Spartans FC: North Edinburgh's field of dreams, by Nick Freer

Founded in 1951, fast forward 72 years and my son and I were at Cliftonville a fortnight ago to see The Spartans FC win out against Albion Rovers in the second leg of the SPFL League Two playoff, sealing the club’s place in the senior leagues for the first time.

Spartans has become a big part of our lives over the last few years, with our 9-year-old playing one of the youth squads, and we’ve spent many an hour up at the Ainslie Park facility in North Edinburgh.

On a sun-drenched morning earlier this week, I sat down with chairman Craig Graham, the chief architect of a masterplan which has seen incredible success both on and off the park.  Fittingly, our chat took place in the dugout, looking out at this particular sporting club’s field of dreams.

Spartans is about so much more than football, it is a community-run sports club with social change at its heart, that is now world-renowned to the extent that its endeavours in social entrepreneurship have been lectured on at lofty academic institutions like Babson College in Boston, Massachusetts.

I knew a bit about the history, but it was great to get a firsthand account from the man who has made Spartans a labour of love for so many years, alongside CEO and first team manager Douglas “Dougie” Samuel.

Former KPMG partner Graham, who worked at the accounting giant for three decades, for international financial services groups from the firm’s Edinburgh base, may have retired in 2021, but my impression is that he is now working comparable hours in his dual role as chair of the football club, a limited company, and the social enterprise, The Spartans Community Football Academy.

On the footballing side, in addition to the success of the men’s team this season, the women’s team also played a blinder, securing 7th spot in the Scottish Women’s Premier League, putting teams like Scottish Cup-winning Celtic to the sword along the way.

However, it’s the charity side of things that is so eye-opening, not least the onsite school for 14-16 year-olds classified as being at high risk of exclusion from state education.  With 16 pupils, one full-time teacher, 5 youth workers, and a writer in residence who is a recent Oxford graduate, the Spartans school caters for an extremely marginalised demographic - educating young people who would not be educated otherwise.

You get the distinct feeling that what the Spartans team achieves off the pitch is always going to be more important than what they achieve on it.  “Family” is the word they use up Ainslie Park way, and “love”, and from what I have seen it is pure, authentic, and real.    

On the pitch, Spartans could also hit a sweet spot, because the embarrassment of riches at top tier soccer clubs is driving many fans to smaller, local clubs for a better fan experience, according to Alasdair Crawley, whose ticketing technology startup Fanbase is a partner of Spartans.

As Spartans ‘Ultras North’ fans sing at games to an incessant drumbeat: “Sha-la-la-la-lah, Spartans FC… everywhere we go, putting on a show, Spartans FC!”  Go see the Spartans show sometime, it’s a good one.

Japan supercharges Scotland's green revolution, guest blog by former Financial Times correspondent Jeremy Grant

When my great-grandfather Evan Grant was church minister in Nigg in the 1890s, he and the souls he served would have had no inkling that this once-quiet corner of the east coast would be part of the re-industrialisation of Scotland over a century later.

But this is what’s in prospect, given some recent big developments in green energy, driven by Japan.

Scottish Secretary Alister Jack was in Nigg the other day talking up the job creation possibilities stemming from the award in January by the UK government of “green freeport” status to the port there in the Cromarty Firth. A key player will be Sumitomo Electric Industries, which last month said it would invest £200 million in manufacturing the subsea cables needed to connect offshore wind farms to the grid, creating 150 jobs.

Yet something much bigger emerged barely two weeks later — again, from Japan. As the leaders of the G7 group of industrialised countries were gathering in Hiroshima, one of the Japan’s biggest companies, Marubeni, said it would sign a memorandum of understanding with the UK government that could see it invest as much as £10 billion over the next decade in the UK. This includes offshore wind in Scotland, and green hydrogen projects in Wales and Scotland. Marubeni opened its first office in Scotland, in Glasgow, in November last year.

It can sometimes be hard to grasp the big picture significance of the headlines we read these days in renewable energy. But once you start to join the dots, it becomes clear that we are on the cusp of something very significant indeed. The supply chain infrastructure needs alone explain why I use the word “re-industrialisation”.

Given that the British grid is old and creaky (technical term), much of the power generated by the offshore wind farms envisaged for the North Sea under the massive ScotWind project is likely to be used to make green hydrogen (so-called because it’s made using power generated by renewable energy such as wind).

Some of that will be used domestically. But the big prize is exports. Small wonder that hydrogen is a key priority of the Scottish and UK governments.

A big piece of the export puzzle fell into place a few weeks ago with the signing of the Ostend Declaration, a joint effort between nine countries, including the UK, Norway and Germany, connecting member countries in cross-border offshore projects in wind and hydrogen production “at massive scale”.

The obvious customer is Germany, which urgently needs hydrogen as an alternative to Russian gas, and as it shuts down its nuclear plants. David Scrimgeour, a Munich-based Scottish energy consultant, says ScotWind, having leased out its seabed sites, is “ahead of  the offshore wind plans of other countries ringing the North Sea — and therefore ahead of the game”.  Notably, Marubeni is also a member of one of the ScotWind consortia alongside SSE.

A lot still has to happen, not least building pipelines to transport the hydrogen. The economics involved are unclear. And they would take about five years to build. Moreover, Spain, Chile, and Qatar are also vying to supply Germany with hydrogen.

But, thanks in part to Japan’s strategic vision for places like Nigg, something profoundly important to Scotland’s future is beginning.

Pathways Forward, by Nick Freer

The latest Pathways Forward panel took place this week at strategic design firm Nile’s Edinburgh HQ on Instagram’s most posted street in Scotland, Circus Lane, live-streamed to an audience across Scotland, the UK, and internationally. 

Featuring Ana Stewart and Mark Logan, the co-authors of Pathways: A New Approach for Women in Entrepreneurship, and joined by the University of Dundee’s Professor of Entrepreneurship, Norin Arshed, and CodeClan’s CEO Loral Quinn, the Pathways panel series is best described by Ana Stewart herself: “Pathways is about maintaining momentum following the publication of the review, and building a community to help us drive effective change in an area where Scotland has an opportunity to take a globally leading position.” 

So, how does Scotland reach this lofty goal?  Professor Arshed says the government needs to give “real commitment, real financial support, not just announcements, otherwise we’ll still be where we were thirty years ago.” 

While approximately 20 per cent of businesses in Scotland are female-led, Arshed’s own research reveals how historically difficult it has been to get into local communities - in cities, suburbs, and rurally - to educate women about initiatives that encourage and support entrepreneurial activity.   

I’ve heard Scotland’s Chief Entrepreneur Logan bang the drum on previous occasions for the significant benefits to be gained by enfranchising a larger percentage of the population, and it was telling to hear him expand on this reality check.

