When my eight-year- old daughter asked what I was writing, I said it was about how we can change the future. She thought for a moment and said “like when we build a city on Mars”. There was a time when positive visions of the future were not just the stuff of childish dreams. As the CEO of a digital agency set up when the web was a brave new world, I still take heart from JFK's 1962 space-race speech. It is rousing stuff:

“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

Fast forward to 2009 and imagine any political leader in the West setting an agenda as compelling as this. If President Obama announced that his priority was to land a manned mission on Mars, he would be met by hostility, bafflement and fear. Yet Kennedy's leadership gave the US a sense of purpose and men landed on the Moon in 1969.

If we are going to come out of this recession well, it is precisely the hard and challenging choices that we need to make. Yet with the first shocks of the recession over, it would be easy to think that somehow or other we can just muddle through. This is delusional.

Prosperity over the past ten years was based on two things that may never come back in the same way: the growth of the UK financial services industry and the vast expansion of credit funded by the Chinese and others. Now we need to ask what can take the place of financial services as the dynamo for our economy. What happens if the credit has dried up for good?

We need to step back, look at the future and ask: “What is Britain for?” We need to know what our unique selling points are; what do we have or what can we develop that means we can take our part in the world economy? And what are the obstacles to developing these USPs?

David Cameron's “age of austerity” will not do. The austerity approach merely reveals the bankruptcy of ideas about what we could do to get things moving again.

The fact is we need to stand up for economic growth. Even during the boom years, loud and influential voices such as Lord Layard and the Prince of Wales proclaimed the pointlessness, misery and environmental damage created by materialism. In the process reality was turned on its head.

All human progress, in health, education, science, technology and democracy has been based on material progress and rising living standards. The poorest countries in the world are inflicted with disease, despotism, ignorance and the routine tragedy of the death of their children. Enforced austerity is something that no society should have to endure. Mr Cameron needs to set dynamic economic growth at the heart of his strategy, celebrate ambition and leave the petty demonisation of greed to new Labour.

But there is a serious challenge to any leader encouraging an entrepreneurial culture in Britain now. We do not like taking risks in the UK today. We even blame risk-taking for our present plight. It is hard to imagine an innovative and dynamic economy coexisting with this culture of risk aversion.

Take the debate about whether the Government should “rebalance” the economy away from services. The industries most cited as worthy of more government support include pharmaceuticals, energy, aerospace and biotech, all of which Britain is good at. Yet each of these industries is viewed negatively. Big pharma is often seen as a conspiracy to damage our health, the energy and aerospace industries are killing the environment, and GM crops were rejected to soothe fears about new technologies.

The very industries that could dig us out of this economic hole are judged unfairly through the prism of risk aversion. In order to get public support behind these industries and to encourage the best and brightest young people to seek a career in them, our leaders need to take a stand and shoot down these negative connotations.

We need to do more to encourage a spirit of innovation. There are immediate practical steps that could set us on the path to recovery: the Olympic site could be declared an enterprise zone with tax breaks and other concessions to encourage new businesses and the development of new technologies. A community of entrepreneurs next to the City might encourage an increase in the below-average levels of venture capital funding and investment in research and development which both hinder the UK economy.

Whatever the policies, we want post-recession Britain to mean something on the world stage. We do not want to end up as losers in a world of opportunity. And to do that we need politicians who inspire us to achieve things “not because they are easy but because they are hard”.

— Rob Killick is chief executive of the digital agency cScape and is speaking at the Battle for the Economy on Saturday. You can join in this public discussion about the economic crisis – with leading economists, business people and policymakers – on May 16, at Goodenough College, Mecklenburgh Square, London WC1N 2AB. For information about tickets, go to www.instituteofideas.com

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