CodeClan 2.0, by Nick Freer

As a press adviser to both CodeClan and CodeBase, two integral pieces of Scotland’s technology ecosystem and pinpointed by Mark Logan in his 2020 STER report, it was encouraging to see the breaking news at time of writing (Thursday) around a rescue plan for the digital skills academy led by the Scottish Government and the UK’s largest tech incubator.

Affected students will now be able to complete their courses, while CodeClan trainers have the option to deliver the remaining courses fully paid.  For non-training staff, CodeClan and a number of other organisations are encouraging applications for a variety of open roles.

After a really difficult week for all those concerned, and what I gather was an inordinate amount of activity in the background, yesterday’s communique was a silver lining to a grey cloud that has hung over our tech scene since last Friday.  In addition to the CodeClan trainers, there is also a collective hope that the non-training staff will find new roles in quick time.

If this happens, it will show that not only can we recycle talent, but also that the Scottish tech ecosystem can be characterised by empathy and caring.  This would also equate to some form of natural justice, when you consider that CodeClan’s raison d’être was to help people find employment in Scotland’s tech sector.

As the operation formerly known as CodeClan morphs into a new existence, I wanted to share some takeaways from the CodeClan I knew before operations ceased and the liquidators were called in.

Irrespective of the underlying financial picture, what the CodeClan team achieved over the years should be lauded.  Over two thousand graduates in software development and data, graduates who were then placed with leading corporate brands - companies like Skyscanner, FanDuel, Baillie Gifford, DC Thomson, BlackRock, and Tesco Bank.

What shouldn’t be forgotten is that graduates also joined much smaller companies, including startups that only had a handful of people in total.  In these companies, they often became key workers from day one.   

CodeClan was also a well-documented champion for women in tech, bringing to attention the alarming statistics on how few women are forecast to gain employment in a UK tech job market predicted to grow six-fold to £30 billion by 2025, and providing funded, free, and on demand courses to address this.

Similarly, a series of CodeClan youth academies around the country aimed to support young people, often from marginalised communities, positioned to get an overlooked demographic of the population into tech jobs.

Hopefully, the transplanted CodeClan 2.0 offering will continue to be all this and more.

Summer swing

In spite of some sporadic family vacation time in Scotland over the last few weeks, I once again failed to fully commit to the out of office setting during the always elusive, so-called ‘summer break’.

But hey ho, business doesn’t stop and newspaper printing continues to roll when the sun reaches its highest arc in the northern hemisphere.

Don’t worry, I still made it to the beach (and Sutherland’s beaches still take some beating in my book)…only with the laptop packed alongside the sun cream and sandwiches.

Action needed now to meet Scotland's offshore wind ambitions, by Jeremy Grant

If you think that things are starting to slip when it comes to meeting Britain’s net zero targets, you are not alone.  

In a letter sent to prime minister Rishi Sunak a couple of weeks ago, over 100 businesses warned that “without a renewed focus and commitment to delivery from the government, the UK will be left behind.”

Among them were not only some recognisable high street names, such as Tesco and IKEA, but nine members of the 20 consortia involved in the vast ScotWind offshore wind project in the North Sea. 

They included Siemens of Germany, Danish energy group Orsted, French utility Engie, BP, SSE and Fred Olsen Renewables, partner in one of the consortia with Sweden’s Vattenfall.

While it might be tempting for some to blame slippage on Sunak’s tighter embrace of fossil fuels — seen in last week’s announcement that the government would continue to grant licences to drill for North Sea oil — the reality is that an awkward combination of inflation and insufficient action on the policy front threaten progress on offshore wind.

Vattenfall set alarm bells ringing last month by not only suspending work on a large wind project off the Norfolk coast, citing a 40 per cent increase in costs (much of it supply chain-related thanks to Russia’s war in Ukraine), but also warning that this was putting “significant pressure on all new offshore wind projects”.