As he put it on Tuesday at Nile: “Underrepresentation is rooted in the sexism of our society, it’s a societal problem that removes opportunity from about half of our population.”  Rightly so, this chief entrepreneur doesn’t pull any punches. 

Asked by former BBC broadcaster Vanessa Collingridge about “concrete actions”, and where to start given the Pathways report has 31 recommendations, Ana Stewart said that while “we can’t do it all at the same time”, a good starting point would be the mobile Pop-up Pre-starts (or PUPS) model, which would see resource travelling to the places near to where people, for example in primary carer roles, can most easily access support.  

CodeClan CEO Loral Quinn, like Ana Stewart a previous technology startup founder, admitted to, “definitely feeling like I was treated in differently (as a female founder)”, and concurred that, “there is a lot of talent out there, minorities and underrepresented groups, we just need to leverage it.”

CodeClan is one of the organisations walking the talk in this whole area, having just announced the launch of more flexible on demand digital skills courses in the wake of research by The Young Women’s Movement indicating how transformative this could be in getting more women into tech jobs.  

Having launched the Pathways Forward initiative on the occasion of International Women’s Day in March at Truspilot’s Scottish base, it’s been great to see the collective move forward since, with input from a number of key individuals and organisations.  

In addition to the role played by my own agency, entrepreneurial ecosystem support organisation Startup Grind Scotland and production specialist Product Forge have been integral to getting the thing off the ground under Ana Stewart’s guidance.

It is a collaboration via a small but agile team that we hope can make an outsized impact.

Rub of the green, by Nick Freer

On a rare midweek day out of the office, I got an equally rarefied chance to play golf on the hallowed turf fairways of the Loch Lomond Golf Club this week.  With the rhododendrons nearing full bloom on what felt like the first day of summer, the majesty of the loch and surrounding hills was only matched by the sparkling shots made by my impressive playing partners.

Sadly, majestic would not be an accurate way to describe my own golf game… middling to mediocre would be much closer to the mark.  There is that saying about golf being “a good walk spoiled”, but for me it’s a glorious game, irrespective of my lack of talent when swinging a shaft of iron at a small white, hard-coated rubber ball in a most inglorious fashion.

With hundreds of thousands of golf tourists flocking to our courses from the rest of the UK, Ireland, the USA, Germany, Japan, and Scandinavia, to name but a few of the golf-mad nations, the game itself is an annual economic driver to the tune of £300 million.  Loch Lomond is undoubtedly a jewel in the crown, with facilities and staff from the very top shelf.

Last year, LinksDAO, a Web3 online community in the States that counts NBA star Stephen Curry as one of its early investors, had a bid to buy the Spey Bay Golf Club at Fochabers on the Moray Firth accepted, having previously raised more than $11 million through the sale of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) from its near one thousand membership.

The LinksDAO story is a modern spin on a game steeped in history.  In the case of Spey Bay for example, former British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald was a member of the club.  The modern spin is that Spey Bay will become the first golf club in the UK to be owned by an organisation funded by cryptocurrency.

My understanding is that LinksDAO cast its net wide, across multiple continents, looking for a golfing property to meet high expectations on its scorecard.  So, even better that Scotland came up trumps - and please note the use of a lowercase ’t’ here ( in “trump”) in relation to the Scottish golf scene.

If I have a favourite golf course, it’s probably the Isle of Harris Golf Club at Scarista on the island’s west coast, a 9-hole diamond in the rough with a heavenly vista to a sickle-shaped white sand beach with the Atlantic surf crashing in.  If tee-off times existed on Harris, wandering sheep would wreak havoc to the golfing timetable, but no-one seems in too much of a hurry which is very much part of the island’s Hebridean charm.

While there can’t be many places better than Harris to get far from the madding crowd, it is admittedly a bit of a trek for a round of golf.  Closer to home, in Edinburgh, East Lothian, and Fife, there are fantastic courses aplenty, including those of the municipal variety.  In this category, Braid Hills is a classic, with incredible views over the city, the Firth of Forth, and the Pentland Hills.

Extra points for spotting golfing puns above.

Facilitating trade and investment with India, guest blog by Jeremy Grant, former international FT and Reuters correspondent

Just when you thought relations between the UK and Scottish governments couldn’t get any worse, long-simmering friction over what Scottish government ministers and officials can — and can’t — raise with host governments when on overseas trips has burst into the open.

Westminster has often chafed privately at the fact that the Scottish government operates “international offices”, such as one that opened in Copenhagen in August last year. It’s one of nine that Holyrood says are designed to “promote Scottish interests overseas”, including business interests.

Yet the suspicion in London is that they are being used to promote Scottish independence, encroaching on a constitutional issue that is “reserved” to Westminster under devolution.

In a sternly worded letter last month to Britain’s overseas missions, Foreign Secretary James Cleverly directed diplomats to ensure that senior UK government officials tag along to meetings between Scottish government and host country officials to “maintain coordination of policy discussions”.

That prompted a tetchy response from Angus Robertson, Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Constitution, External Affairs and Culture, complaining of an attempt to “censor Scottish Government Ministers’ legitimate engagement in international forums and meetings”, arguing that this could damage Scottish trade.

And it’s getting personal. Alister Jack, Scottish Secretary, later took a swipe at “Air Miles Angus”, in a reference to Robertson’s overseas trips.

The petty political pirouetting on both sides stands in contrast to the serious, quietly effective work being done behind the scenes by diplomats and officials to promote trade and investment.

Much of this is happening not just in the UK and at missions abroad but at foreign consulates right here in Scotland, as I discovered recently when I attended a fascinating breakfast roundtable organised by the Indian consulate in Edinburgh.

You might think that consulates in the Scottish capital mostly concern themselves with issuing visas, helping their citizens with lost passports and hosting the occasional cultural event.

But it turns out that facilitating bilateral trade and investment is on the agenda too for some of them, building on what their embassies do out of London. That’s because Scotland is increasingly on the global radar when it comes to its potential in renewables and green energy, commercial satellites, regenerative agriculture and more.

Over coffee and bacon rolls at a hotel on Princes Street, I learned that Scotland’s hydrogen scene is a big focus for India, whose energy companies are starting to look abroad for opportunities under a National Green Hydrogen Mission approved last year. Indeed, representatives of 30 member companies at the Hydrogen Association of India visited Scotland last year.

Scottish interest in India included PlusZero, a company involved in portable generators powered by “green” hydrogen, produced using electricity generated through wind turbines on the Scottish islands. It was looking to India as a potential source of the capital equipment, such as electrolysers, needed to scale up green hydrogen. Celtic Renewables, which produces biofuel from whisky distillery waste, was eyeing opportunities to do the same for distilleries in India.     

