What gets done gets measured, guest post by Opto Advisory founder Chris Wilson

In this new world, we will not always be able to catch the unintended consequences of our actions.  What really drives behaviour?

I’ve had the pleasure of leading businesses in a number of sectors and have seen the traditional reversal of this saying, ‘what gets measured gets done’, menacingly scrawled in in permanent marker on white boards in all manner of workplaces.  

I too was a disciple.  Target the behaviours you want, pick the measure that you believe will show it’s working and, hey presto – watch as the sales flood in, costs will tumble and things will generally be better.  

I even adopted this approach as a parent.  I can distinctly remember lining up two of my kids in front of a ‘reward’ chart when they were little.   A vein attempt to get them to use cutlery, the potty, get to bed on time, you know the story.  In response to this approach, I can distinctly remember my oldest (then 4) looking quizzically and simply responding “daddy, can you not pick things we already do”...

And there we have it, what gets measured does not in fact get done.  In reality, we pick things that we believe will make changes we want, then make ourselves feel better by managing the numbers.  But what actually gets done?

One example haunts me from when I ran a bank branch network.  We came up with a great plan to get our staff to contact more customers that rarely came to branches to ‘meet their needs’ (sell to them!).   

To encourage them, we set staff a target of a percentage of appointments to be with these customers as opposed to from traditional ‘walk-ins’.   I remember visiting a branch and having a lovely honest chat with one of the team.  She explained that a customer had walked in off the street to get a mortgage the previous Friday afternoon and she had declined to meet them (her diary was clear).  Instead, saying it needed to be booked in the following week. Why, because seeing this ‘walk in’ would have meant she missed her ‘self-generation’ percentage target for the week!  

So, what got done (meeting booked the following week) got measured.  In many instances, the customer would simply have gone elsewhere, and we would never had known.

Another more worrying tale was when I was responsible for a group of motor repair centres where we were trying to encourage more standardised repair methods that were safer and more efficient (quicker!).   Again, we came up with some measure of success: how quick teams were.   I recall a site visit where I saw a rather alarming corner being cut that could have caused some serious harm.  Again, what got done (less safe repairs) got measured, quicker.  

In both cases, the guys at the front line were not trying to cheat or do anything dishonest, they were hard working dedicated employees simply trying their best to deliver.  The issue was mine for thinking that measures alone will get the best outcomes.

As we ponder how we manage and lead businesses in this new world, this has become even more problematic.  In both these instances, it was only when I was out in the business that I could see what was actually going wrong – the unintended consequences.   In the case of my kids, the spaghetti splattered walls and bathroom floors liberally pee’d on certainly told me the measures were not working.  

As people work more remotely without line of sight, we need to be even more mindful of how we lead.  Great care has to be taken when thinking about how we seek to create success in a business.   Instead of the traditional notion that you can coerce behaviour out of people by simply measuring what you want them to do, leaders that will succeed need a little more sophistication.   

Real success happens when you are clear on the values and behaviours that will truly help your customers.  With that potent knowledge, you can then attract people that instinctively live and love those values and behaviours.  If you give these talented people a clear sense of purpose and unleash them on your customers, they will naturally do the things that they need and value.   

When that gets done, you will be able to measure your real success.

An edited version of this post ran as on op-ed in The Scotsman on Saturday 21st November 2020

New challenges during Covid, guest blog by Andragogy.co's Anneli Ritari-Stewart

What is the secret of peak performance in business and sport? Hard work, perseverance and skill are essential. But there is another often neglected element which optimises results. 

Growing up in Sweden I played football from a young age and continued to play at a high level until my thirties. An injury put an end to my football career but instead I took up running. I started with shorter races before moving on to marathons and ultra-marathons. 

Once I had my two boys, now aged 5 and 7 I needed a new sport and took up powerlifting. I won “Best Female Lifter” in the Scottish Masters Championships three years in a row and had the opportunity to be part of Team Scotland and medal at the Commonwealth Championships.  

At the start of the 2020, I decided that I needed a new challenge and signed up for a physique competition. I started training in January but due to the pandemic competitions kept getting cancelled. It was tempting to give up as the goal post kept moving further away.

Finally, I competed at the UKDFBA’s (United Kingdom Drug Free Bodybuilding Association) UK International Championships in October where I won the Novice FitBody class. 

Performing in sports has made me realise that you can achieve almost anything you set your mind to. However, hard work and tenacity are simply not enough. The missing link was an expert led, data-driven and meticulous approach to training.

Working with experts, I left no stone unturned, whether it was calculating how many tons I lifted in each session, running at a specific heart rate, or sculpting a particular body part. I even developed a spreadsheet which calculated my carbohydrate consumption per mile. This helped take 1.5 hours off my marathon time. 

Coaching and training helped me understand exactly what I had to do to improve and in what areas. I used technology to measure my progress and evaluate what worked. Precision is crucial. 

And so, when I got the opportunity to work with Andragogy.co which uses a blend of experts, technology and a data driven approach to learning and development I leapt at the chance to use the same approach for businesses too. 

I interviewed 50 senior executives asking them about their digital skills gap and their training plans. None of the companies I spoke with used a data driven approach. When it comes to marketing, for example, we are obsessed by data, so why are we not using the same approach when it comes to improving people’s skills?

This is often because companies rely on team leaders or the individuals themselves to seek out the training they need. Busy leaders may not have the time or skills to do this and it is hard for individuals to know what they do not know. 

Andragogy.co helps individuals and teams to operate at their peak performance by assessing the skills gap and providing tailor-made individual plans to plug those gaps. Much like my use of technology to inform my performance, they gather data to inform business-wide skills development which is crucial for companies looking to accelerate their digitisation.  

I also believe that this approach can help improve diversity and nurture a mix of talent in teams. Using an assessment as part of recruitment can also eradicate some of the subjectivity and bias which often leads to certain groups being under-represented.  

The pandemic has also shone a spotlight on mental health and wellbeing. I have also felt emotional highs and lows and uncertainty about the future. Staying goal focused and enjoying the training has helped my mental well-being. Seeing constant progress gave me a sense of strength and it also helped me drive business forward.

This is also why I have volunteered to drive an initiative to develop future business leaders for Scottish Women in Sport in partnership with SAMH (Scottish Association for Mental Health). We are designing a mentorship program for young sports women to help them build mental resilience and the belief that they can achieve anything they set out to do in life. Despite the pandemic, I believe that is true and now more than ever we need to help our future leaders have that confidence too. 

An edited version of this blog ran as an op-ed in The Scotsman on Monday 9th November 2020

Startups and podcasts, guest post by Oli Littlejohn, Head of Partnerships, CodeBase

I'm pretty lucky that I've gotten to work with the Scottish startup community for the last seven years. I stumbled into it more or less accidentally, taking a temp job doing administrative and events work. It was immediately apparent that it was something special to be a part of - the fast moving nature and the way people were so supportive of each other really appealed to me. But the biggest thing was the constant state of learning. When you work in a startup, every day is a school day.

When I started learning about the world of startups, there were a handful of resources you could tap into: blog posts on how to build your company by the enormously successful accelerator programme Y Combinator; videos covering design, user experience, and product management by coding bootcamp General Assembly; and tales of startup success and failure from renowned venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz on their seminal podcast, a16z.

I learned so much from this podcast, and still do. They have regular segments covering startup playbooks and a peek behind the curtain at how some of the world's fastest growing companies have implemented them. They created a back catalogue, a greatest hits that you could refer any new founder to and know that if they took the time to listen they'd immediately up their game.

But, there's something that often jars when listening to them talk. Andreessen Horowitz are based in the city of Menlo Park, south of San Francisco, where Google were founded and Facebook are now headquartered. Sure, they could share incredible stories of founders beating the odds, but it was all against the backdrop of the Silicon Valley ecosystem. Stories of success, and indeed what success means, didn't always translate.

There's something on the internet called the 1% rule. It comes in different forms, but loosely it states that for any online community, you have three categories of people: 90% of folks will just consume content - they read blog posts, listen to podcasts, watch videos. 9% will actively engage in that content - they'll post comments, have a conversation on Twitter, share their 2 pence on the matter. The final 1% actually create new content.