The move has cast doubt on the UK’s ambition to triple offshore wind capacity to 50 gigawatts (GW) by 2050, from around 14GW now. ScotWind’s importance here can’t be overstated given that its 20 consortia are together to deliver 27.5GW of power — over half the 2050 target. 

While it’s admittedly still relatively early days for ScotWind, there are some key issues that need fixed now.

One is an urgent overhaul of planning and regulatory regimes to give businesses the confidence to properly sequence the investments needed to build out the various phases of offshore wind projects. 

In a paper out last week, the Scottish National Investment Bank highlighted that because oil and gas revenue declines will not necessarily correlate with an increase in offshore wind supply contracts, a “viable supply chain in place at the point of final investment decisions by offshore wind operators will be crucial”. 

Another issue concerns “contracts for difference” (CfDs), a mechanism in place since 2015 through which the government guarantees the price that offshore wind operators receive for selling their electricity. 

Scottish Renewables, which represents the private sector, says that the parameters used for the current auction in which developers bid for CfDs don’t take in to account the effect of supply chain cost pressures exceeding headline rates of inflation and that the next one in 2024 must “adequately reflect the prevailing economic conditions at the time”. 

The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero recently ran a “call for evidence” on how the CfD could be improved. “We are now considering responses and will publish next steps over the summer,” a spokesperson says.

Meanwhile, there are sensible-sounding recommendations on supply chains, grids and consenting in an April report by the UK government’s “offshore wind champion”, Tim Pick, appointed to this new role in 2022. 

But the time for reports and target-setting is over. Action is needed, and urgently.

Business sponsorship should start with community, by Jeremy Grant

When cellist Natalie Clein and pianist Julia Hamos perform at the “Absolute Classics” festival on the outskirts of Dumfries this weekend, the piano on stage will be one made by Blüthner, a German company that’s been making the instrument since 1853.

It’s also one of two that have been on loan from Blüthner for the last five years. “Without these pianos, it wouldn’t be possible to bring world class pianistic quality to the communities of Dumfries and Galloway,” says Alex McQuiston, festival director.

Business sponsorship of the arts is nothing new. But at a time of brutal budgetary constraints and scant government funding, its role in ensuring that the arts in Scotland survive, let alone thrive, has become more important than ever.

There was a reminder of the parlous financial state of the arts in Scotland last week with news that six theatres had agreed to share resources and create a new company under a “theatre survival plan” designed to avert closures. And had it not been for a screeching U-turn by Holyrood in February, Creative Scotland — the national arts agency — would have suffered a 10 percent cut to its 2023/14 budget.

As the instrumental philanthropy of Blüthner shows, sponsorship is no longer just about cash in exchange for ringside tickets and a drinks reception for clients in the concert interval (although cash is obviously still vital).

These days, it’s about something else too: connecting with community. Given the lessons from the pandemic, it’s appropriate that one of the three themes running through the Edinburgh International Festival, which kicks off next week, is “Community over chaos”.

One of the festival’s supporters, investment management firm Baillie Gifford, is billed not as “sponsor” but as “Learning and Engagement Partner”. That’s because it supports the festival’s year-long programme of activities in schools and community groups in Edinburgh, including bringing the London Symphony Orchestra to play for residents in hospitals.

TikTok has another take on community support through its sponsorship of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, enabling top comedy performers on its platform to bring their content to the live stage for the first time. The idea is that talent being discovered by the virtual community should be able to find an audience among the physical community as well.

Community can of course include the people associated with the workplace. Cirrus Logic is a Texas-based semiconductor company with its European headquarters in Edinburgh, where it designs the tiny chips embedded in mobile phones and laptops that govern how the devices’ audio performs.

The company started sponsoring the Fringe last year after its British chairman read about an emergency funding appeal it had issued in the aftermath of the pandemic. Its support involves not only part-funding operating expenses but also hosting Fringe performers every Friday  at its offices for employees and their families.