Also around the table was a senior official at Scottish Enterprise, a non-departmental body of the Scottish Government that helps companies enter international markets. And, just for the record, there wasn’t a single reference to Scottish independence.

Scotland swing, by Nick Freer

After a Scotland swing over Easter, a road trip up through Argyll to Appin, a couple of days in Torridon, and tracking back to Edinburgh via the Cairngorms and Deeside, it was back to the old routine this week… kids back to school and, in my case, chaining myself back to the desk.

Because it’s important to get an occasional airing, I made it along to the Glasgow Tech Fest, now in its second year, on Wednesday at the University of Strathclyde’s Technology and Innovation Centre.

I wrote about Glasgow’s rise as a tech hub in this column earlier this year, as did Krucial CEO and Co-founder Allan Cannon, whose space tech startup is based in the city, so I won’t cover old ground here, albeit to say that having a annual focal point in the form of a conference like Glasgow Tech Fest has got to be a good thing.  Even better, one of the principal architects of the conference, Alisdair Gunn, director of the Glasgow Innovation District, announced in his opening remarks that the first Glasgow Tech Week will be taking place next year between 13-17 May.

A highlight this year was the fireside chat between Gillian Docherty, Strathclyde’s chief commercial officer, and Alison Porter, a portfolio manager with Janus Henderson Global Investors.  As a fund manager covering Big Tech over the last couple of decades, Porter had a great story about meeting Apple’s former CFO Peter Oppenheimer back in 2022, when Oppenheimer and his investor relations executive were on the last leg of a European investor roadshow in Glasgow.

Hard to believe, but a year on from the launch of the iPod and with visionary leader Steve Jobs back at the helm, Apple was not the stock market darling it went onto become.  Over a meal at the city’s famous seafood restaurant Gamba, Porter struck up the start of a longstanding relationship with Apple and its IR team, and presumably Porter received a gold star or two when this unfancied horse went on to beat the bookie’s odds to become one of the legendary FANG stocks.   

A day later, supporting global tech advisory firm GP Bullhound on PR around the annual Northern Tech Awards, which returned to Edinburgh for the first time since 2018, it was good to hear some of the pitches from select founders, including Shot Scope CEO and founder David Hunter putting his best foot forward for the Scottish tech scene during the afternoon judging session at the Virgin hotel on Cowgate, before the awards ceremony itself kicked off in the evening at the Assembly Rooms.

It was impressive to see the quality of technology companies based in the North of the UK - North West and North East England, Yorkshire, and Scotland - and one of my main takeaways is that our respective tech hubs should be rubbing shoulders more frequently… to build networks and exchange learnings.

Highlights from the night included hearing GP Bullhound’s Managing Partner Hugh Campbell reading a ChatGPT-created ‘Ode to Technology’ in the style of Robert Burns, and Shot Scope’s David Hunter taking home one of the top awards.  You can spot the golf pun at the beginning of this piece.

Adapt and evolve, guest blog by Callum Bastock, CEO and Founder of CCL Logistics & Technology

CCL Logistics, the business I started from a small office in Troon in 1999, was pleased to be among the first cohort of companies selected for ScaleupScotland 2.0, an initiative driven by Sir Tom Hunter with the support of The Hunter Foundation.

The scale-up support programme could not have come at a better time, as CCL is going through its fastest phase of growth. In revenue terms, we are building on multiple years of double-digit growth, and increasing demand for our innovative technology from customers in the UK and Europe means we can be ambitious enough to target revenue in excess of £100 million over the next few years.

Rapid growth can be exciting and trying in equal measure and, if anything, being able to adapt and evolve is key.  It was one of the points to come up at this week’s Scottish National Investment Bank-led Scaling Up Summit in Edinburgh.   

We now have a headcount at over 100 based across the UK, and are investing around £3 million every year into our technology platform, underpinned by over 40 people working at our Innovation Centre at Strathclyde Business Park.

Essentially, we work with manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, and retailers to simplify their supply chain, improve productivity, and significantly reduce costs.

Sustainability is paramount for our UK and European customers, and the CO2 emissions calculator feature of our transport management system, myCCL, provides customers with a CO2 statement at the press of a button.  Reinforcing our commitment to making an impact in this area, we have recruited a Head of Sustainability who starts with the business next month.

As we scale the company, hiring the right people across the group is critical to momentum and, at the end of 2021, former Google supply chain lead Tony Wringe came on board as chief technology officer.

Tony has overseen us building out our sea freight capability, we are now dynamically updating ETAs with live vessel mapping, customs status fields, and a free-time counter that helps customers eliminate demurrage costs.

Sea freight rates are an eye-opening measure of shifting global industry dynamics in recent years.  So, a 40-foot container, the industry standard, is now around $2,000, compared to something closer to $20,000 during the pandemic.

As your business grows at speed, the only constant becomes change which you have no option but to embrace.  We religiously focus on one quarter at a time to deliver our twelve month goals which, in turn, connects to our three-year vision.

Back at ScaleupScotland 2.0, one of my main takeaways was how transformational peer-to-peer learning can be.  Just to be in the room with fellow entrepreneurs and business leaders, sharing experiences, good and bad, and being able to ask specific questions of people that have already been through scaling challenges similar to ours is an invaluable process.

We want to be another success story for Scotland’s technology sector, but our primary focus is around how we can be an even better business for our people and our valued customers.

And along the way, we have collective pride in the jobs we have created and our contribution to regional and national economic growth.

The 'R word', guest blog by Jeremy Grant, freelance writer and editor, and former journalist at the Financial Times and Reuters

The word “reset” has had a thorough workout since the starting gun was fired on the race to succeed Nicola Sturgeon as Scotland’s First Minister.

Early in the contest, Scottish Secretary Alister Jack called for a reset in the relationship between the Scottish and UK governments. That same week Benny Higgins, former Tesco Bank chief executive, used the R-word again in discussing the relationship between the Scottish government and business. 

Back in 2018, the Sustainable Growth Commission, established by Sturgeon, called out the need for “partnership … between government, business, trade unions and wider civic society to ensure policy can be made sustainable”.

But ask around the business and financial community and it’s hard to see much evidence of a partnership that is producing results. Small wonder that Higgins, speaking to the Financial Times, made his appeal.  

At a conference in Glasgow last month, I met the chief executive of a social housing company who’d been trying to get a project off the ground for three years. But glacial progress in addressing regulatory and legislative issues meant the project was stuck. “The private sector just seems to be outside their comfort zone,” he said. 

A small business owner I had coffee with this week in Edinburgh is set to lose £20,000 a year if the flagship bottle recycling plan – known better to its detractors and fans as the DRS, or deposit return scheme — goes ahead. It’s not that the government doesn’t consult, this person said, “they don’t listen”. 