What gets me excited is that in the last few years we've seen a lot more people move into that 1%. We're no longer just absorbing the views of others and perhaps discussing those views at the water cooler. Being able to critically examine our experiences and share those thoughts globally is a strong sign of maturity in the ecosystem. It's a sign that we're ready to start teaching rather than learning.

There are plenty of podcasts talking about startup culture in Scotland. We've got How AI Built This, where Liam Wilson brings in experts in the world artificial intelligence and machine learning. The Data Lab's podcast examines how data is used in everything from healthcare to finances. Erik Ravaglia presents Adventures in the Creative Industries, bringing warts and all tales of the Scottish creative scene. I feel obliged to plug the podcast I produce, Startupification, where my pals Matt and Steven look at the evolution of startup thinking (plug finished).

There are loads more. And I'm just focused on podcasts that look at business and technology - there's many more that explore culture, entertainment, science, the arts, etc. That's the beauty of podcasting. If you have something you want to talk about, the barriers to entry are relatively low. Unlike mainstream radio where you need connections and hustle, you can simply start recording on a smartphone (as we have done a few times with Startupification) and release it to the world. The infrastructure is all there - with very limited tech knowledge, your voice can immediately be heard on a global platform.

For me, these grassroots moments are what make an ecosystem thrive. It's great to hear new voices bubbling up from the primordial soup of the startup world, giving their world view and disseminating it publicly, for others to learn from and push back on. These voices help us collectively reflect on what has been working and what hasn't, and what we should be striving to do for the future.

I think we're going to continue to see more podcasts pop up from our tech and business community. We have our own unique worldview, and stories to tell. Hopefully we're just getting started telling them.

An edited version of this blog appeared as an op-ed in The Scotsman on Monday 2nd November

The four questions that bring ingenuity to life, guest post by Kim McCann, partner, PA Consulting

Throughout history, Scots have always found the commercial opportunity in the latest cutting-edge technology and innovation. From James Watt’s application of the steam engine to drive factory production, to John Boyd Dunlop putting the industry on wheels with the pneumatic tyre - we’ve helped drive progress through ingenuity. 

The world needs our ingenuity now, more than ever, as it faces existential challenges like pandemics and to climate change. The Scottish economy and business world have all the skills and capabilities needed to respond. From energy and engineering skills to world leading scientific institutions. The opportunity is there for Scottish business leaders to harness these skills and find the commercial opportunity in technology and innovation. 

To identify the right opportunity for commercial innovation requires business leaders to ask themselves four things. Firstly, what need does technology meet? What gap does it fill in peoples’ lives? Profit is only ever an outcome of adding value to society. Your innovation must solve a problem.

Secondly, is the idea technologically feasible? There’s no point spending heavily on something if science and engineering won’t support it. This is not easy, especially while running a going concern. At PA, we use our “Dark Matter” AI analysis and research tools to help businesses scan the landscape for the right innovation opportunities. 

Third, is there a commercial business in this? Many technologies fail in the “valley of death” between being technological feasibility and commerciality. Starting with the commerciality in mind is key, don’t let yourself get drawn to the cool tech with no real business model.

Today the fourth question is more important than ever, is the idea sustainable? Sustainability, whether it’s preventing waste or minimising emissions, is also a huge opportunity for innovation. As specialist technical advisors to the UN global compact, we know that to produce, consume and dispose is no longer an acceptable way forward for business, circularity by design must be considered in any innovation or business opportunity. 

Swedish business, PulPac came to us with an idea on how to use their dry form pressing process to give cellulose pulp the tensile strength and flexibility of plastic, with higher quality and lower cost. Meaning good old paper can replace everyday plastics such as fruit cups, razors, to coffee pods. 

This wouldn’t have happened without the human need for a sustainable replacement of the 300 million tonnes of plastic we produce every year, half of it single use. We helped PulPac commercialise their idea, and we are now seeing the first commercial-scale production lines installed by consumer goods companies across the globe.

Another technology that shows that commercial opportunity can grow from adversity is Airora. The Airora technology recreates the safety of outdoor air indoors, harnessing natures detergent, Hydroxyl Radicals, to make indoor enclosed spaces, just as safe from pathogens like COVID-19, as the great outdoors. Scottish manufacturers are also in the running to benefit from this new technology, as they look to partner with us to produce Airora at scale to help address the current pandemic. 

The process combines ozone, UV light and plant oils to produce hydroxyl radicals that condense on any pathogen – like a virus or bacteria – and neutralise it. After joining forces with start-up Hydroxyl Technologies in April, we’ve developed the technology to the point where the first units are going into NHS hospitals this month. 

It’s a reminder that real breakthroughs, like motorised transport or even bagless vacuums, are so dramatic that no one imagined them. Yet, once they take commercial shape, they become indispensable.

With this sort of thinking, profit is a by-product, not the sole purpose. Searching for that unmet human need is vital to what we at PA call a positive human future. And it’s a spur to ingenuity that Watt and Dunlop would surely have welcomed to herald our country, economy and humanity forward.

An edited version of this post ran as an op-ed in The Scotsman on Monday 26th October 2020

Scottish startups soar at EIE20, by Nick Freer

EIE20

EIE20 went virtual for the first time last week, with almost one thousand attendees including investors from every corner of the earth. 50 startups pitched for seed to series A funding up to £5 million and it’s always a highlight of Scotland’s tech calendar to see so many exciting early stage technology companies in one place. 

Ethical data was a common theme, as marked out by Shannon Vallor, senior Baillie Gifford executive and Director of the Centre for Technomoral Futures at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. While there wasn’t an official pitch of the day award this year, my pick went to Andrew Duncan of Soar, a Scottish fintech that works closely with credit unions and other not-for-profit banks to help deliver digital products. For me, next on the podium was hotel app startup Criton’s CEO and founder Julie Grieve, followed by sensor technology startup Beringar’s co-founder Mark Sorsa-Leslie. 

Startup founders pitched technology solutions ranging from robots improving the cultivation of strawberry crops to a platform enabling last mile-access to lifesaving vaccines for children in developing countries. The fintech sector was well represented including Melbourne-headquartered Gobbill who develop cybersecurity products and is looking to relocate some of its operations to Scotland, and mobile authentication startup PolyDigi Tech who recently relocated its global headquarters from Hong Kong to Edinburgh. 

Internationalisation was another main theme at EIE20, with online “pavilions” dedicated to Germany, the Americas and Asia-Pacific. Keynote speaker Lord Bilimoria, Cobra Beer founder and President of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), was a highlight on the day and his talk created a lot of buzz on EIE’s conference chat channel.

Lord Bilimoria recounted how he had arrived in the UK from India as a 19-year-old before going on to found Cobra Beer during recessionary times. “Entrepreneurship was looked down upon at that time”, said the CBI president, “now entrepreneurs are celebrated”. He added: “Our country is at a crossroads and we must innovate our way out of this”, as he described how Covid-19 “came out of nowhere” and “reverberated through supply chains”. The Cobra founder revealed that his own beer business lost over two-thirds of its sales following lockdown with only supermarket sales keeping the wheels turning. 

Bilimoria, who is also the Chancellor at the University of Birmingham, praised UK’s university sector - “I am passionate about our universities, they are the best in the world next to the United States” - and picked out the University of Edinburgh for its record in R&D and spin-out companies, “81 per cent of which still exist”, and the city’s reputation as a leading European data hub. 

Another keynote, Jacqueline de Rojas, President of techUK, said the organisation has seen the demand for digital skills “grow exponentially on the back of Covid-19” while championing diversity in the tech sector.  

I really enjoyed EIE this time around. Unlike previous years, I spent most of it in lounge wear, made hot beverages for myself, answered the front door for deliveries on a couple of occasions and made sure the kids didn’t trip over my laptop lead when they got back from school. A brave new world I guess, or something like that. 

Car valet

One of my less impressive lockdown stories (there are quite a few to pick from) involves a resident pair of wood pigeons who spent weeks nesting, with associated droppings, directly above our parked and very stationary car. I should have moved the family wagon and my excuse as to the state it ended up in (just think of Bass Rock off North Berwick if you can’t imagine the scene) centres on a lack of free parking spaces because no-one was out on the roads combined with a more general streak of personal laziness.