There is also a role for sponsorship in reaching communities that don’t have much access to the arts. Thanks to matching funding from Culture & Business Scotland, a charity that links business with the culture sector, Absolute Classics has been able to film its concerts for broadcast later online, helping to combat the isolating effects of living in remote communities in southwest Scotland.

The more businesses that buy into this, the better for us all.

Education can be transformational on the startup journey, guest blog by Shona Marsh, Head of Education Programmes, CodeBase

The more I’ve worked with startups, the clearer it’s become that there are key inflection points on the journey where intervention in the form of education can be transformational.  Today, education is front and centre of the Techscaler programme run by CodeBase, which is designed to cover all the bases, from ideation through to early stage, growth, and scaling.

While our First Steps initiative was launched at Barclays Eagle Labs in May, Next Steps is our course to guide founders towards product-market-fit (and applications are open now).  In his Scottish Technology Ecosystem Review (STER) in 2020, Mark Logan makes clear reference to the challenge Scottish startups find in scaling, and that the two main reasons are that the product or service doesn’t fit the intended market, or there is product-market fit but the organisation isn’t capable of capitalising on this and driving subsequent growth.

Our scaleup partnership with Silicon Valley-based Reforge follows on from Next Steps and is an opportunity to bring that knowledge to Scotland, and show that we can build these companies in situ and see the knock-on benefits, namely economic impact, talent recycling, and innovation loops.  Along these lines, Reforge is more focused on helping specialised staff capitalise on growth opportunities.

Skyscanner and FanDuel are Scottish examples of unicorns (a startup achieving $1 billion valuation within ten years of creation), with both companies achieving this status back in 2015/2016.  However, Mark Logan makes reference to there being no room for historical complacency, with Scotland needing to grow with influence outside of our local best practice, and that we can’t rely on the legacies of Skyscanner, where Logan was COO, and FanDuel to translate to future startup success.

Reforge brings this external perspective, from the most renowned startup ecosystem in the world, Silicon Valley. This perpetual cycle of success and growth has led to the recycling of talent into the ecosystem to both accelerate the growth of existing startups, and lead to the creation of a large volume of new startups that are built and grown quicker.

As Logan quotes in STER: “It’s generally not well understood within the Scottish ecosystem (and many others) how a startup should go about the process of iterating its product or service to the point where it fits the needs of its market… it is very common to see startups declare that product-market fit has been achieved, and start to attempt scaling when, in fact, the market isn’t interested in the product.  This situation always ends unhappily.  Silicon Valley has a well established playbook for how to go about this process and how to measure progress to the product-fit goal.  It’s vital that this playbook is widely understood within our ecosystem.”

In my own career, working at the University of Oxford’s Entrepreneurship Centre and with scaleups like Airbnb, I have seen the way in which domain expertise can be expanded through the development of new skills and knowledge.  It is an ethos I have brought to my role with CodeBase.

While you can encourage, if not teach, an entrepreneurial mindset, you can teach the skills to build your startup, through leadership, product management, understanding customer needs, and simply resilience - an essential skill when building a business.

World class entrepreneurial campuses, guest blog by Joe Little, Honorary Professor and Digital Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Stirling

Last year, I was asked, along with my fellow Entrepreneur in Residence Ross Tuffee, to write a paper on how Entrepreneurial Campuses can help transform Scotland’s technology ecosystem. This was one of the recommendations from Mark Logan’s Scottish Technology Ecosystem Review in 2020.

Rather than interviewing our institutions close to home to find best practice, we felt a more effective change would come through learning from world class entrepreneurial campuses such as Stanford and MIT in the States, Aalto in Finland, Imperial in London, and DTU in Denmark.  We would then look at how institutions in Scotland could replicate to help transform Scotland’s regional economies.

Institutions like Stanford and MIT have recognisably transformed the regions where they are located. No longer do students aim to just do an undergraduate degree, then move elsewhere to develop their career and hatch business ideas…they stay.