The Scottish government is clear in its official statements where it stands. “We aim to grow our economy by making Scotland one of the best places in the world to do business. This means supporting and listening to small and medium-sized enterprises and working to deliver the right support at the right time.”

We live in an age in which special pleading on the part of business and the financial sector does not land well — a point painfully resurfaced this week as regulators, investors and the public assess the wreckage of Silicon Valley Bank, the collapsed US bank. Judgement, and trust, are once again in short supply when it comes to parts of the private sector. 

Yet an essential ingredient in any successful economy is a well-functioning, mutually beneficial relationship between business and government in which government facilitates an enabling environment for business to do its thing. Jobs and economic growth should follow.

One of the Sustainable Growth Commission’s recommendations was that Scotland should “[seek] to emulate the performance of the best small countries in the world”. 

Scotland could do worse than look at Singapore. The tiny city-state’s economic miracle has been based on an understanding by its leadership since independence in 1965 that the business community is part of nation-building, and that this requires having a consultative relationship - crucially, with higher education too - that produces results. 

Iain Gibson, a partner at Charlotte Street Partners, an Edinburgh-based advisory firm, says that businesses must hope that the “likely victor” in the contest to become First Minister, Humza Yousaf, “will break from his predecessor in at least one respect and adopt a more pro-enterprise approach to government”. Regardless of the independence agenda, it’s time for a reset, Singapore-style.

We are all responsible for getting more girls and women into tech, guest post by CodeClan CEO Loral Quinn

The other day, my daughter, now 27, was clearing out some of her old My Scene dolls, fashion dolls that were all the rage twenty odd years’ ago.  It got me thinking, what if she had been given one of the seven Barbie dolls designed by Mattel to celebrate International Women’s Day to encourage more girls to see themselves in STEM.  Would she have chosen a career in tech?  Could this inspire other girls?  And could this help close the enormous gender gap in tech? 

Seeing is believing - and access to successful female role models in STEM is essential for children to build and maintain an interest in the industry.  Women make up less than one-third of the STEM workforce, and it’s proven that girls are systematically tracked away from STEM throughout their education. 

A recent Harvard study found that 61 per cent of parents reported the pandemic had negatively impacted their child’s social-emotional development.  So, discovering doll play can positively impact children may be particularly beneficial at this delicate time.

The latest research found children talked more about others’ thoughts and emotions, a concept known as internal state language, when playing with dolls than while playing tablet games.  Speaking about their internal states allows children to practice social skills when interacting with people in the real world, and benefits their overall emotional development. 

According to the recently published Stewart Report, the root of under-participation in entrepreneurship is a continuous process of role stereotyping within our society, embedding sexism with prejudices transferred from generation to generation.  They manifest in the ecosystem as pay gaps, digital gaps, data gaps, chore gaps, and authority gaps.  I found out this week that the tech gender pay gap in Scotland is an incredible £20,000.

My daughter and I co-founded a fintech startup, and she is now the product owner at another tech company.  She is one of the lucky ones, who has a great career and great opportunities.  We are all responsible to take urgent action to remove unconscious and conscious bias and move the dial ten times higher, and bring more women and girls into tech.  

CodeClan’s Emerging Tech Fund was launched out of recognition that there is a shortage of women, LGBTQ, and people belonging to underrepresented ethnic groups in tech.  At CodeClan, we strive to create an inclusive and welcoming community.  The fund is designed to support students who could not have otherwise afforded CodeClan’s immersive bootcamps, but who have shown aptitude to learn and succeed on our courses. 

CodeClan is Scotland’s first and only not-for-profit digital skills bootcamp.  We transform careers and unlock opportunities for diverse talent through our professional software development and professional data analysis training.  This means we run all our programmes at the lowest cost we can, aiming to get more exceptional talent into the ecosystem.  

By partnering with CodeClan, and paying it forward, companies show a commitment to diversify by hiring a graduate with limited or no prior experience in tech to join their organisations. 

Our ongoing commitment to getting diverse talent into the ecosystem faster, and to help companies be more successful, has seen us place more than 2,000 students with over 300 companies.  If we have an ask, it’s that even more companies join the fold so we can be even more impactful.

Starting a company is tough, doing it as a woman is even tougher, guest post by Appointedd founder and CEO Leah Hutcheon

Starting a company is tough. Doing it as a woman is even tougher, according to a new Scottish Government report. A staggering 50 times tougher if we use investment as a benchmark (and money is pretty important when building a high growth, ambitious business that wants to change the lives of its customers).

It turns out, as we approach International Women’s Day 2023, where the IWD theme is Equity, that the equity is really not all that equitable.

The stats don’t lie; only 2p in every £1 invested into Scottish companies goes to female founded businesses. 

It’s been enlightening, and saddening, to read the hard stats and the softer, qualitative data, laid bare by the Pathways report published by the Scottish Government last week. Led by tech entrepreneur and investor, Ana Stewart, and co-authored by Scotland’s Chief Entrepreneur, Mark Logan, the report pulls no punches and even drops the S bomb. Sexism. 

In a time where headlines are rightfully debating the role of gender in our society, it was shocking to read the assertion that our society is inherently sexist.

As the founder and CEO of Appointedd, an award-winning software company that powers bookings in 167 countries, it’s sometimes easy for me to forget the imbalance in the Scottish tech ecosystem - the male founders almost never conform to the ‘tech bro’ stereotype, and the female founders are fiercely supportive of each other. But it’s also easy for me to forget the battles I’ve fought to get there. The Pathways report has been a stark reminder of them. 

A quote of mine was featured in the report: “I was once advised in an investment meeting to take a male colleague to future meetings to make my tech business more ‘credible’. I spent the next few days thinking of where I might pick up a man to do this. It was both funny and depressing in equal measure.” Mind boggling when I look back, as is the fact that I had normalised this in my mind to be grateful for the advice as its aim was to give me, a solo female founder, the best chance of success. With 20/20 hindsight, it’s clear that these kinds of interactions aren't without impact. “Women frequently have a sense of not belonging in entrepreneurship, which affects their confidence and self-belief” states the report - a pretty impactful barrier to equity I’d say. 

So, this International Women’s Day, I have some requests. If you can, invest in a female-founded company. Or actively search out companies owned by women and buy from them. 

And if you’re in a corporate role where you can do this at a large-scale level, then please do! There’s some fantastic work coming from the procurement community aiming to actively procure a percentage of their supply chain from minority-led companies. And the Community Wealth Building recommendations in Scotland's National Strategy for Economic Transformation feel like they could really impact. But there’s unfortunately a long way to go. 

So let’s make a difference. Not just on International Women's Day, but every day. Engage, invest, speak up, and support. And maybe read Ana Stewart and Mark Logan’s great Pathways review while you’re doing it.

