the early stages of building tech companies that find themselves confronting some of the issues and challenges that you have encountered in your career?

Mike: Well I think yeah government's done a great job in solving a lot of those problems so when I started, the idea of being an entrepreneur was slightly dodgy, and you really wanted to go and work in a bank because all good things happened in the bank. That's all changed now. Similarly, you know, the idea that you were going to start your own business was also something that was not expected for 20 year olds to do. That's all changed, we have an amazing start-up culture. We do have funding for it, everyone always complains they'd always like more but actually, there's good funding for good ideas in the start-up world. And now we're starting to see great companies. I think, from a point of view of young entrepreneur is realise why Britain is actually the great place to do it. You know, I always have done all of my R&D, despite having multinational companies, in the UK, because you get the best people here because of that science base. They're very loyal. And you can actually get long term stability and build amazing products. So actually, this sort of idea that Silicon Valley is the place to do things, disastrous place to do product development because everyone changes their job every 30 minutes chasing the next unicorn, and you don't have access to the same level of people that you do here. So, there are big advantages about being here. And I think the way that the government should be thinking is how to increase those advantages. Britain now that we are free of European regulation is in a situation where it can go its own way. And it can move much faster and it's generally much more forward looking than its European partners were about moving to the next stage. We were just talking about medicine: regulation in medicine is all built on cohorts, the idea that if I give this to 100,000 people, what happens? Modern medicine is about personalised medicine, it's about just you, there isn't 100,000 of you. So, that is definite, that's the world changing, it's going to have a big impact for patients, and for health services.

We can move so much faster in creating a regulatory framework that understands the future and isn't bogged down by looking in the rear-view mirror. And these are the sorts of situations which I think entrepreneurs over here can take advantage of. We can now get up to the three or $400 million market size. And what I want to make sure is, by the time that people that are starting their businesses today have got them up to three or $400 million, we in the UK have everything right and we say stay here, list, I want to see a $20 billion company in the UK. I want to see all of that tax receipts coming back to the UK, I want to see all of that training going on in the UK. I want to see the supply chain employing people who aren't technical for those companies in the UK. And then I want us to have a seat at the top table when it comes to the technology discussions that go on in the world. That is what we need to make sure, and we can do that, we have time.