Anyway, I had the pleasure of meeting a young founder last week who has just secured one of the top Scottish EDGE awards for his car valet startup and it turned out that one of his franchisee operators had been the guy we got to sort out the embarrassing wood pigeon problem post-lockdown in July. Talk about customer service, Vidmantis spent five hours completing what can’t have been a pleasant job. 

Founder Sam Brennan has a whiff of Blackcircles.com founder Mike Welch about him, having developed a so-called “car care-as-a-service” technology platform to create a new digital marketplace, and his Fresh Car Valet startup is definitely one to watch. 

An edited version of this blog ran as an op-ed in The Scotsman on Monday 19th October 2020

Scottish startup bucks travel sector woes, by Nick Freer

Back in February, when it felt like we still lived in a pre-Covid existence, I attended and helped to publicise the Travalyst conference at the EICC in Edinburgh alongside Prince Harry’s (when he was still called Prince Harry) team at an international business event that featured industry sector players like Booking.com, TripAdvisor and Skyscanner. 

Like so much in our post-Covid world, how much has changed since then is one of those things you occasionally sit back and think about and it never stops being anything short of mind-blowing. The travel sector, in particular, has been turned on its head and it’s tough to see how our own travel tech superstar Skyscanner has had its wings clipped since the onset of the pandemic. 

In the autumn of 2017 when I was with my family up near Aviemore, I got a call from a contact who put me in touch with TravelNest founder Doug Stephenson. TravelNest, a platform positioned to support holiday rental owners, had been founded three years before, was building its product and team, making some impressive hires including Skyscanner’s former chief technology officer, and was on the verge of a £3 million investment round led by venture capitalist firms Pentech, Mangrove Capital Partners and Frontline Ventures.  

I spent the next couple of weeks giving Doug and his leadership team advice around the planned funding announcement from our own holiday rental property up on Speyside. Fast forward three years, and Stephenson and TravelNest are poised to be one of the rare winners in a sector ravaged by Covid-19. 

Catching up with the TravelNest team recently, I was keen to hear how staycation trends are benefiting the business since tourism reopened post-lockdown. Some of the numbers tell the story best, including a 250 per cent year-on-year increase in reservations in July when the platform experienced a record booking month with over £1 million in total booking value (TBV), the standard industry yardstick, achieved.  

As one of TravelNest’s marketing executives puts it, “since tourism reopened, significant traveler behavioural change has led to switching from international to domestic, hotel to vacation rentals and urban to rural”. All startups are on a mission and in TravelNest’s case it is to “dramatically improve occupancy while reducing administration time for vacation rental owners and hosts”.  

While vacation rentals through platforms like Airbnb, Booking.com and Expedia have risen rapidly, a high percentage of nights can still remain unsold, what TravelNest describes as a “disconnect between demand and supply”. When the travel tech startup points to over 80 per cent of properties being listed on a single channel, you get a clear picture of how market dynamics play to its advantage. In ‘startup speak’, it is ready to disrupt a fast-growing marketplace and already counts thousands of customers and properties on its site.

In a TravelNest traveler optimism survey carried out prior to the easing of lockdown, 73 per cent of respondents said they were likely or very likely to book a trip once Covid-19 restrictions eased; 84 per cent planned to take a trip over the next twelve months; 88 per cent of people said they would prefer to travel in their own car and 66 per cent said their preference was for a holiday rental. Pre-Covid, vacation rentals made up around 15 per cent of overall holiday accommodation and the TravelNest survey says this percentage could quadruple over the next year alone.  

Data indicates that holiday rentals will continue to take market share from hotels, as after staying in a holiday home for the first time the likelihood that a traveler will choose a vacation rental over a hotel for future travel accommodation increases.

TravelNest and its team of over 40 people are advised by non-executive director Mark Logan, Skyscanner’s former COO, and the word on the street suggests they have a series of interesting announcements in the pipeline. The Doug Stephenson-founded venture was always considered “one to watch” on the Scottish startup scene and the shifting plates in the travel market have only upped its credentials in recent times. 

An edited version of this post ran as an op-ed in The Scotsman on Monday 5th October 2020

Scotland's tech festivals move into full swing, by Nick Freer

ScotlandIS-run tech conference ScotSoft takes place this week and there is a great line-up of speakers including Steve Guggenheimer, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of AI & ISV Engagement, who joined the board of Edinburgh-headquartered Forrit earlier this year (Scottish Startup Strengthens Board of Directors, PR Newswire, 8 June 2020). One notable thing about conferences since Covid struck is how moving to a virtual platform has allowed events to draw an increasingly global number of participants and attendees. 

As Ray Bugg, Founder at technology events player DIGIT who are running the 7th annual Financial Technology Conference this week says, “DIGIT took the decision to pivot to virtual events early in the pandemic, allowing time to create an event environment that mirrors that of the physical events we’ve produced since 2013. It was imperative we created something more than ‘Death by Zoom’ that would allow delegates to network, collaborate and interact. Also, attendees are no longer constrained by geography resulting in an increased attendance from other parts of the UK and around the world. Our sponsors now have a richer environment to demonstrate their products and services and post-event analytics that are undeliverable by physical events.”

I’ve been fortunate to support Turing Fest, Startup Summit and EIE, three of Scotland’s other main tech conferences, through the years and individually and collectively they form an important part of the fabric of our tech scene, something that was emphasised in Mark Logan’s recent Scottish Technology Ecosystem Review. 

Personal highlights from these conferences, in addition to the in-conference talks and sessions, are some of the memories from the sidelines including hanging out with CodeBase founder and chairman Jamie Coleman and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in 2012, walking through Edinburgh with RocketSpace founder Duncan Logan en route to The Scotsman for an interview during Startup Summit in 2016, and a late night malt whisky session with Chris van der Kuyl and a celebrated tech journalist from Forbes following EIE17. 

EIE, Scotland’s top tech investor conference, is the one I know best - both in terms of the EIE team itself and the slew of startups who have come through the year-round programme that is now run out of the University of Edinburgh’s Bayes Centre. In terms of the numbers, EIE has supported over 500 startups who have raised over £750 million in investment.  

EIE was launched in 2008 to bring tech founders together with investors who could help fuel their ambition and in 2020 it is comforting to see that investors continue to invest in startup talent in spite of prevailing Covid winds. Many of this year’s company cohort are on a mission to tackle some of the world’s biggest challenges - around health, including Covid itself, climate, energy, agriculture, cybersecurity and robotics.

The recent Logan Review, commissioned by the Scottish Government, pinpointed the importance of conferences like EIE to the greater good of the tech scene here: “We recommend that these conferences are internationalised to showcase startups regardless of their origin country, and that a level of public finance is provided to ensure that ticket prices and pitch-entry prices are not prohibitive. The reason for doing so is to attract external investors and international industry expertise to Scotland that won’t come to see a solely domestic portfolio.” 

Having said that, investors from outside Scotland should not underplay the opportunity they have to meet Scotland-headquartered startups as history shows that we have produced homegrown ventures who have gone on to great success - startups like Skyscanner, FanDuel and Two Big Ears. Many investors’ first chance to see FanDuel, which went on to become Scotland’s first billion dollar-valued tech startup in 2015, was at EIE in 2010 and virtual reality audio startup Two Big Ears pitched to investors at EIE15 before going on to be acquired by Facebook the following year.

This year’s EIE20 takes place on Thursday 14th October, with an investor-only event with Mark Logan and a webinar for international delegates both taking place the day before.

Another Scottish tech sector conference runs on the 13th October with the inaugural edition of Ada Scotland, referencing English computer pioneer Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. Organised by the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing, the festival is aimed at improving gender balance in computing and providing a hub for girls and young women to get inspired about opportunities to study and work in computing and IT. 

An edited version of this article appeared as on op-ed in The Scotsman on Monday 28th September 2020

Thinking globally and creating a strong biotech ecosystem in Scotland, guest post by Clare Wareing, Founder and CEO of Cumulus Oncology

It was good to read about ClinSpec Diagnostics’ latest investment recently, along with some positive news on Scottish biotech spinouts Pheno Therapeutics and Amphista Therapeutics earlier this year.

