New wave of investment in Scotland's wind sector is needed, by Jeremy Grant

After only a week with their hands on the levers of government, Labour has been moving at a “move fast and break things” kind of pace on energy policy.

We’ve seen the establishment of a £7.3 billion National Wealth Fund (NWF) to support clean energy investments, reversal of a ban on onshore wind as part of a target to double this form of power generation by 2030, and plans to invest £500 million in green hydrogen.

Much of this had been in the party’s manifesto. But there have been some surprises too. Scottish climate and energy expert Chris Stark was – judging from one of his social media posts - blind-sided by being appointed to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. He heads a new unit that will bang heads together to ensure UK renewables policy is “supercharged”. Channelling Nasa vibes, it’s called “Mission Control”.

Clearly, having someone who was director of energy and climate change in the Scottish government will be helpful as work is done to accelerate grid upgrades, cut red tape and coordinate investment in port infrastructure for offshore wind. Especially in Scotland, where so much of the UK’s renewables story is playing out.

This work is urgent. As Wind Europe, an industry group for wind power, points out, five times more electricity infrastructure needs to be constructed by 2030 than in the past three decades to deliver a net zero grid. Some of this will come from ScotWind, one of the largest offshore wind projects in the world.   

Port infrastructure is key. You can’t build offshore wind farms at sea, so assembling the kit – turbine towers, blades, rotors and nacelles (which generate the electricity from the action of the rotor) must happen quayside. And this means acres of space, given that a blade can be longer than nine London double decker buses.

Ports are also where much of the supply chain manufacturing is most usefully located. Sumitomo Electric of Japan is building a £350m subsea cable factory at Port of Nigg at Cromarty Firth, while Vestas of Denmark is scoping Port of Leith for a turbine blade factory.

An innovative Scottish scheme called the Strategic Investment Model is busy trying to match prospective supply chain projects with ScotWind developers to kick-start more activity. Most of a list of 10 “priority” projects are port-related. Meetings between the two sides start in coming weeks to see if projects can attract the required investment commitments.

Labour has also allocated £1.8bn for port infrastructure, presumably part of the NWF’s £7.3bn. The idea is that this will “mobilise billions more in private investment” to allow more Scottish ports to accommodate the huge pipeline of offshore wind projects that’s coming.

This is where foreign direct investment (FDI) will come in. Scotland attracted more of this than anywhere in the UK outside London in 2023, according to a report by consultants EY. New projects secured increased by almost 29 per cent from the 2022 level.

Yet most of the increase came from one-off investments in ScotWind. Says Ally Scott, EY Scotland’s managing partner: “While welcoming the critical momentum Scotland has achieved in renewables FDI, we need to look beyond it to identify where the next wave of projects will come from.”

Scottish housing market: mid-year report, guest blog by John Boyle, Director of Research and Strategy, Rettie

As the housing market slips into mid-Summer and activity levels simmer down after the usually hectic Spring and early Summer phases, it seems a suitable time to take stock and assess how the market is performing. At Rettie’s, we are just writing our Summer Market Briefing, from which there are a few key takeaways.

The sales market has been resilient despite the backdrop of high mortgage rates and a stagnant economy. The latest official house price figures show a rise of 4.5% in Scotland in the year to April 2024 compared with the same period last year, and transactions are also up slightly in the most recent annual data (by 2.1%).

New listings are around 20% up year-on-year in both Edinburgh and Glasgow, which does seem to show some market confidence among sellers. Although conditions remain difficult, it is hoped that interest rate cuts from late Summer will stimulate market activity further.

The rental market has shown classic signs of a demand/supply imbalance for a couple of years, with rapidly rising rents between tenancies and falling supply (despite rising demand), principally due to political interventions. The Scottish Government’s new Housing Bill (as it stands) is doing little to encourage new investment into the sector, but it is hoped that it will go through a revision process during its passage through Parliament.

The Build to Rent (BTR) sector has essentially closed down new investment due to the uncertainty created by the politics, but there has been some positive news, with the emergence of the suburban family BTR sector in Glasgow at Casa by Moda’s scheme, Casa, Vista Park.

