I recently interviewed Martin Higginson who is currently chief executive of NetPlay TV but has run several successful businesses throughout his life from publishing to mobile phone downloads.

We were discussing leadership, mentoring and strategy and I was struck by one of the comments he made: “The British are the probably world’s best inventors, but we are the worst at execution.”

Martin was speaking in reference to our car industry and ailing engineering sector and was lamenting its lack of investment and foresight. Indeed, the collapse of Rover and other car manufacturers must bring a pang to the heart of any patriotic business leader, but sadly I think Martin’s point could be applied to many other sectors.

I regularly speak to innovative and exciting companies but so often the businesses that really capitalise on these new technologies are from overseas, particularly the US. Producing great start-ups on the domestic front is one thing, but so few go on to be world beaters. British businesses aren’t great exporters in fact, according to research from Grant Thornton, just 37% of companies do any at all, which is well below the European average. 

There are exceptions of course; Cheapflights.co.uk is performing well in the US, Cobra Beer and Innocent Drinks are also making steady inroads internationally. But they form part of a list which is all too short. Strangely, though British businesses have got a strong reputation abroad. Dan McGuire, chief executive of Broadbean, recently told Growing Business that UK companies are fantastically well received internationally. Tellingly, though, he also spoke of how he has been warned off from expanding into the US as he was bound to waste money – thankfully he’s ignoring the sceptics and is branching out across the Atlantic. On top of our good reputation we also have a strong and effective patent system and venture capital investment in the UK beats that of other European countries by some considerable margin.

So why aren’t we doing better? There are various explanations for all of this; we can blame the government, the strength of sterling, we can make many excuses. However, I tend to believe that much of it is down to the fact that too many entrepreneurs fail to think really big and don’t believe that they can conquer the world.