Moving the dial on female entrepreneurship, by Nick Freer

Like most people who meet Scottish entrepreneur and investor Ana Stewart for the first time, I was both impressed and charmed when I met Ana, an individual who combines a razor-sharp business mind with a high likeability factor.  So, no surprise really when the Scottish Government commissioned her to chair the Women in Entrepreneurship review, or so-called Stewart Report, that was published earlier this week.  

At 150 pages I’m not going to attempt to summarise the report here.  The report is publicly available on the Scottish Government site, so it’s there for everyone to read.  As an agency, we were pleased to support the PR push by the Scottish Government’s communications team, following on from the advisory services we have offered Stewart since the discovery phase of the review commenced last year.  

In a not dissimilar way to the Scottish Technology Ecosystem Review by Mark Logan, Scotland’s Chief Entrepreneur, in 2020, the Stewart Report will have an enduring shelf life and is a strong foundation on which the narrative around barriers to female entrepreneurship in this nation will be built over the years ahead. 

What has been welcoming, is how positively received the report has been across the board, both in this country and further afield. Of course, the more support the report garners, the greater impact it will have.  While it’s a bonus to see the worldwide attention that has already been achieved, the real rub will be around how effective and lasting transformational change can be here in Scotland.  

One of my main takeaways from the report is how male behaviours and mindset are crucial to bringing about this kind of effective change.  

We know the status quo is holding back not only female entrepreneurship, but also the economy as a whole.  Widespread research shows us that more diverse workforces lead to significant economic growth, and we know that entrepreneurs are absolutely integral to successful modern economies.  Therefore, it’s not hard to ‘do the math’, it’s a total no-brainer.  

Having a son and daughter, this is important stuff for me on a personal level.  And really, essentially, who wouldn’t want a level playing field on gender terms in business.  I mean, unless we’re still living in the Dark Ages or something?  

But what do more important people than me think on the subject? 

According to Tim Allan, Founder of Tricorn Capital: “The odds are stacked against women succeeding in entrepreneurship because the current system has not evolved to support them.” 

Leah Hutcheon, CEO and Founder of Appointedd, says: “I was once advised in an investment meeting to take a male colleague to future meetings to make my tech business more ‘credible’.  I spent the next few days thinking of where I might pick up a man to do this.  It was both funny and depressing in equal measure.”  Depressing indeed. 

Worryingly, storied entrepreneurs like Ann Budge think the dial on female entrepreneurship, which some people think has improved in recent years, is nowhere near to that kind of reality: “The gender gap has widened, not narrowed, since I started my business many years ago.”  

On this basis, the collective hope is that the Stewart Report’s recommendations are implemented in a timely fashion. 

An opportunity for business journalism in Scotland, guest post by former Financial Times' international correspondent Jeremy Grant

The other day, I was in Glasgow for the first proper visit in 40 years. Standing in front of the house on the city’s south side that was our family home for the first 18 years of my life, a lot was familiar: the red sandstone exterior, the front lawn. 

But then I started to see that some things had changed. The gravel drive was now paved, the window sashes painted a blingy matt black. And a monkey puzzle tree that I remember my parents planting at the foot of the lawn as a sapling in the late 1960s was now of Jurassic Park proportions, towering over the street below.   

I’ve been having other similar experiences in the year since returning to live in Scotland, after a long career in journalism in London, Asia and the United States. Much is familiar and unchanged (starting with the Tunnock’s teacake, I’m relieved to say). But a lot’s changed, too. 

One of the big changes is that the business scene seems more varied, vibrant and outward-looking. It also has global heft, thanks in part to the food and beverage sector. Much of the heavy lifting is done by whisky, of course. Figures recently out from the Scotch Whisky Association showed that Asia has just overtaken the European Union to become the drink’s biggest export market.  

All in all, Scottish business feels like a richer offering that, in parts, tells a fresh, forward-looking story.

Take pureLiFi, an Edinburgh-based company that has developed a kind of mobile wireless technology that uses light, rather than radio frequencies, to transmit data. Its technology is now being used by the US Army. 

Or Orbex, a Forres-based rocket manufacturer founded seven years ago that’s set to build and operate the first vertical launch site for satellites on the UK mainland (in Sutherland). Astonishingly, there are more small satellites being built in and around Glasgow than any other European city, as Ivan McKee, Scottish Minister for Business, Trade, Tourism and Enterprise, told a space convention last week in Singapore.

Then there’s the transition to a low-carbon future, clearly a huge deal for Scotland. I noticed the other day a Glasgow-based start-up called HVS that’s developing hydrogen-electric vehicles for the commercial vehicle market. An electric bus swept past me the other day on Princes Street, Edinburgh (my home these days) operated by Ember, the UK's first all-electric, intercity bus service.

The funding environment is another part of the story of change. Back in the day, there was no development bank for Scotland. Now, the Scottish National Investment Bank (armed with £2 billion over a decade) is funding exciting companies in clean energy, including Nova Energy, which in Shetland operates the largest cluster of tidal turbines in the world. Some of this, crucially, is done by co-investing with the private sector.  

All this presents a fantastic opportunity for business journalism in Scotland. To be sure, this month’s news that DC Thomson, the Dundee-based publisher of the Press & Journal and Beano, was closing titles, coming after last year’s closure by publisher Reach of the print edition of Scottish Business Insider, have been reminders that this is a tough environment. But the story of change is there to be told. 

Scotland-wide cluster will launch Scottish tech into orbit, guest post by Allan Cannon, Co-founder and CEO of Krucial

The power of the Glasgow tech scene has been brought into focus in recent weeks and months with success for Glasgow-based company Novosound, reports that the Glasgow ecosystem is worth £2.6bn, and subsequent media interest – including in a recent column (Startup growth potential is heading west - Nick Freer | The Scotsman).

My own business, Krucial, which harnesses space technology to connect Internet of Things (IoT) devices all over the planet, is headquartered in Glasgow. It’s home. But we’re part of a wider landscape; a Scottish phenomenon that is launching our relatively small nation into orbit and once again proving that we can and do over-achieve. 

So why would we put our cities in competition with one another? There are more than 850 high-growth tech companies operating across Scotland so we shouldn’t focus on a Glasgow or Edinburgh cluster, but a Scottish one. 

I’d define a cluster as a critical mass of people, organisations and support mechanisms designed to encourage collaboration – meaning founders, funders and innovators have the necessary support in place to thrive. A cluster is self-reinforcing: its existence then encourages more people, funding, startups and fresh ideas to the area. 

Individual places still play their own unique part in making the tech ecosystem what it is – but ultimately the goal is the same, to make Scotland a home of big ideas and opportunity. 

Look at the advantages we already have to help boost our tech industry.