They stay because the resources they need in terms of academic support, venture funding, mentoring, and technology are all to hand because over the course of several decades a virtuous cycle of engagement, enrichment, and a ‘giving back’ approach has made it happen.

Best-of-class universities encourage faculties and students to collaborate for solutions, and enable faculties to take sabbaticals to develop their business startups, importantly with the proviso that they return to teach.

They open up their research, making it easier for industry to discover them.  In turn, this encourages industry to show up with their problems and help co-create solutions.

By way of a stark comparison, by the end the conversations we had with some of these revered places of entrepreneurial learning, we had developed both a both plan and potential solution….compared to the experience here where sadly I might get a call back 9 months later to find out if we still had any interest.

In fact, what we found was that very few universities in Scotland made it easy for industry to engage and, where there was a possibility to do business, excessive licensing and lack of resources at the university to sort out legalities became the ultimate barrier.

What’s needed for real growth and transformative change is for all universities and colleges to embrace a direction of change that inspires the development of a more entrepreneurial mindset in their students, staff, and academics by promoting and teaching entrepreneurship.

They need to provide environments for students to engage in creating startups, and encourage cross-faculty participation in solving global challenges.

They need to make it simple to start a business, spin out an opportunity, and not demand an excessive cut of the result by way of equity.

But most of all, they need to make it far easier for industry to do business by making our research more discoverable and making our facilities more accessible.  In return, industry needs to re-engage, and share their problems and ideas more with academia.

Finally, we also need alumni relations to transform from the scary cap in hand requests for funds to a genuine connection and request for support. Our colleges and universities need these alumni back. We need alumni to help mentor students and faculties through this new direction of travel, to help them see the value in their research and to help create successful startups.

To Scale Up, we must also Scale Deep, guest blog by Mark Logan, chief entrepreneurial adviser to The Scottish Government

Mention entrepreneurship policy in Scotland and you’ll quickly discover that two divergent viewpoints exist, each held as passionately.   The first says that policy support should be focussed exclusively on  high-growth potential start-ups, or Scale-Ups, for short.  The second prefers that efforts instead be focussed on community entrepreneurship, or Scale-Deeps.

Both views, individually held, are wrong.

It’s easy to understand the case for focussing on Scale-Ups.  Those that break through to success create lots of relatively high-paying jobs and considerable tax revenues.  They also instil a helpful sense of confidence in the business community that Scotland can compete internationally, with the consequent ambition-raising that follows it.  This can become a virtuous circle.

In contrast to Scale-Ups, which may employ hundreds or even thousands of people, Scale-Deeps usually employ less than ten people. This is why they are often dismissed as not worthy of policy support – the marginal cost of spending time and money on nurturing Scale-Deeps seems, at first glance, to significantly outweigh the marginal benefits of doing so.   

But look again. Scale-Deeps drive the economy in three important ways: firstly, through their sheer number (provided that the right environment exists to support their formation);  secondly, because of their wide geographic distribution, bringing jobs to places that Scale-Ups usually don’t reach; and, thirdly, because their product or service almost always directly benefits the location in which they are based. This is rarely the case with Scale-Ups. Scale-Deeps directly raise the country’s wellbeing index and reduce its social security bill, and in a more uniform fashion. They are an integral part of a functioning, successful society.

Over decades, industrial policy has, in general, favoured either Scale-Up or Scale-Deep support, but not both.  This is a mistake, based on the erroneous belief that it costs twice as much to support both categories than to support either.   Such a belief ignores the considerable overlap in the respective support needs of early-stage Scale-Up Scale-Deep founders.  It also crucially ignores the symbiosis between the Scale-Up and Scale-Deep categories, and the fly-wheel effect that can be generated when both categories are well represented.

What is the essence of this symbiosis? Successful Scale-Ups act as an attractor into entrepreneurship – nothing succeeds like success, after all. In the other direction, nurturing the creation of a large network of Scale-Deeps helps to normalise entrepreneurship within society. High-growth start-ups emerge more frequently in a country that exhibits a general culture of entrepreneurship and that is at ease within that culture. They emerge rarely within an otherwise sterile entrepreneurial landscape.