The new build market had a particularly difficult last couple of years due to falling demand caused by interest rate rises as well as such rises impacting on developers’ cost of finance. The inflationary environment since early 2022 has also fed through into build costs. As highlighted in the recent Homes for Scotland report on the SME housebuilding sector in Scotland, for which Rettie produced the sectoral data analysis, it is the smaller housebuilders that have been most affected by this downswing.

The public housing sector has also been significantly affected by a cut of around £200 million in its funding by the Scottish Government. Furthermore, there are concerns that the new planning framework (National Planning Framework 4) will constrain land availability for residential development. With the country and many local authority areas declaring a housing emergency, there needs to be a much more proactive government approach to getting this sector back on its feet or Scotland’s problems of a lack of available and affordable housing will worsen.

The new UK Parliament is unlikely to make much of a difference to these sectors. Housing in Scotland is devolved and within the remit of the Scottish Government, whereas market changes will probably be most affected over the rest of the year by decisions by the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee on interest rates.

Although the market remains resilient, it is still a tough one to operate in and these conditions look like being with us for the next six months at least.

Studying entrepreneurship – a comforting illusion of progress? Guest blog by Richard Lennox, scale-up executive who has held leadership roles at Skyscanner and Current Health

As business professor and author Dr Brené Brown writes in Dare to Lead, “Studying leadership is way easier than leading”.  It’s somewhat ironic that I start this piece with a quote from one of the endless supply of resources available to teach us how we should build, scale and lead a company. As a voracious reader and learner, I deeply appreciate that, when used appropriately, the acquired knowledge of the experience of others allows us to make better decisions and scale faster. This quote, however, has been getting under my skin recently.

It highlights a hard truth about our start-up and scale-up ecosystem. The ease of studying entrepreneurial success contrasts sharply with the challenges of actual execution. While the numerous learning experiences for “how to start a startup” and “how to scale” might seem inherently valuable to founders, we have to ask ourselves: Is our desire to act as educators a comforting illusion of progress rather than a catalyst for real achievement?

I do not dispute that there is a clear need to close the entrepreneurship knowledge gap left by the more traditional educational establishments in Scotland. Yet, as we are inundated with workshops, meet-ups, courses, and accelerators – how many inspire action that materially changes the trajectory of the business? Do we really know?

Building and scaling a business demands resilience, adaptability, and primarily the courage to act in the face of often overwhelming uncertainty. It is messy and unpredictable. We make decisions with incomplete information, pivot strategies to reflect market feedback, and endure significant setbacks, all of which are specific to our context. You cannot truly replicate that experience in a classroom, even those created by the deified of Silicon Valley. In my own experience of driving growth in two of Scotland’s most successful tech sector companies, success was driven by a pattern of matching problems to solutions in the critical moments and synthesising that expertise into action and delivery.

While education is valuable, it needs to better complement necessary action to unlock growth. Effective leaders will strike a balance between acquiring targeted knowledge and critically applying it. Fundamentally, both Skyscanner and Current Health were successfully built on an execution first mindset coupled with continuous learning. So, how can we better support and move towards a bias for action within our ecosystem?

One specific suggestion is maximising access to experienced operators, executives, and founders – those that have lived the journey – at the point and time of need. This goes beyond mentoring programs with prescribed approaches towards delivering direct support through experienced people with skin in the game. 

We need to better help scale-up leadership teams to discard the notion of boards and advisor panels made up of institutionalised investors; and to create cross-functional ‘mastermind groups’ that contribute at the right time. These mastermind groups would regularly support and advise but also lean into the business as needed, taking the time to go deeper into challenges presented. 

Engagements with this group are highly execution focused and accelerative for the business, while at the same time helping the leadership teams grow and learn. When you move from the start-up phase towards having product-market fit and the scaling phase of the business, this option would be inherently more valuable than the latest, best selling “How to scale” lessons.

The myth of lacking global ambition, guest blog by Paul Wilson, CEO of the Smart Things Accelerator Centre

For decades, Scotland has been a global leader in educating, developing, and exporting competitive talent, particularly in the electronics device industry. Scottish professionals have made significant contributions to renowned international brands such as IBM, Apple, Dyson, BlackBerry, and Motorola.. This success demonstrates that, given the right opportunities, Scots can rise to any challenge and build impressive international careers. So, why is there a persistent narrative around Scotland’s so-called "ambition crisis"?