Our two largest cities are more connected than ever. A 50-minute train journey is all that ‘separates’ them. I easily work across both regularly - in other places looking to be at the forefront of innovation, this would be the distance from one end of a city to the other. And that’s before we mention the one hour flight to the financial and tech powerhouse of London.

Between them, our cities have multiple world-class educational institutions, from the University of Strathclyde, my alma mater, to the University of Dundee, home to some of the most exciting video game development work on earth.  Scotland has more than 330,000 students in higher education across the country – each with the potential to come up with the next unicorn-worthy idea.

We have innovation centres across the country – such as CENSIS (Scotland’s Innovation Centre for sensing, imaging and Internet of Things) based in Glasgow which helped Krucial with early stage product development, or its sister centre SAIC (Sustainable Aquaculture Innovation Centre) in Stirling, focused on ways to make Scottish aquaculture as sustainable and successful as possible.

Compared with the UK more widely we perform well – Edinburgh, for example, came second only to London in 2021 as the most attractive UK city to set up a new business – 45% of which were in tech.

This is an important moment for the Scottish tech scene. The wins are coming thick and fast and since co-founding Krucial I’ve been blown away by the sheer talent, tenacity and ambition of founders all over Scotland. 

My hope is that work continues to be done to combine and maximise the potential of all Scotland’s ecosystems – and not focus on segregating success. 

Enter stage left, by Nick Freer

As I occasionally do, I met someone interesting for coffee in town this week.  A former Financial Times correspondent who covered desks in Asia and North America during his tenure with the so-called ‘pink pages’, I hope he will write for this column in the not too distant. 

Having spent almost exactly a year in Edinburgh, the former hack (his description, not mine) and his wife had been in London for the previous few years, so as with any relocation it’s been a big move.  I remember it being tough to leave the bright lights of London, and floundered for a while when I relocated here over a decade ago.  Making contacts definitely helped to right the ship, and I hope I can help to expand this journalist’s network in the kind of way that others have done for me.  It makes such a difference.  

One of the people I was kindly introduced to a few years’ back is Scottish entrepreneur George Mackintosh, another globetrotter who has returned to his native land.  It can be a small world, particularly in Edinburgh, and it turned out that George knew my uncle, Angus Maitland, who founded one of Europe’s most successful public relations agencies back in the Nineties.  

In Scotland, you seldom need the six degrees of separation, or the ‘six degrees of Kevin Bacon’ as the dinner party game used to go, based on the idea that all humans can be connected by six social connections.   

Anyway, since I met George and we got the chance to work together on a few ventures and projects, I’m now in the fortunate position to have him as one of my advisers.  Thankfully for George, I’m not on the phone to him all the time, but if something big comes up that I can’t quite get my head around, it’s good to know he’s on the other end of the line. 

One of George’s ventures, although in truth it is best described as a labour of love, is Papple Steading in East Lothian, one of Britain’s finest historic model farms of the Agricultural Improvement Movement, and formerly owned by AJ Balfour, the British Prime Minister between 1902 and 1905. 

Recently repurposed into top-end holiday accommodation and a corporate retreat, with a community centre, agricultural museum, and performance venue in phase two of its development, Papple has hosted some rather special guests over the last couple of years.  

During the first half of 2022, Hollywood came to Papple when the entire post-production for Universal Pictures movie Tár, the acclaimed drama starring Cate Blanchett that has just been nominated for six Oscars, took place in situ.  

With BT playing a supporting role (that’s a pun people) via a direct-connected one gigabit digital service, Papple’s health studio, lounge, and grand dining room became post-production studios, each with blackout blinds and multiple huge screens.  

Best known for its golf courses and beaches - I once heard Skyscanner founder Gareth Williams say his favourite beach on the planet (the guy has been to a lot of beaches) is Yellowcraig - George Mackintosh and his team are developing a new type of attraction that is already putting East Lothian increasingly on the map.  Bravo! 

A tale of two (tech) cities, by Nick Freer

Last weekend, I wrote about the smoke signals from the west suggesting Glasgow is set to outpace Edinburgh’s growth as a tech hub.  I should have known that by going on the record to pit Scotland’s largest cities against each other, there would be a good deal of feedback.  I’m pleased to report that there weren’t too many profanities involved. 

In Robert Crawford’s book ‘On Glasgow and Edinburgh’, the author writes: “Edinburgh and Glasgow enjoy a famously scratchy relationship.  Resembling other intercity rivalries throughout the world, from Madrid to Barcelona, Moscow and St. Petersburg, and Beijing and Shanghai, Scotland’s sparring metropolises just happen to be much smaller and closer together - like two twin stars orbiting a common axis.” 

“Yet their size belies their world-historical importance as cultural capitals of the British Empire, and the mere forty miles between their city centres does not diminish their stubbornly individual nature.” 

Cally Russell, founder and CEO of eco startup This is Unfolded says, “It might be wishful thinking, but I would love to see us starting to view the two cities as one ecosystem.”  While you can’t really argue with this kind of sentiment, can we really bring our “twin stars” together? 

In Scotland’s tech ecosystem, there are undoubtedly initiatives taking place that are bringing the geographical spread of talent into one town hall, with organisations like CodeBase, via Techscaler, digital skills academy CodeClan, and Startup Grind Scotland among those leading the pack.

Rochelle Oliver, founder at wealth adviser Welfified, adds Fintech Scotland to the list of collectives that are helping to unify Scotland as a joined-up tech hub, although Oliver would like to see more “meet-ups organised for startups”.     

The University of Glasgow’s Executive Director of Innovation, Enterprise and Economic Development, Declan Weldon, says, “What is exciting is Scotland’s high potential to build a world-changing innovation ecosystem given the combined research excellence, supported by Government policy for innovation and entrepreneurship.  Collaboration and alignment are key.” 

Between 2016 and 2019, University of Edinburgh Business School senior lecturer Dr Ben Spigel, an expert on entrepreneurial ecosystems, interviewed dozens of high-growth entrepreneurs in both cities.  Spigel’s research found that Edinburgh’s strength lies in the strong connections between founders at all stages of development, learning from other entrepreneurs on subjects ranging from managing investors, growing pains, and hiring.  

“The continued engagement of successful entrepreneurs as investors and mentors is very important”, says Spigel, “and has helped to build a culture of trust and reciprocity.”  

On Glasgow, Dr Spigel’s research showed that the city didn’t have the reciprocity evident in Edinburgh, founders weren’t connecting like they do in Scotland’s capital, although he found the strength of Glasgow’s creative talent in the city to be a huge asset. As he puts it, “The ability to integrate design with tech is crucial and will be a source of a lot of innovation and growth”. 

