Freelancers play a pivotal role in Britain’s 21st century innovation-driven economy:

• They are sources of and conduits for innovation in both corporations and SMEs 
• They liberate businesses from the limits of their internal resource base and enable the use of exceptional talent that would otherwise not be economically feasible to hire on employee contracts 
• They enable de-risking of some of the uncertainties of the market so that firms can reduce the risk of growing They reduce the amount of finance required for innovation and business start-ups 
• They promote efficiency-driven economic performance 
• They reduce barriers to market entry and reduce minimum efficient scale 
• They enable businesses to maximise performance across peaks and troughs in demand 
• They create jobs by increasing the level of innovation and efficiency in the economy and helping new projects succeed
• They enable businesses to manage, in fact reduce, entrepreneurial risk and so promote innovation and enterprise

Freelancers usually generate these benefits through a working partnership with employees. This symbiotic relationship between employees and freelancers has unfortunately been overshadowed by perceptions of their competitive interaction. 

Despite these important economic functions, freelancers are still largely under-analysed and unheralded economic agents in the modern British economy. The main reason for this is that their new pivotal role has only really come to the fore with the emergence of the innovation-driven economy over the last three decades.

In this setting businesses benefit from being: 

• Innovative 
• Able to manage entrepreneurial risk 
• Capable of prospering despite greater market uncertainty 
• Flexible and agile

Freelancers enable businesses to do all these things and hence have become a key driver for economic performance in the economy. There is a need to identify the defining and unique features which distinguish them as unique economic agents in their own right.