Like ClinSpec, Cumulus Oncology has benefited from investment by St Andrews-based investment firm EOS Advisory. EOS has a similar philosophy to ourselves and understand the impact that investment can have when ambitions are aligned.

We founded Cumulus in 2017 to create spin-out companies that will work to develop anti-cancer therapies. We aim to fast-track treatments into clinical trials for cancer types that don’t respond well to existing options.

While our business model is well developed in the US, we are leading the way in Europe. Having spent three years carefully curating a high-calibre team and building a portfolio of oncology asset-centric spin-out companies, we are now poised to scale the business and are excited about doing this from a base in Edinburgh.

Specialist life science venture capital (VC) investors really see the value of the European biotech sector where year-on-year increases in venture financing led to record investment levels of $3.3bn in 2019.

Back in 2012, my clinical research organisation (CRO) Nexus Oncology was acquired by the larger US CRO Ockham after I had spent a decade building the company to a headcount of over 120 and revenues of almost £10 million. This time around, we want to focus on therapeutics rather than services and create something that is both highly valuable and scalable. We want to be one of the next big success stories on the Scottish biotech scene, creating a sustainable business for the future.

Last week, we demonstrated our intentions by co-founding our latest biotech spin-out, Modulus Oncology alongside a first rate scientific team from the University of Sheffield. Modulus plans to fast track its lead asset into clinical development within two years. Myself and Cumulus co-founder and chair Alan Wise have joined Modulus’s leadership team in line with our modus operandi at Cumulus.

Next month, we will be announcing the appointment of a number of high profile industry figures to our advisory board and we plan to hire more people into our team over the next 12 months. We are fortunate to have a number of world-class universities on our doorstep and this will help us to grow critical mass for the sector here.

The life sciences ecosystem in Scotland is a very supportive one with access to grant funding for early stage companies as well as co-funding opportunities. This has helped create some of the impressive exits we have seen in recent years. The entrepreneurs who have been there and done it foster the next wave of new companies and create a strong biotech ecosystem for Scotland.

Scotland has an excellent base of early stage investors but for the larger investment rounds needed to scale biotech companies, particularly as they reach the clinical stage of testing, we have to look to larger VC funds in London and Europe - though Epidarex Capital, with offices in Edinburgh as well as the US, is a notable exception.

Working in the biopharmaceutical sector has taught me that you always need to think globally and, in a science-based industry sector, you need to base decisions on robust data. A strong understanding of market potential, a clear picture of the opportunity to improve patient outcomes and last, but not least, creating value for stakeholders are all key factors in the biotech sector.

For me, the most important lessons learned from scaling a life sciences service company include: always working with people you respect; listening well and learning from those that have done it before; never losing sight of your purpose and acknowledging that you need different skill sets at different stages of growth so be sure to bring in the right people at the right time to scale the business. Most of all though, love what you do, as passion and drive are the key to seeing you through difficult times.

While Covid has not impacted Cumulus in any significant way, it has been detrimental to the cancer research sector in general; cancer charities have lost income and recruitment into clinical trials faltered. So the sooner we can return to pre-Covid activity the better it will be for all in the cancer research community.

An edited version of this blog ran as an op-ed in The Scotsman on Monday 21st September 2020

Mapping out Scotland's games sector, guest post by Brian Baglow, Founder, Scottish Games Network

Most people know two things about the videogames industry in Scotland: a) we have one, and b) it made Grand Theft Auto didn’t it?

If pushed, they might add it ‘punches above its weight’. 

Combine that with a general sense that the globally videogames are doing rather well gives a general sense that Scotland’s video games sector is probably getting on with being quietly successful. 

I’m not sure that’s the case. From some recent informal research, despite the global uptick in gaming, some of the industry here in Scotland may be struggling. 

To start with, it looks like the number of companies actually developing games has shrunk. Since 2016 it looks like we’ve lost around 65% of our developers (From 115 in 2016, to around 40 today,) despite the global games market growing.

Is that worrying? It could be. 

The problem is that the videogames industry evolves fast. Not just with new consoles, but with whole new classes of device, business models, audiences and entirely different kinds of experience. Maybe things have just shifted?

Back in the 90s, when I joined the industry as a writer on the original Grand Theft Auto, making videogames was a major undertaking. You needed large teams and lots of time and money. To get your game released you needed a publisher, who could get the game manufactured on disks or cartridges (ask your parents) for dedicated videogames consoles. 

Contrast this with today’s market. Games are ubiquitous. Every device with a screen and a processor, from smartphones to smart fridges, now play games. Most are ‘non-dedicated’ i.e. their primary function is something other than gaming. This has shifted the audience for games quite profoundly.

The games engines used by the world's largest companies, are now freely available to everyone. ‘Applied’ games bring tools, technologies and techniques from videogames to sectors such as film, television, education, healthcare, tourism and the workplace. 

Making games can now be done by individuals or small teams. Hobbyists and part-time developers are common. Large studios are now the exception rather than the rule.

Esports (playing games competitively at a professional level) has hit Scotland, along with  massive growth of streaming games on Twitch and YouTube

The problem is, we just don’t know how big Scotland’s games industry is. We don’t know where it’s based or what it’s composed of. We’ve no visibility of freelancers, or of the actual games being released. It’s never been mapped. The information we do have is inconsistent, out of date, or focused on old definitions of ‘real games’. 

From what we do know, it seems like we should be doing better. We now have six universities and almost every college across Scotland now offering games courses. Despite this we’re not seeing many new startups. Very few games companies appear in the incubators, accelerators, competitions or innovation centres across Scotland. 

Why are we losing so many development studios? If new employers are not coming through then where are our graduates going? Are we really struggling as badly as it seems?

Good questions. Thankfully there is a way forward.

Since 2004 I‘ve run the Scottish Games Network (www.scottishgames.net), which carries news and updates from everyone involved in the games sector. In July I was awarded a ‘Connected Innovator’ grant, as an industry expert, which will enable me to map Scotland’s games sector, in all its weird unknown glory. 

The games industry has never really considered itself part of the whole ’tech sector’, nor really as part of the wider creative industries. As the ground-breaking Logan Review pointed out, we’re all part of a larger, interconnected ecosystem. If we want to build a better, more collaborative digital future, then games and interactive media should be a significant part of that. 

Mapping the industry in Scotland is an important first step. In addition, I’m also lobbying the Scottish government and public sector organisations to support the creation of a videogames industry cluster. 

We are justifiably proud of our videogaming legacy. From Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto, to the world’s first games degree course, Scotland’s games industry has a strong cultural heritage. 

To echo the Logan Review, our challenge in a rapidly evolving and disruptive global market is to make Scotland a place where the next tech unicorn is as likely to be a games studio, as a fintech, cyber or data company. 

Wish me luck.

An edited version of this blog ran as an op-ed in The Scotsman on Monday 14th September 2020

Searching for Scotland's next Skyscanner, by Nick Freer

I handled the Skyscanner press announcement around Mark Logan’s appointment as the travel search site’s chief operating officer in April 2012.  At that time, Skyscanner was on a flight path to global domination and was in full on scale-up mode.  Six months previously, Skyscanner had opened its first international office in Singapore to capitalise on strong growth in Asia-Pacific and CEO Gareth Williams had stated his ambition for the fledgling venture he co-founded a decade before to become Scotland’s first billion dollar valued technology company.  As the saying goes, the rest is history.

Of course, a lot of water passed under the bridge over the following years and insiders agree that Logan played a key role in preparing the ground for Skyscanner to really take off.  He helped the business become investor-ready ahead of Silicon Valley heavyweight Sequoia investing in 2013, crystalising that unicorn status. 

In an interview with a national newspaper in 2018, Logan expressed his view that while Skyscanner may be unique, it is also replicable.  He then tempered this remark by saying Scotland requires hundreds of good tech start-ups to grow one unicorn. 

Last week, Logan’s Scottish Technology Ecosystem Review, commissioned by Finance Secretary Kate Forbes, was released to a considerable amount of acclaim across the Scottish tech scene.  As one of the senior team from CodeBase tweeted out on the day, which seemed to capture the overall response to the report, “Brilliant to see a coherent narrative forming around the future of Scottish tech”.  

