Hasan Bakhshi, director of Creative Economy Policy & Research at London-based innovation agency Nesta, is optimistic about the UK’s future growth. Despite the disruption caused by new technology over the past few decades, he believes that good public policy can help reduce the barriers to innovation and ready the labor market for new opportunities, especially in creative fields like video game production that combine fields like science, tech and the arts with intense user engagement.

Understanding industry disruption

“Our reading, really, of technological progress historically is it gives rise to new opportunities, new forms of occupation that didn’t exist at the time,” Bakhshi said in an interview with theCUBE at the MIT IDE 2015 Conference in London. “So although we’ll see lots of disruption in industries, the role of public policy is to understand which of those industries are going to be disrupted, which of those industries are going to see greater opportunities and try and help innovation.”

Also key to the future of Britain will be the notion of innovation as a collaborative process. Without a single massive local market, as in countries like China or the US, it’s harder to produce platforms like Google and Facebook that rely on huge adoption for their success (although he mentioned Spotify as an exception).

Encouraging a free flow of ideas

But if innovation is collaborative and combinatorial, using existing technologies in creative new ways, the UK has a great opportunity to bridge global markets. Looking at innovation this way, instead of as an isolated “eureka” moment, changes the way “public policy makers approach how to support innovation. It’s through supporting networks, it’s about combining resources from different disciplines, it’s about breaking silos between traditionally separated people who are scientists on one hand, say, and technologists or artists on the other.”

By allowing and encouraging a free flow of ideas between all of these sectors of the economy, the UK can motivate its creative citizens to innovate on a global level.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of MIT IDE 2015.