So, what does the academic think about Edinburgh and Glasgow being more joined-up as one tech hub?  “My research shows that there is a real barrier between the two communities” says Spigel.  “That can change”, he continues, “but it’s going to be a slog.  Maybe we can all just agree to hang out in Whitburn!”. 

Smoke signals suggest tech hub power shift, by Nick Freer

I bumped into a well known investor on George Street in Edinburgh just before Christmas, a guy who splits his time between the States and Scotland.  He told me he thinks Edinburgh’s tech startup scene is close to plateauing, after years of well documented success.

Glasgow, he said, is the Scottish city showing the greatest potential for growth as a startup hub, and I agree that the smoke signals from the west of the Central Belt indicate that a power shift is taking place.  Companies like Glasgow-based foodtech startup ENOUGH (formerly 3F Bio), a University of Strathclyde spin-out originally backed by Eos Advisory and pioneer in high-scale sustainable protein production, raised £36 million in its last investment round, and is just one case in point.

In December, another former spin-out (from the University of the West of Scotland), remote sensor specialist Novosound, reported that it had secured a major contract with a Nasdaq-listed healthcare company alongside an investment led by Par Equity.  Novosound’s continuing progress Stateside has many rating the company, not unlike Current Health a few years’ back (Current Health secured the second largest European healthtech exit when it was acquired by US consumer electronics giant Best Buy in 2021), as one of the next big things to come out of the Scottish technology sector.

Here is how the CEO of the Nasdaq company, Lishan Aklog of PAVmed, describes Novosound’s offering: “We believe Novosound’s proprietary ultrasound technology has the potential to be a once-in-a-generation breakthrough in medical imaging.”  High praise indeed.

Remote sensor technology is an area Scotland appears to be building critical mass in, and we have another client company story in the wings to evidence this in the coming weeks.  Watch this space.

Talking of space, well a different type of space, space communications is one of Scotland’s future economies that is beginning to take off.  Recently rebranded as Krucial, formerly R3IoT, the Glasgow-based space communications startup secured investment from New York-based Space Capital in 2021, a press announcement we handled at the time, and is a good example of how the Internet of Things (IoT) is integral to so many of our economies of the future.

This point was highlighted by Paul Wilson, CEO of Filament Smart Things Accelerator Centre (STAC), this week as Wilson forecast that STAC, based at Skypark in Glasgow, could become Europe’s largest IoT cluster.

As Wilson puts it: “When you look at Scotland’s key future industries including Energy, Healthcare, Education, Natural Capital, and the Satellite Communications sector, IoT is absolutely integral to each.” 

In other news, Techscaler, powered by tech incubator CodeBase, launched at the end of last year, with startup hubs being rolled out across Scotland.  You would expect this initiative to even a playing field where Edinburgh has arguably dominated over the last decade.

For me, I’m not convinced that Edinburgh has reached a plateau point.  For one, there are too many second time tech founders starting up new companies here.  Let’s see how the startup cookie crumbles, but trying to democratise the tech ecosystem order on a geographic basis has got to be a good thing.

2023, let's do this! By Nick Freer

2022, whoa what a year.  For me, more so than other years, it felt like it went in a blur.  Was that a post-Covid thing?  I don’t know, perhaps.  The pandemic was, and continues to be, a traumatic experience, and the after-effects are still being felt in the business world. 

I think a lot of people spent so much energy just getting through Covid, that there is a good deal of post-traumatic stress around.  How many of us got through the last three years unscathed?  I know I have some battle scars, and I’m pretty sure they exist in both the conscious and subconscious.  

Throwing yourself at your work can be a good distraction from the travails of life, with less time to sit around and navel gaze.  Up on Skye this week, where I have come to fully realise the meanings of “windswept” and “rain-soaked”, there has been some time to reflect and look forward to the year ahead.  

As an agency, I believe we did some of our best work last year, for longstanding, occasional, and new clients.  Corporate communications is always nuanced, and because of Brexit, Covid, and times of economic crisis, it has only got more nuanced.  We have been mindful of this, and it has been built in to the strategic advice we have offered, and how we have gone about executing public relations in tandem with our client base.  

If one principal underpins the approach of the agency, I think it centres on client care.  If we take on a client, we will go the whole nine yards on their behalf, no matter their size, or the financial fee.  

An example?  Over the last twelve months, we have advised on investment deals totalling over £100 million - mainly tech startups and scale-up companies raising funds from venture capital and angel firms.  The largest one was circa £20 million, the smallest in the region of £500,000.  In spite of the divergence in quantum, both these investment announcements required lots of legwork, albeit in different ways, and we received rave reviews from the respective CEOs.  

Working for my uncle’s public relations firm in London in the late Nineties, I remember I had dropped a ball on a client assignment, and he brought me to task.  I think his analogy was along the lines of “if I ask you to do a job, you do it to the best of your ability, whether I ask you to paint my office or look after a key client.”  I’m pleased to say that I never got called in to do the paint job.  

One thing I learnt last year?  I have a great instinct for my own business, but that doesn’t mean I always get it right.  Having Carolyn Jameson and George Mackintosh on speed dial as advisers has helped to address this chink in the armour. 

The best move I made last year?  That one’s easy.  Bringing former BBC dynamo Vanessa Collingridge on to work with client CEOs on presentational training.  Ness has been amazing.  

 We have one more walk planned on Skye, to the Fairy Pools in Glen Brittle, then it’s back to the old routine.  2023, let’s do this!  

A sustainable future for offices, guest post by Mark Sorsa-Leslie, co-founder, Beringar

For many businesses, traditional workplaces have changed drastically over the past few years. While the space still exists physically, the very idea of what a workplace is has evolved to enable a new hybridised approach to work – one that prioritises flexibility.

These changes have signalled a new way of thinking about work. Whereas before it was seen as a physical space, it has now become a process detached from a physical location.

So where does that leave the modern workplace? Surely it will continue to exist to some degree. But if it does, what will it look like, and what will this mean for the commercial property market?

Today, you cannot just lease an office and stuff it with desks. Businesses must make their spaces fit the model of work they have chosen to adopt - whether that’s hybrid working, flexible, or fully remote.

Research from Women and Banking in Finance and the London School of Economics shows that 95% of workers within the financial industry prefer a hybrid working approach. However, the more control employees have over when and how often they work from home, the more complicated the scheduling challenges become for employers.

Many of Beringar’s clients are monitoring their hybrid working patterns using our solutions and seeing occupancy rate consistently below 50%. As a result they are beginning to think about downsizing into smaller, higher quality offices. They have also made environmental, social and governance (ESG) commitments to their stakeholders, pledging to reduce their carbon emissions, improve the wellbeing of their people and drive up efficiency. Where work gets done has a material impact on meeting these commitments.  