The Logan Review states that Scotland’s technology ecosystem has still to pass through a “tipping point” in its development, “which is the point”, the report continues, “at which the ecosystem hosts a critical mass of viable startups and scale-ups”.  Logan places emphasis on “Education and Talent”, “Infrastructure” and “Funding” and the report goes on to outline a detailed list of “interventions” which Logan says need to be implemented in their entirety unless we want to achieve what he describes as “incremental outcomes only”.  

My own take on the report is that, most importantly, they picked someone with the right kind of credentials to undertake the review.  When Skyscanner was sold to Ctrip for £1.4 billion in 2016, which was Scotland’s largest ever tech exit, Logan exited Skyscanner but decided to stick around and stay involved in the country’s tech ecosystem (I’m guessing retiring to a desert island and sipping piña coladas was another option).  He has founded a Glasgow-based programme to mentor software entrepreneurs, modelled on a Stanford University equivalent and advised a series of Scottish startups while going on to join a select number of their boards, including Care Sourcer and Swipii.

Investors looking for Scotland’s next unicorn will undoubtedly have paid close attention to the startups Logan has attached himself to.  As outlined in the Scottish Technology Ecosystem Review, we are still some way off being able to say that we have a critical mass of Scotland-based startups who have a realistic chance to achieve global scale and it’s a belief that is echoed by a number of prominent VC firms I have been in touch with over the last twelve months. 

In the year before Logan joined Skyscanner, the company had already reached a strong position on the revenue front, reporting top-line growth up 75 per cent to £15.2 million for 2010.  That kind of yardstick applies to very few, if any, of the current crop of Scottish startups and scale-ups. 

A well known UK tech reporter occasionally asks me who I think will be, as she puts it, Scotland’s next Skyscanner.  My answer is usually pretty much the same - what I have heard from VC and angel investors in my network, who tech incubator CodeBase (the tech incubator supports around 400 companies who have raised over £600 million in investment) rate and startups I have got to know first-hand.  

Do I believe we can produce another Skyscanner?  For sure.  Technology investment bank GP Bullhound’s Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Hugh Campbell, puts its best: “There are now more than 100 billion-dollar technology companies that have come out of Europe.  As we become a more global society and economy, so the ambitions across continents have become more similar.”

An edited version of this blog ran as an op-ed in The Scotsman on Monday 31st August 2020

Dickensian musings on Covid by Nick Freer

I’m not sure I ever made it through the entire novel, but there’s that famous first line in A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” 

The last few months of Covid existence have had a Dickensian feel alright, from increasing social inequality across the globe to nefarious characters in positions of power.  More so than anytime in our collective memories, 2020 has been a tragic year on so many fronts.  With so much pain and trauma in all corners of the earth and so much uncertainty about the road ahead, sometimes it has been hard to focus on the the here and now.  For most of us, the here and now revolves around our home and work lives and, even before Covid, there was a blurring of lines between the two that has only increased since.   

I decided to work primarily from home a few years’ back and by working from an office at home I’ve got to see a lot more of my kids.  That’s been a big plus for me on the domestic side of things.  I quickly found I was also much more productive working from home, combining that with regular face-to-face meetings with clients, colleagues and contacts.  So, there wasn’t much of a transition for me when the world moved to remote working earlier this year. 

I tend to agree with Richard Marshall, a former Gartner technology analyst and Principal at Concept Gap who recently wrote for this column, when he says, “I have to wonder if the people saying that working at home is full of distractions have actually worked in an office.  My experience of open plan offices is that they are infinitely more distracting than a home or co-working space.”

It’s still unclear if remote working and platforms like Zoom will impact the office market in a similar way to how Amazon has impacted the retail sector, but it’s now generally accepted that things won’t go back to the pre-Covid status quo.  At the same time, I also agree with commentators who believe that virtual meetings won’t ever completely replace the social capital derived from meeting people in person.

As the “worst of times” in Dickensian speak is one side of the coin, the “best of times” is the other.  With a couple of notable exceptions, I have loved having our kids around the house for the duration of lockdown and I’ll miss them when they go back to school.  As a family unit, we’ve spent so many more hours together than we would have if Covid hadn’t struck and that has been one of the silver linings for me.  Admittedly, home schooling at our house was more “St Trinian’s” than “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”, but I think we all got to know each other a lot better and hopefully we’ll be even more tight-knit as a family going forward.  

I also wrote in this column a few months ago that in spite of coronavirus, when we have the opportunity to look back many individuals and businesses will realise they did their best ever work during this time.  For me, whether I fit into this category or not is something I’m probably not the best judge of, but I hope I’ve been there for my clients with more urgency and diligence than ever before.

And what a time it has been for the business world, including here in Scotland.  As they say, you couldn’t make it up.  Like a lot of businesses, I hope my agency can emerge from Covid in a stronger position.  Battered yes, but stronger too.  

If you are under pressure, as so many of us have been, and unless you are a Dickensian style bad guy, it’s a prerequisite to have more empathy for your clients and peers at this time.  And I truly believe that when it comes to good PR, you must continue to communicate through the worst of times as you would in the best of times. 

An edited version of this comment ran as an op-ed in The Scotsman on Monday 17th August 2020

Making an Impact, guest post by Mark Beaumont, record-breaking athlete, author, broadcaster and partner at Eos Advisory

Seeing as no one is talking about Covid and it’s impact on all of our work, I thought I would gently raise the topic.  Some businesses are doing extraordinarily well given the pandemic, but many are not and the road ahead is foggy.  Most of the working population has also had reason to pause and consider its use of time – which, more than money, is the scarcest commodity of all.  

Money doesn’t make you happy in itself, whilst not having money makes life difficult.  So, assuming you have a roof over your head and food on the table, your measure of worth to yourself, put into sharp focus during periods of economic downturn, has to be about more than making money.  I thought it would be worth sharing some personal practices, how I am structuring my time in order to grapple back control and create impact through times of extraordinary change. 

Impact on a personal level for me is defined in a Venn diagram of family, community and work – your own emotional equilibrium comes from making a positive impact in all three areas.  Get too obsessed in any one of these, and the other areas of importance quickly suffer and. selfishly, your own happiness too.  Life is a juggling act, but it is worth considering so you can simplify the best inputs (time) to get the best outcomes (happiness & impact). 

During lockdown I used this model to take on specific projects in each of these impact areas – rather than getting lost in the woes of an 85% hit to my own business in 2020.  Taking an example from each area – I am organising ‘World in a Day’ as a national cycling community to raise £250k for NHS Charities Together, I took on a project with my 6-year-old daughter where I would run and she would cycle every street in Edinburgh (507 miles of streets in 67 days) and in work rather than struggling on with an events, conferencing and travel market that has been the lifeblood of my work for the last decade, I have pivoted and focused my work time on a completely new area of work for me – investment firm Eos Advisory and its focus on impact investing. 

Once again, impact in this sense has to be more than solely financial gain – there has to be a quantifiable greater good.  Untold challenges in the world call for inventive minds and entrepreneurial spirit, character traits that Scots have long been renowned for.  Most people will know me as a cyclist, having pedalled around the planet twice – but I am not the best cyclist in the world, I doubt I am the best cyclist in Edinburgh.  However, I do have the quiet confidence to spot opportunities, build teams and belief behind ideas – and this habit is often what is most important to succeed.  

A few weeks ago we invested £1.7m into Cumulus Oncology, alongside the Scottish Investment Bank, Alba Equity, Apollo and Investing Women, in order for Clare Wareing and her team to scale Europe’s first and most successful oncology drug discovery accelerator.  This is our 12th investment and the legacy of these businesses will clearly be judged by the greater good that they create in the world, as well as their valuation and financial returns.   

I’m not claiming to always get these things right - but I do spend time thinking about them.  A quiet confidence in your ability, a healthy dose of obsession and a bloody good plan is important in times like these.  

I wish you all well with the road ahead, hope you have good fog lights and wish you clarity of impact.  From the £5Tn FAAMG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Google) tech giants to every individual citizen of the capitalist world, if we can redefine our purpose by impact, where financial growth is only one part of this equation, this will certainly help us better qualify our time as well spent. 