To act only upon one category is a policy myopia that, in times past, has rendered our national strategy for entrepreneurship incomplete and incoherent. It’s akin to attempting to grow Giant Redwoods without also nurturing the forest floor that brings them forth. Scotland needs Scale-Ups and Scale-Deeps, and they need each other. Our entrepreneurial development strategy must embrace this connection.

Back office on the front foot for Scotland's financial sector, guest blog by former FT correspondent Jeremy Grant

Think of an image for Scotland’s financial sector and you might come up with the Neoclassical splendour of Dundas House, the former headquarters of Royal Bank of Scotland on Edinburgh’s St Andrew Square. Or the logos of the city’s big asset managers.

I’d like to suggest a new one. In 2025, US asset manager BlackRock will move from its current Edinburgh office to new premises near the Royal Botanic Garden that were once occupied by Standard Life, now part of asset manager abrdn.

The building also happens to be called Dundas House. But the more interesting thing is why BlackRock is occupying what was the largest existing office space outside London when the firm took out the lease last year. It’s expanding in the crucial middle- and back-office functions that make financial markets tick.

I’m talking about the plumbing of markets which includes — jargon alert! — portfolio management technology, trade confirmation and settlement, regulatory reporting and risk management.

BlackRock operates a platform called Aladdin that helps the firm and its clients oversee their whole portfolio and manage risks in it. The significance of Edinburgh is that, from a modest start involving 20 staff in 2000, the operation has grown to be BlackRock’s hub for Europe, the Middle and East and Africa. Its new office will eventually house about 1,400 staff.

This isn’t just an Edinburgh story. In Glasgow, Barclays last year opened a state-of-the art campus on the banks of the Clyde that’s home to various back-office functions. By year-end, it will have 4,000 employees — a 90 percent increase on the bank’s Glasgow headcount four years ago.

Two of the largest US banks, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley, are also expanding in this area. The former will soon combine its two Glasgow offices into one, which will become one of the bank’s global technology centres.

The latter employed six people in the city in 2000, a number that has since swollen to 2,400 working at an “operations division” supporting clients’ trading activity from Asia across to the US.

This technological financial plumbing is unglamorous stuff. But the investments that such firms are making define a new image of Scotland as a financial centre and point to where its competitive advantage may lie in Europe.

This isn’t to downplay asset management, which remains the backbone of Edinburgh as the second largest financial centre after London, anchored around abrdn and Baillie Gifford.

But the reality is that plumbing is a key part of the puzzle. Moreover, it offers the prospect of huge growth potential if you add data and the explosive growth of artificial intelligence to the mix.

Edinburgh this week came top in a ranking of “AI-ready” cities in the UK by SAS, a software company. It found that the city is home to the highest number of courses that feature an AI element.

Collaboration between financial firms and universities to develop new technologies is surely the next big thing. Notably, BlackRock has an AI laboratory in Edinburgh — the firm’s only one outside the US.

Yesterday, a working group at Scottish Financial Enterprise, the member-funded industry body for the sector, held its first meeting to map out a new growth strategy for financial services in Scotland. Data and AI were on the agenda. Watch this space.

'Let teachers lead change, it works', guest post by Mark Logan, chief entrepreneurial adviser to The Scottish Government

What happens to the quality of education when you trust teachers to lead improvement initiatives, and give them the space to do so? If the early indicators from experiments in computing science school-stage education are anything to go by, the answer is that astonishing results can be achieved, and achieved quickly. 

The Scottish Technology Ecosystem Review was released in August 2020, and included recommendations to improve the state of computing science education in Scottish schools.  Although programming is a critical skill for Scotland’s technology economy, computing science has long been the neglected poor relation of other STEM subjects within Scottish education priorities.  

