Visiting Boston and Washington last month at the invitation of the US National Academy of Sciences to discuss transatlantic thinking on innovation, I came away with a feeling of urgency after seeing ambitious initiatives under way to boost America's competitive challenge against Asia. I realised how much the UK has to learn and how little our business community and institutions comprehend the scale of the threat to our economic status.

Despite our (often deserved) high opinion of ourselves as leaders in new ideas and product concepts, the UK - with its modest expenditure on research and development - was rated average by the European Union innovation scoreboard in January. The UK's aversion to risk is well known across the Atlantic: 33 per cent of British people say fear of failure would stop them from starting a business, compared with 21 per cent in the US, according to research by Enterprise Insight. Only 41 per cent of the British would prefer to be self-employed, compared with 61 per cent of Americans.