An edited version of this blog ran as an op-ed in The Scotsman on Monday 27th July 2020

Structuring the Future Enterprise, guest post by Richard M Marshall PhD, Principal, Concept Gap

The way most companies are organised dates to the industrial revolution. Our ancestors stopped working from dawn to dark on the family farm for subsistence and moved into the mills, mines and factories where they were at least paid and sheltered from the weather. They had to move into the mills because that was where the machines were. Clerks worked in counting houses because that was where the ledgers were, and later when mechanical calculators and typewriters were invented administration staff needed access to those. Command and control structures were borrowed from the military, and proximity was required because message runners were the only way of communicating. Silence was the order of the day in the counting houses, and the noise levels in factories precluded conversation.  What was necessity became habit and is still how most people work.  Well, everything except for the silence. 

The military have long abandoned rigid command structures, empowering field forces to make immediate decisions based on current conditions, yet most companies retain rigid structures and reserve decision making for a specific echelon. Since most office workers can carry their equipment with them they no longer need to be in an office to use it.  Recent research has found that 37% of all jobs and 50% of urban jobs can be done from home, as many organisations have been forced to discover during the pandemic. When survival becomes the imperative, instead of ego gratification, agility becomes key as many companies have discovered. 

It is important to focus on what has been learned during this period of survival as we tentatively look towards restarting broader economic activity. Many things once unthinkable have proven to be effective and we must capitalise on these rather than rushing back to a status quo that was becoming increasingly unsustainable. More important than the kinks of remote working is learning how decision making happened in those moments of crisis. 

The key takeaway from this decision making should be the importance of trust. Modern business practices have tended to diminish the importance of trust if not downright eliminate it. The term “human resources” speaks volumes about how trustworthy large companies consider their employees. 

Many managers have found it extremely stressful when they cannot see their staff beavering away at a desk. Modern management is uncomfortably close to those old counting houses with the supervisor literally overseeing the clerks from their podium. Now is the perfect moment to rebuild trust such that managers and their reports learn to believe that they are all working together, rather than having to prove it. While measuring output is a fabulously unintrusive way of monitoring work, the idea of having regular checkins between managers and staff helps build a human profile on both sides. Trust grows when each party discovers that they are both humans rather than “the boss” or “a resource.” Discovering what everyone’s work-from-home setup looks like and the wonderful intrusions by small children work wonders in humanising working relationships.

These new relationships are accelerating the challenge to our manager obsessed culture. Organisations need management but do not need managers. Management should be considered an integral part of how work gets done, not an end to itself. While the concept of holacracy is probably a step too far, too soon for traditional organisations, companies need to move towards building teams around outcomes, and staffed with balanced sets of hard and soft skills rather than filling holes in a rigid org chart.  Measurement and direction become much simpler when teams are directed by business outcomes, giving everyone genuine objectives.

The pandemic is both testing our mettle and giving us a chance to stand back and look at how we operate. Take the time to learn and try not to return to how things were before.

An edited version of this blog ran as an op-ed in The Scotsman on Monday 20th July 2020

Why rebrand? We simply decided to go Forrit! Guest post by Peter Proud, Founder and CEO of Forrit

Earlier this month, the technology company I co-founded in 2014 rebranded from Cortex Worldwide to Forrit.  Cortex was a legacy name for the business before we secured a management buyout from advertising giant WPP in 2017 and we just didn’t feel the name fitted the bill anymore.  From deciding we wanted to change our company identity to the rebrand launch itself took about two years.

So, what’s in a company’s name?  Where possible, I think it’s important to have something unique and it should be a name that you like.  In old (auld) Scots, “Forrit” means “forward” and that embraces the spirIt of our company as we are all about helping businesses move forward with their digital transformation.  One of my favourite sayings is that sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good and we got lucky with Forrit.  In Ancient Greek, the word means “program” and in Icelandic it means “application”.  

A lot of people have asked why we we rebranded after six and a half years and fundamentally there are four reasons: there are lots of medical and tech companies with the same or similar names: we could not secure the trademark; we could not get the .com, and; last, but most importantly, Cortex just wasn’t representative of who we were anymore. 

On the day of our rebrand, we also announced board appointments which show how far we’ve come.  Steven “Guggs” Guggenheimer, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of AI, Austen Mulinder, former CEO of Ziosk and a veteran of multiple startups, and Carolyn Jameson, Chief Legal and Policy officer at Trustpilot joined our board and their appointments illustrate the level of ambition we have for the business. 

The cloud-based web content management (WCM) platform we have spent years developing at significant cost, to the tune of almost £15 million, enables clients like Microsoft Education to create, deploy, analyse and optimise their digital estates.  In the case of Microsoft Education, our platform has supported a fivefold increase in traffic to their site since the onset of Covid-19 as online learning has become even more important.   As Liza Magee, Microsoft Education Director puts it: “The website infrastructure Forrit built, on Azure, supported our large traffic spikes, ensuring the user experience was never disrupted.”

As I said in a recent Pioneering People podcast with Morven McIntyre for The Scotsman, we saw the opportunity to create an application that sat on top of the Microsoft Azure service.  What we’ve developed since is a software service that customers use to build big secure scalable websites.  It is all about creating rich media experiences, deploying them across lots of different channels and analysing the output. 

Our new board appointees were kind enough to talk about how highly they rate our product and also to note how impressed they are with the team and culture at Forrit.  As we scale our business globally from a base in Edinburgh, our people, values and culture will remain central to everything we do and this approach has helped us get through such a challenging time during the current crisis.  

Youth and enthusiasm have been key components in our success to date and a couple of weeks ago we hired five more apprentices.  I always say that after starting the company, hiring graduates has been the second best thing I have done in business.  Around one in five of our team is now a graduate apprentice and we believe nurturing talent is key to both our own long-term success and that of Scotland’s tech sector as a whole. 

We are on an exciting journey at Forrit and are fortunate to have so many great people, from seasoned tech veterans to young people just out of high school, with us on the ride.

An edited version of this blog ran as an op-ed in The Scotsman on Monday 29th June 2020

Future-proofing careers and embracing digitisation in Scotland, guest post by Melinda-Matthews Clarkson, CEO, CodeClan

In November 2019, McKinsey & Company released a report on UK plc which indicated that two thirds of the nation’s workforce could be lacking in basic digital skills, while more than 10 million people risked being underskilled in leadership, communication and decision-making.    

The research findings by McKinsey suggest UK companies will need to respond by “transitioning up to a third of their workforces into new roles or skill levels over the next decade”.  If UK companies fail to do this, says McKinsey, they could find themselves with even more acute shortages of talent than today.  Importantly, the global management consulting firm says potential talent shortages “will not only be among technology specialists and engineers, but also among the managers needed to lead change and upskill teams, especially in customer-facing service roles”.  

Fast forward six months, and the business world finds itself in the first throes of a financial crisis stemming from Covid-19 that is only going to exacerbate the trends identified by McKinsey.  At CodeClan, we want to be part of the solution in the Scottish context.  Already, nearly one thousand of our graduates are working with over 250 companies, from startups to multinationals, armed with the latest skills in software development and data analytics.  

We know that digitisation and data will be crucial in guiding our business scene through the coronavirus pandemic and then out the other side.  As part of this process, we are going out to companies across Scotland, including in the employer network that already employ CodeClan graduates, to ask them what they need to upskill their teams so we can do an even better job of helping them to achieve digital savviness and empowerment.  We would also like to hear from other business we are not yet connected with.  

We know that many businesses can go into “hiding mode” when it comes to the kind of digital skills uptake required for their people and their growth potential.  We don’t think business leaders should be afraid of digitisation, rather start thinking about it as an opportunity to become far more competitive.  With the global nature of business in the 21st century, only increased in the wake of the latest technological advances, we need to keep up otherwise we risk being left behind by other countries and regions.   

As Finance Secretary Kate Forbes said in our recent announcement on transitioning to a virtual classroom model: “It’s important that candidates continue to receive the excellent digital skills training that will prepare them for exciting careers in the new high-tech, low-carbon economy, which is going to play an important role in Scotland’s post-pandemic future.”

At CodeClan we talk about “future-proofing” the careers of our candidates and this is now more relevant than ever because of the current health crisis and how it impacts the work dynamic in the months and years ahead.  Not only do new employees need to understand how critical software applications and data-driven decisions are, but we need to reach all of the employees in a business to manage and survive the impact of the pandemic.