This has led to falling teacher numbers and difficulty in recruiting specialists into the subject, and leaves Scotland in a position where less than a third of its secondary schools are able to offer the subject at Advanced Higher level, with a whopping one quarter not able to offer it even at Higher level.

When I started to explore solutions to these problems with education administrators back in 2020, I was struck by the fact that, in meetings, workshops and roundtables on the subject, not a single teacher was present. An early priority, therefore, was to directly involve teachers in working to arrest the decline.  

It’s fair to say that giving such a level of agency to teachers caused apprehension amongst some in administrative circles. Nevertheless, Scottish Teachers Advancing Computing Science (STACS) was formed just over a year ago. The organisation, which is funded by the Scottish Government, is led by two former computing science teachers, Toni Scullion and Brendan McCart, who work with a wider group of expert teachers across Scotland.  

In its first year, STACS has already created a full set of resources to support the teaching of computing science to 1st and 2nd year pupils, where existing teaching materials have been severely lacking. This matters because losing the interest of pupils at this early stage makes it much harder to re-engage them later on.   

Even more impressive is the launch of a nationwide continuous-skilling programme, the first of its kind anywhere in the world. In a field that evolves rapidly, many teachers, for example, those who have cross-trained from other specialisms, report a lack of confidence in teaching computing science at advanced levels. STACS addresses this by hosting a platform where our more experienced teachers help those with less experience to skill-up and stay current with the subject as it evolves. And STACS works with the SQA to identify areas in the annual examinations where pupils most struggle, prioritising teacher training to those areas.

In short, members of the network of computing science teachers in Scotland are helping each other to build confidence and to improve the teaching experience for pupils. Importantly, this networked approach brings immediate national scale to the programme, in contrast to those traditional one or two school pilot programmes that fizzle out when no one is looking. Most importantly, teachers love it. 

When we trust teachers to lead, they generate solutions that are informed, innovative and effective, and which administrative hierarchies alone would label unsolvable. Let’s extend this approach across more subjects. In the battle to improve standards, we should listen first to those in the front line.

Preserving nature, empowering business, guest blog by EICC CEO Marshall Dallas

Scotland's landscapes and untamed wilderness have always held a special place in the hearts of its people and visitors alike. As the CEO of the Edinburgh International Conference Centre (EICC), I have witnessed first-hand the profound impact that collaboration between businesses and wildlife conservation groups can have on preserving our natural heritage. 

Inspired by the remarkable work of organisations like RSPB Scotland and WWF Scotland, we have embarked on a journey to integrate sustainability into every aspect of our operations. Together, we can pave the way for a more sustainable future, safeguarding our planet's treasures for generations to come.

In April, RSPB Scotland and WWF Scotland launched a 30-minute film titled "Wild Isles: The Business of Nature" at the EICC. This powerful production highlighted the benefits that businesses can bring to nature when working in collaboration with wildlife conservation groups. The screening marked a significant milestone in our long-term partnership with RSPB Scotland, and our commitment to support peatland restoration in Scotland. We have pledged to contribute a portion of every qualifying conference delegate's fee and every dinner guest's payment to RSPB Scotland, with the aim of making a substantial financial contribution to their invaluable work.

To deepen our understanding of the impact of our partnership, I recently embarked on a trip to Forsinard in Sutherland to witness the efforts of the RSPB's dedicated full-time and volunteer teams. Their unwavering passion and collaboration left me deeply inspired. It is through such partnerships that businesses can play a pivotal role in nurturing and protecting our fragile ecosystems.

As an avid open-water swimmer and Munro bagger, I have personally cherished the beauty of Scotland's coasts, lochs, rivers, and mountains for many years, and the thought of these natural wonders being compromised for future generations is deeply unsettling. 