However, as organisations look to downsize, the knock-on effect of this race for quality space has resulted in ‘zombie’ office buildings in cities across the world. With properties no longer viable as modern office buildings, many building owners are now actively looking into converting these into housing or even industrial space.

Real estate analysts at Citi Group are estimating that the value of offices in London could fall by as much as 38% over the next two to three years, driven by economic turmoil and working-from-home office shrinkage. Office markets across the UK will suffer a similar fate as large companies start to jettison surplus office space they no longer occupy.

It might sound bad for the office market, but the desire for businesses to find the best available office to help attract the best talent is having very positive effects on the market. Now, employees demand a well-thought-out, flexible workplace that fosters collaboration and innovation. Companies want to move to smarter, greener office buildings that use technology to improve the working environment, decrease running costs and reduce carbon emissions. 

The good news for owners is that according to CBRE, offices like these that are certified as sustainable command a 6% rental premium.

So, although there are certainly challenges ahead for the future of the office, there is clear evidence emerging that as we learn to live with hybrid working and head in a more sustainable direction, both owners and occupiers could win by being more sensitive to each other's changing needs.

GIVE400.scot a chance this Christmas, by Nick Freer

I was approached recently about an initiative aimed at tackling the worsening cost of living crisis in Scotland, to see if we could support on PR for the campaign alongside a well known Edinburgh-based creative agency who would handle the branding and design. 

Fast forward a couple of weeks, and GIVE400.scot launched on Tuesday to help tackle the rising tide of poverty is this country, encouraging households who feel they can afford it to donate some or all of their £400 Energy Bills Support Scheme sum to charities of their choice, or via Scottish charity the Corra Foundation.  

Since being set up in 1985, Corra has delivered more than 16,000 grants totalling almost £200 million to disadvantaged communities.  It does this by making small grants to smaller charities and community groups, who in turn pass on funds to families and individuals on low income, with cash or vouchers to cover food, fuel, household items, and clothing. 

So, how bad are things on the ground?  In October, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation released its annual Poverty in Scotland report, stating that, “Nearly one in five households on low incomes in Scotland have gone hungry and cold this year, even before we enter the winter months.” 

Corra Foundation’s CEO Carolyn Sawers puts it like this: “The levels of need and urgent requests for support are shocking and sobering in scale.  Families are having to make impossible choices at the moment, they are doing so with dignity, but they need support.”

The collective hope is that the campaign will strike a chord, catch the public imagination, and both individuals and businesses will get behind GIVE400.scot.  

In my own experience of charity campaigns, patronage by the corporate sector can be a key driver for success.  In the Scottish context, Social Bite, and Street Soccer Scotland are two of the success stories that come to mind.  

In December 2016, I was one of three hundred people to participate in Social Bite’s first sleep out, on Charlotte Square in Edinburgh.  The meteorological gods were kind that night, the temperature didn’t get too low, and at 7 to 8 centigrade the weather was unseasonably mild for a Scottish winter.  

In all honesty, it was not a great hardship that night, although I think everyone went home the next morning with more empathy for homeless people and, in turn, felt more committed to the cause.  

Like Social Bite, the support from Scotland plc for Street Soccer Scotland has been tangible whenever I’ve attended one of their events, or helped to publicise them.  Both not-for-profit organisations have inspirational leaders, with omnipotence that resonates with stakeholders, including chief executives from the business world.  

Celebrity endorsement can be a game-changer for aspiring charities, boosting their brand and profile.  Those who attended dinners over the last decade in Edinburgh with the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, George Clooney, or Barack and Michelle Obama, will never forget them.   

We would love to get some celebrity endorsement behind GIVE400.scot.  We don’t have the time or resources to organise any glitzy dinners, we cannot currently count on any Hollywood A-listers, but the mission itself will hopefully be enough to create a wave of support for those most in need in the months ahead.

Learning about egoless collaboration from the Helsinki startup scene, guest post by Startup Grind Scotland co-director Nick Murray

Just as travel expands our personal horizons, so too must we explore new frameworks from business ecosystems overseas. This was the intention of a recent Startup Grind Scotland programme, delivered in partnership with the Scottish Government, to experience the vibrant city of Helsinki, and its world-famous Slush conference. 

Why Finland?

With an ecosystem valued at €37Bn, boasting 1822 startups, 500+ investors, and the yearly Slush conference attracting 12,000 - 25,000 people, Helsinki marries entrepreneurial excellence with an enviable quality of life. Finland’s 8 unicorns happily pay up to 49.2% tax, viewing it as a civic badge of honour to support the country’s high-functioning social infrastructure.

This is what I learned and what Scotland could adopt from Finland.

Embrace risk, failure and ‘Sisu’

Helsinki’s ecosystem was built on failure. Nokia’s 2008 crash released hundreds of developers into the job market. Many started businesses, and failed. They started again, and with the combined support of the universities and some light state intervention, the scene blossomed.

Slush was, and still is, run by students, and frequently refreshes leadership to avoid things getting stale. The conference now attracts thousands every November, including international investors looking for the next big thing. This success didn’t just happen. Early on, the organisers chartered a plane of Silicon Valley VCs to showcase their offering. That gamble paid off. Investments in Finnish startups reached over €1Bn in 2021 alone.

The Finns call this spirit of perseverance ‘Sisu’, a stoic determination to push through hard times like chipping through a block of ice. This mindset has parallels with entrepreneurial resilience, a level of mental toughness built through embracing failure and risk.

Egoless Collaboration

The lack of ego in Helsinki was striking. The universities, accelerators and public sector work seamlessly to streamline support activity.

Maria01, a massive enterprise hub based in an old hospital, houses startups, incubators and investors, all mingled under one roof. Their public sector sees themselves as part of this community, rather than part of the state. 

In contrast, Scotland’s distributed and competitive ecosystem is marred by a sense of tribalism of brands and geography, with siloed and disconnected services across regions, where similar and competing players confuse the entrance point or support roadmap for Founders. 

Our Opportunity

The Finnish message is clear; If you’re fighting for your piece of the pie, you’re not fighting for the big picture. To attract international attention and investment we must discard tribalism and adopt a ‘Team Scotland’ approach to act as a national flare gun, illuminating what we have to a global audience. 

Encouraging new players to contribute to the ecosystem and showcase ‘their’ Scotland will lead to fresh ideas and help retain graduate talent.

There are rumblings of a refreshing approach to state support, such as the energy behind realising 2020’s Logan Report recommendations. The Tech Ecosystem Fund empowering grassroots projects earlier this year, the appointment of Chief Entrepreneur Mark Logan, and the Tech Scalers going to community-builders CodeBase, all mark a vote of confidence in those on the ground to deliver impact with light state support.

As they say, “If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together”. I believe that, together, we can move Scotland closer to the Finnish line.