I believe we have plenty of reasons to be optimistic in Scotland.  Our technology community has a seasoned air about it in 2020, we have produced world-beating tech and attracted some of the fastest growing international technology companies to set up offices here.  We have a world-renowned university sector and a Government that wants to support all things digital.  At the same time, we cannot rest on our laurels and we cannot afford to put our head in the sand. 

Now is the time to act on what commentators, industry leaders and economists are telling us.  If we can truly embrace digitisation in Scotland, it will be to everyone’s benefit.

An edited version of this article appeared in The Scotsman on Monday 18th May 2020

2020: the year when so many of us will do our most important work, by Nick Freer

I was honoured when Heriot-Watt asked me to be interviewed for the university’s inaugural edition of its Entrepreneurial Speaker webinar at the end of April.  While I don’t consider myself an entrepreneur, I give myself some credit for being entrepreneurial and thankfully the main focus of the webinar interview was around best practice PR for spin-outs and startups.  

Advising technology companies has been a big part of my agency activity in the decade since I founded my agency.  Skyscanner, Blackcircles, pureLiFi and CodeBase were among the clients I advised in the early days and, more recently, in addition to continuing to work with startups I’ve also had the privilege to work with global tech players like Deliveroo and San Francisco-headquartered UserTesting.  

Covid-19 has cast a menacing shadow over the business scene and the tech sector has responded better than most.  UserTesting’s CEO Andy MacMillan wrote for The Scotsman recently about how the company’s Human Insight Platform is helping many of the world’s leading brands navigate customer engagement during the health crisis, earlier this month the press covered Paul Reid-founded Trickle’s announcement of a raft of NHS boards and services now supported by its employee and wellbeing and engagement platform and over the last week we’ve been busy working with Scottish digital agency xDesign and NHS 24’s press team around the announcement of its Covid-19 app launch. 

Hats off to xDesign, who volunteered its services to NHS 24 then built the app for iOS and Android in five days.  Like many of us, some of the team have partners or family working for the NHS and wanted to do something to make a difference.  While it’s hard to truly empathise with what it must be like to be a NHS worker the last couple of months, the stories we hear give us a glimpse of the coal face.  

In my own family, my youngest brother, a consultant anaesthetist at NHS Forth Valley in Stirling, is someone close to the fight against coronavirus while my father, a retired doctor, is a medical adviser to one of the UK’s biggest banks and is engaged in daily conference calls with the bank’s crisis management team.  Undoubtedly, so many people will look back on 2020 as the year when they did their most important work.  At least, when the trauma begins to fade.  

In a US broadcast interview last week, Microsoft’s President Brad Smith talked about how digitisation and data have come together more than ever before since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.  In addition to data’s “fundamental and indispensable” role in relation to public health, Smith concurred that we wouldn’t have been able to sustain the economy without the latest technologies at hand.      

Scotland’s digital skills academy CodeClan has been in the press over the last few days talking about its switch to a virtual classroom model, something I’ve been working on with CEO Melinda Matthews-Clarkson and her team.  With close to one thousand CodeClan graduates now working with over 250 companies - from startups to large international corporates - and over one hundred candidates currently engaged in its software and data courses, CodeClan will play an important role in helping Scotland’s economy get through these difficult times. 

As a Turing Fest survey recently revealed, Scotland’s startups are hurting in the midst of Covid-19, not least around how they continue to fund themselves.  It was good news, therefore, to see wearable tech PlayerData get its latest investment round over the line - a wearable tech startup we have supported from its early days.  And if you want to read about a bona fide entrepreneur, look into CEO and co-founder Roy Hotrabhvanon, a former international archer who narrowly missed out on selection for the Rio Olympics in 2016 and began developing prototypes during his time studying informatics in Edinburgh. 

An edited version of this article appeared in The Scotsman on Monday 11th May 2020

Empathy, Before Tech, Will Lead Our Economies Out of This, guest post by UserTesting CEO Andy MacMillan

Companies around the world have had to change their business models in a matter of weeks. Many of them are moving to digital, something often called “digital transformation.” It’s a shift online that many have been undergoing gradually for some time in an effort to stave off digital-first competitors and business model disruptors. This need to “go digital” has now become necessary just to survive.  And it's not only about going digital, many businesses have had to completely change their business model. Fine dining restaurants have had to move to takeout only or face closing their doors. Retailers are offering curbside pickup for their customer’s piece of mind. An ability to understand and adapt to evolving customer needs has become the new competitive advantage. 

This pace of disruption isn't easy.  We are operating in a world different from what business school taught us. Different from what the online algorithms have been optimizing for over the past decade.  Different from the experience our management teams have built up that informs their instincts on what to do.  How do we manage to adapt our business and re-build our economies in a world of “different?”

To manage and understand “different,” businesses must step back from their technology, lead with empathy, and lean into the human insights they can gather from their customers. Consumer behavior isn’t what it used to be; people are behaving in ways we never could have predicted. Brands everywhere are now faced with this challenge and must re-learn who their customer is and what they care about in this moment. To do this, companies must connect directly to real customers and listen to them in order to understand how to adapt. 

Even after these restrictions are lifted, consumer comfort levels with returning to “business as usual” will vary wildly. What will it take for consumers to be comfortable going out to eat or traveling again? Will they need assurances on new processes for disinfection and sanitation?  Will they require some continuation of social distancing practices to feel safe?  Are consumers in a place now where they are open to promotions and discount offers? It might seem tone deaf now to be pushing our wares, but at some point we'll need to get back to marketing our products and services.  When is that right time and how do we get that balance right? Customers will tell us… if we listen. 

UserTesting, which has a European HQ in Scotland, has been working with consumers and companies to try to determine the answers to these questions and more. Our Human Insight Platform enables companies to have remote access to over one million consumers around the world so they can see, hear, and talk to their customers to understand their needs and concerns, and be able to bring customer empathy into the company strategy to make more informed business decisions. During this challenging time our team has launched a set of pre-built covid-19 messaging templates so we can help organizations understand the sentiment of their customers and develop clear and appropriate models for connecting with them. 

With this sudden business model disruption, now is an opportunity for businesses to rethink how they actually connect with customers in meaningful ways, and look to bring empathy into their brand experience. Hopefully companies can emerge from this situation and continue to provide all of us the many conveniences of doing business through digital channels, but with an approach that shows us they know who we are, they understand our concerns and our desires, and are adaptable while helping us reconnect with each other. 

While tech may be what is helping us get by right now, it will be our humanity and empathy that helps us re-engage with the world when we get through this.  

An edited version of this article appeared in The Scotsman on Monday 27th April

Why COVID-19 is making the case for intrapreneurs within businesses, guest post by Gib Bulloch, author of The Intrapreneur: Confessions of a Corporate Insurgent

We are living in an alternate reality. The COVID-19 pandemic has closed shops, banks and offices. Employees are working day at home. Stock markets are falling.  Airplanes are grounded. It seems the corporate hamster wheel is slowly grinding to a halt. Yet, scratch below the surface and these outcomes are not the full story. We’re witnessing a surge of innovation that, previously, was hard to imagine.  

Companies that normally make cars or vacuum cleaners are now making much-needed ventilators. Iconic Parisian perfume brands and gin distilleries are now producing hand sanitizers. And there are numerous other examples where creativity (and desperation) have led to inspired outcomes.  As demand for their traditional products has slowed or ceased, many businesses are now jostling to respond constructively to the challenges of COVID 19. 

Announcements about these innovations may come from on high, but I’d be surprised if the inspiration does. It’s unlikely that Jim Rowan, Dyson’s CEO, personally had the bright idea to switch production from vacuum cleaners to ventilators, but I’d bet one of its smart engineers did. I believe that the current situation has provided the perfect opportunity for employees across many businesses, large and small, to demonstrate their innate creativity and entrepreneurial flare. And if it’s possible now, why has the corporate world been slow to make it happen in the past? It’s not as if we haven’t been beset with other pressing crises, ranging from climate change to poverty eradication.

There are many reasons, but I’d argue that the innovation we’re witnessing today is the result of a perfect storm.  Firstly, the clear and present danger of a global health crisis is challenging the role of business. Secondly, we’re seeing a temporary suspension of traditional corporate hierarchies and accepted rules of the game. Thirdly, we’re experiencing a profound change in pace.  