To fulfil our responsibility, we have chosen to invest in a nature-based solution that addresses climate change and biodiversity loss: the restoration of peatlands. Peatlands are vital carbon sinks and home to numerous plant and animal species threatened by the climate crisis. Additionally, they play a crucial role in filtering Scotland's drinking water. It is estimated that 80 per cent of Scotland's peatland, nearly 2 million hectares, is currently degraded, emphasising the urgency of action.

Our commitment to sustainability is at the core of our plans at the EICC. We embrace a triple bottom-line approach, considering environmental, societal, and economic aspects equally, to achieve genuine sustainability. Through our transformative 'Step Change' initiative, we are well on our way to realising this vision. Our event impact reports serve as powerful tools, enabling clients to set environmentally-focused targets for their events and contribute to a greener, more sustainable future for our industry.

In line with our sustainability goals, we are developing a hotel and hotel school in Edinburgh's Haymarket area. This establishment will be one of Scotland's most sustainable hotels upon its opening in 2025, with zero fossil fuel energy use.

By working together and fostering collaborations between businesses and conservation groups, we can create a future where nature thrives alongside our economic endeavours. Let us embrace the responsibility to reduce our environmental impact, preserve our natural heritage, and build a sustainable future for generations to come.

An Irish jig, by Nick Freer

Back in 2018, we worked on an assignment for Enterprise Ireland ahead of Ireland’s minister for business, enterprise and innovation making a trade trip to Scotland.  At the time, Irish-Scottish trade exceeded £1.8 billion, up by 130 per cent over the previous five years.

As Enterprise Ireland’s UK manager wrote for this newspaper in September that year, “Scotland benefits from the commitment and ambition of Irish companies, representing the fourth largest foreign direct investor in Scotland.  At time of writing, I haven’t got my hands on the latest data, but an educated guess would suggest that this growth trajectory may have slowed in no small part due to Brexit.

What is well recognised, then and now, is that Ireland has strengthened its export imprint to the extent that its internationalisation record is one of the best of any small nation.

During the Irish trade mission in 2018, one of the fixtures on the itinerary was a joint event with SSE at the energy giant’s Offshore Wind Centre of Excellence and if you’ve read this column of late, contributions by journalist Jeremy Grant and energy consultant David Scrimgeour have outlined how important and exciting related industry developments could be for our nation’s economy.

Today (Thursday), I’m flying from Edinburgh to Dublin for dinner with a client and a business reporter from one of Ireland’s top news publications.  While the plan is to deliver an informal briefing on the client company’s strategy in Ireland, I will also be interested to hear the journalist’s view around sentiment on the business scene, and in particular how the country’s tech sector is progressing.

On a macro level, Ireland is definitely one step ahead in terms of inward investment and associated job creation by US tech giants.  Some quick desk research while waiting for my flight reveals that Ireland was the number one choice for US tech groups in terms of foreign direct investment in 2021, and 9 of the US’s top 10 technology companies now have bases there.

While IBM was the first US tech company to invest in Ireland, in 1956, a slew of others have set up shop since, lured more recently by a 12.5 per cent corporate tax rate, an educated workforce, EU membership and easy access to European markets.  However, we know that so-called FAANG stocks have lost their bite in recent times, and tech sector layoffs have hit Ireland like everywhere else on the planet.   

Importantly, I’ve also done some desk research on the best place for a pint of Guinness in the vicinity of St Stephen’s Green in Dublin’s Southside.  In a hastily organised straw poll, O’Donohue’s and Kehoe’s came top of the pile.

Scottish EDGE

A fortnight ago, and closer to home, I was lucky enough to attend Scottish EDGE’s awards ceremony at RBS Gogarburn as my youngest brother’s company, Infix Support, scooped one of the top prizes.

With hosting duties carried out by EDGE’s CEO Evelyn McDonald, and inspirational talks from entrepreneur Sir Tom Hunter and ACTIPH Water founder Jamie Douglas-Hamilton, it was a proud moment to see my brother (Dr Matthew Freer) receive his award from First Minister Humza Yousaf on the night.

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.