This is mid

The case for getting into the middle of things

A few months ago I suggested to someone working on industrial strategy for medium-sized businesses that they brand their work “This Is Mid”.

They laughed. Then they said no. To be fair my children also laughed at the idea. Mid, you see, is a youth slang insult: it means mediocre, forgettable, beneath notice. The word has migrated from neutral descriptor to quiet insult. But that’s precisely why I loved the idea of reclaiming it.

The middle is not boring. The middle is the crispy bit in the Malteser. It’s the ham in the sandwich. The jam in the dodger. And more importantly: the strength in the economy. So if even those trying to focus policy attention on the middle are reluctant to speak its name, we really are in trouble. We have internalised the idea that the middle is something to apologise for.

Macro, micro… mid-cro?

Across business, investment and public policy we are binary in our instincts. We celebrate the extremes: the unicorn start-up, the global giant, the breakthrough technology, at one end, and the corner shop or the community social enterprise at the other. All of these are important, but they’re not the whole.

Most of the economy, most public sector organisations and most charitable activity sit, structurally and statistically, in the middle where they do not get the attention they deserve.

One way to see this is in the way capital and talent are allocated. The logic of the UK’s innovation ecosystem is increasingly non-linear. If you are founding a company, you are expected to signal venture scale. The path must plausibly lead to a 10x or 100x return, or the machinery does not really engage.

Angels, funds and university commercialisation offices all operate within an ecosystem optimised for exponential outcomes. If your ambition is to build a £30m or £80m business over ten years - a business that employs a few hundred people and anchors a supply chain - you will struggle to find a natural home in that architecture. We get excited about multi-exited founders who’ve built and sold business after business - and great! They’re exciting! But why aren’t we also excited about the founders who want to build a multi-generational family business, or an anchor employer that regenerates their (mid-sized) town?

A plate of jammie dodgers

This is particularly visible in the sphere of university ‘tech transfer’ where I’m doing most of my work at the moment: the teams that help inventions and knowledge created in our universities to reach the real world.

British universities have become more sophisticated at spinning out venture-backed companies. In some places there is funding available for social enterprises, but between those poles lies an oddly underdeveloped terrain: commercially viable, technology-based businesses that are not venture scale and do not aspire to be. People working in tech transfer tell me they have no choice but leave these opportunities on the table.

As a result, many such companies are never built. Not because they lack merit, but because they are insufficiently extreme. This is a problem because the country is full of mid-sized problems that need mid-sized solutions.

• Mid-sized towns who want mid-sized employers

• Mid-sized diseases affecting middling numbers of people who want mid-sized treatments and diagnostics

• Mid-sized social problems that need mid-sized solutions

• Mid-volume waste streams that need mid-sized recycling facilities

You get the picture.

Of course, none of these mid-sized problems are as big as the big problems: but together they are the big sized problems.

It’s in the way that we feel

This preference for extremes is not entirely irrational. Outliers are easier to understand; they generate compelling stories. But this preference creates structural fragility. Economies are not sustained by a thin slice of extraordinary firms at the top and a churn of fragile experimentation at the bottom. They are sustained by a thick and capable middle layer: companies that compound value over time, institutions that improve steadily, places that develop depth rather than spikes.

What makes this harder to correct is that the analysis is not especially new. Economists have worried about the “missing middle” for decades and if you’ve worked in think tank land for more than a month without hearing someone say “mittelstand” then I’m impressed. Industrial strategists understand that scaling firms from £10m to £100m turnover is often harder than launching them.

The problem is not intellectual. It is psychological.

There is something about the word “middle” that triggers discomfort in political and commercial life. We are world-leading or world-beating, or we are broken. We are exceptional or in crisis. Hunting for unicorns or cherishing our neighbourhood coffee cart. No minister wants to describe Britain as mid-ranked (even though we are). No vice-chancellor wants to champion mid-scale commercialisation (even though there’s plenty of money to be made and jobs to create). No founder wants to say their ambition is to build a very good, £50m company serving a regional market well (because they won’t get funded). And this is daft!

We should be proud when we make it to the middle.

Oh, Canada¹

Recently, Mark Carney offered a different model when speaking about what it means for a country to be a middle power. He did not inflate Canada into something it is not. Nor did he treat “middle” as decline. He treated scale as fact, and drew strategic conclusions from it. Middle powers, he argued, succeed not by pretending to be superpowers but by being disciplined, networked and capable.

The tone mattered as much as the content. There was no flinch. Sure, I’d have loved it more if he’d said the middle was the jam in the dodger, but he got there in spirit.

Some will object that this sounds dangerously relaxed in an era defined by technological competition. Shouldn’t we be aiming for leadership in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, advanced manufacturing, not rehearsing the virtues of middleness?

But here too the language distorts the choice. For a country of Britain’s size, sovereign capability in frontier technology will, by definition, be middle-sized. We are unlikely to outspend the United States or outscale China. The serious question is whether we possess enough indigenous capability - scientific depth, industrial capacity, regulatory credibility - to shape and absorb these technologies in ways aligned with our interests. Our goal is to be safe and prosperous in the world, not to take it over.

That is not mediocrity. It is proportional ambition. The middle may never be glamorous. But it is powerful.

And if we could speak about it without embarrassment - in business, in public services, in frontier technology, and even in geopolitics - we might find that the path to renewal lies less in chasing extremes and more in strengthening the broad, capable centre on which everything else depends.

1. Listeners to How to Win and Election will know how dangerous it is for me to praise Canada, but here we go.