If you trace business back to its roots, it was predominantly about creating products and services that addressed an unmet need within, or solved a problem for, society.  Examples include the need for energy to provide lighting, heat or transport; demand for food or medicine. More recently, ever-more sophisticated corporate marketing departments have managed to convince us to buy more “stuff” that we probably don’t need and cannot afford.  Along with bringing countries to their knees, COVID-19 is apparently bringing businesses back to basics. 

Secondly, employees have been given the permission to break the rules and be creative—to take a chance and suggest things that would have been considered unpalatable in normal circumstances. Their annual objectives have been rendered irrelevant; key performance indicators are hardly worth the paper they’re written on.  And, video conferencing aside, home working means you won’t have the boss looking over your shoulder any time soon. Could these factors explain why H&M, the fashion brand, switched production at a factory in China to making surgical face masks? Or the reason Decathlon snorkeling masks are being converted into makeshift ventilators?   Such radical product innovation may open up new market opportunities that would have otherwise remained untapped. 

Thirdly, the global slowdown has given employees the time and headspace to be creative. The mantras of “faster, bigger, higher growth, more profitable” have been replaced by some forced business “deceleration”—a topic close to my heart. Then again, was it ever realistic to expect anyone to come up with a fabulous new concept in the 65th hour of their working week?  

I’m not looking to make light of the impact of the current crisis or trying to find an upside. But it has shown just what’s possible when a certain set of circumstances present themselves and temporarily lift “business as usual” constraints.  Savvy leaders will realise that the lessons of today hold the key to finding new business opportunities that will help us not only cope with the crises of tomorrow, but also overcome them. 

An edited version of this article was published in The Scotsman on Monday 20th April 2020

Pivoting for the good during Covid-19, by Nick Freer

I’ve been flat out the last few weeks advising clients around corporate communications in light of our new business reality. While some have been proactive or reactive in facing up to Covid-19, my rule of thumb advice is that if a client is making any kind of press announcement at the moment then it’s going to look pretty odd if there is no reference to how the business is being impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. Certainly, be prepared to field related questions if you're not going to be up front about it.

For some organisations, the impact of the pandemic represents a full on crisis situation, for others less so but every company is somewhere on the spectrum. What is certain is the importance of getting coronavirus-related communications right, or as near to right as possible. For those that get it wrong, the negative brand impact may not go away anytime soon and we're now starting to see a string of businesses being singled out in the media.

I was discussing this with a client, UserTesting’s Vice President for Europe, Middle East and Africa, Bruce Hunter. User Testing launched in Edinburgh last July, the first time a Silicon Valley-headquartered technology company had set up here. Last month, the company whose platform enables organisations to get feedback on products and services from consumers on-demand, secured its latest investment round to the tune of $100 million and made its first European acquisition in the form of Oslo-based multilingual startup Teston.  

In the wake of the pandemic, UserTesting has introduced a free-use service so organisations can access its platform to test how well they are doing, or otherwise, at communicating with customers and stakeholders during the outbreak. It’s one great example of how companies can support the business scene amid the current health crisis. When we all come out of this horrendous situation, it’s also the kind of approach that will lead to a lot of goodwill in the bank. 

Care Sourcer is a great example of a Scottish tech startup that has gone above and beyond in adapting its offering in the collective fight against the pandemic. The comparison and matching site for elderly care is not only helping to find care for people exiting hospitals across the UK, it’s also aggregating data that is going to help the health sector better understand developing trends in the weeks and months ahead.  

On a Product Tank Edinburgh webinar supported by Deliveroo, Skyscanner and xDesign a fortnight ago, Care Sourcer CEO Andrew Parfery used animal analogies to describe how companies can choose to face up to the current crisis - you can be a bear and go into hibernation, a deer caught in the headlights, a swallow that is highly agile or a chameleon that changes its colour altogether. I’ll admit to having had a few “bear” and “deer” moments myself these last few weeks, while trying to be the “swallow” Care Sourcer’s CEO describes. 

While UserTesting and Care Sourcer adapt to a new business reality globally and in the UK respectively, some the stories of more hyperlocal pivots to address the current situation have caught the eye recently. One incredible social enterprise that came onto my radar recently is Tranent-based Heavy Sound, who primarily work with young people who have experienced trauma or barriers, helping them to reengage through projects involving hip-hop, song writing, DJ’ing, music production and band work.

Heavy Sound can’t go into schools to deliver its programmes at present but CEO and founder Jordan Butler realised he had staff and resources who were “available and willing” and wanted to help the most vulnerable people in our society. One initiative Butler and Heavy Sound has initiated is with the Edinburgh International Conference Centre (EICC) to deliver food the EICC has in its kitchens for events that can no longer now take place.  

Thanks goodness for amazing people and businesses like this at this time. Here's to the swallows. 

An edited version of this article appeared in The Scotsman on Monday 13th April 2020

Above and beyond, by Nick Freer

Social distancing and the web

Amid the coronavirus-related avalanche of news reporting over the last week, one segment on US broadcaster CNN stood out for me. In it, a rabbi from New York said he prefers to use the term “physical distancing” over “social distancing” because so many people now have access to online technologies that allow us to stay close by seeing and speaking to each other when we are physically apart. 

Much criticised social media platforms like Facebook have come into their own of late as the majority of the world moves to self-isolation mode. While it’s good to talk, it’s great to be able to see loved ones, family and friends - grandparents seeing their grandchildren is the one that springs to mind at the moment. 

A couple of weekends ago, when it became obvious that it wouldn’t be wise to go ahead with a small birthday bash for a family friend, we decided to do a video call instead. After a bit of difficulty setting the 3-way call up - despite one of the dads being a chief technology officer and one of the mums a board member at one of Europe’s fastest-growing tech companies - it was one of the kids who succeeded in getting us all online on WhatsApp and then we had a glass or two of fizzy wine and a few laughs.

The next day I did client conference calls on Zoom, WebEx, Google Hangouts and Microsoft Teams. Were some teething issues experienced at times? Most definitely. Remote working is going to be tough for most of us. What’s for sure is that we’re all going to get much better at it in the coming days and weeks. 

I got in touch with Scottish tech entrepreneur George Mackintosh, who set up teleconferencing business Geoconference in 1995 with the backing of venture capital firm 3i, to get an expert’s view. “We had started to get people to conference call”, says Mackintosh, “but struggled to gain user traction in early web conferencing and especially with video technologies. While I banged on about it being a business imperative, we were let down by clunky user interfaces and hopeless connection speeds. Over the next 20 years it has been uphill progress until Apple with FaceTime and Microsoft with Skype made inroads, but mostly in the consumer field. Zoom has now burst onto the business scene and is a media favourite. This pandemic has now made video a personal communication imperative.” 

Speaking with Cortex Worldwide’s CEO Peter Proud, Proud reminds me that the reality of remote working extends beyond enabling technologies. “Working from home is not just about the technology, it’s about the home environment too.” Since asking staff about their remote requirements, Cortex has been buying ergonomic chairs, desks, keyboards and monitors and getting them delivered to its people at home.

Business PR in the wake of Covid-19

I wrote a blog last week about how businesses and PR people seeing an opportunity to position stories around the coronavirus pandemic are walking something of a tightrope. It’s a subject I’ve been speaking to business editors about the last few days, in no small part because I want to be able to give my own clients the best possible advice at this time. 

One of the editors I spoke to put it like this: “At first we wondered whether business news would dry up but that's not been the case. Companies have quickly adapted to their 'new normal', though it's fair to say that almost everything is happening against a backdrop of coronavirus and we're happy to reflect that. This is the biggest business story for a decade. There's no question of 'crowbarring' it in though and those who have tried that approach are easily spotted.”

In a similar way to the big US tech players like IBM pulling together to offer supercomputer support in the global fight against Covid-19, I know that on the Scottish scene earlier stage tech players like CodeBase, Care Sourcer, Current Health, Relaymed and Trickle are all flat out doing what they can to support the NHS in Scotland and across the UK. It’s companies like these that are setting the standard at the moment. Going above and beyond. More power to them.

An edited version of this blog appeared in The Scotsman on Monday 30th March