After spending 11 years in Canada, I returned to Scotland with a fresh perspective. In Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, I witnessed a remarkable transformation. The region transitioned from being dominated by BlackBerry to becoming a powerhouse of startup innovation, producing numerous internationally competitive startups. Inspired by this, Gregor Aikman, Paul Winstanley and I founded STAC to replicate this success in Scotland, focusing on the “Things” sector, including wearables, sensors, advanced robots, and drones.

Starting STAC in Scotland was driven by a desire to build competitive startups similar to those in Ontario—a region recognised as a world-class tech hub and an exemplar of entrepreneurship. As I started, I was frequently asked, “Do they have more confidence?” “Do they take more risks?” “Are Canadians more ambitious?” The truth is, Canadians have similar levels of self-doubt and risk appetite. Their ambitions are fuelled by visible examples of large-scale success. The key difference is that they have created a system that fosters repeated success, and being close to such success breeds belief.

At STAC we reject the narrative of a lack of ambition, and focus instead on building a system that nurtures realisable ambition. In just over 2 years, we have made significant progress in laying the groundwork for international competitiveness. Our mentorship program delivered by industry experts provides 18 months of comprehensive support to startups, ensuring they are ready, well-rounded, and sustainable.

We mobilised an industry-led effort and a cluster of 20 corporates who support building world-class startups with their products, services, market intelligence, and valuable networks. This industry-led effort is unique in Scotland and vital to STAC’s model.

Scotland does not suffer from a lack of ambition. What we need is a robust system that continuously cultivates success, encouraging more Scots to realise their potential. At STAC, we are dedicated to building this system and demonstrating that Scotland’s entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well.

Last year we launched a talent acquisition platform and next month we will open one of Europe’s biggest co-working spaces for creators and makers of “Things”, a 250-desk capacity, fully equipped space called The Beyond in Finnieston, Glasgow. To fuel the startups with the needed capital, STAC Syndicate is launching in September this year, combining Scottish investors with international capital from Asia.

Next, we connect our startups to global markets. Last week we announced our partnership with Volvo Cars, which will unlock our innovation to benefit a world leader in sustainable and safe transportation. Volvo’s innovative and progressive mindset towards mobility matches the thinking of our real problem-solving entrepreneurs. STAC provides the support that gets our startups ready for the scale needed in such collaborations.

As Johanna Arvidsson, Director at Volvo Cars, put it in our news release: “STAC has demonstrated great potential and excellence in smart products and deep tech, enabling technologies such as AI, advanced materials, and battery-powered solutions. They are led by highly qualified industry executives who can develop innovation to scale, and this is one of the main reasons why we have chosen to invest in STAC. We are excited about the future and the collaborations with the best of the UK's innovative start-ups.”

We are on a great trajectory at STAC, unleashing innovation powered by a powerful industry cluster. There is no lack of ambition here - only an absolute focus on method and how to succeed on the global stage.

What Scotland needs is smart global capital, guest blog by Ross Hamilton, managing director of Sustainable Alpha and chair of the New York GlobalScot Advisory Board

What drives the world's leading tech ecosystems?

Exceptional university research with the potential for commercial spin-outs, well-structured incubators and accelerators, talented individuals, a culture of innovation and commercialisation, progressive policies, tax incentives, and - crucially - smart investment.

Scotland possesses most of these components in abundance, yet some integral elements are still missing.

Mark Logan’s Scottish Technology Ecosystem Review, published in 2020, outlined the steps necessary to foster a more entrepreneurial ecosystem that is supportive of innovation. A significant focus of the report was on nurturing talent by integrating STEM and business entrepreneurship into earlier stages of higher education.

Logan, now chief entrepreneurial adviser to the Scottish Government, also emphasised the critical need for increased international investment. I passionately support both of these points.

The question is how do we make this a reality and drive our ecosystem forward?

Last year, I proposed to Scottish Development International the idea of inviting global investors to Scotland to witness firsthand our dynamic sectors. Our approach was to curate sector-specific sessions that presented real investable opportunities to investors in high-potential startups across biotech and life sciences, climate and space.

We gained invaluable insights into what investors are seeking. When polled, many were interested in investing directly, yet 72% preferred channeling their investments through local funds aligned with specific sectors.

We heard comments from the investors such as 'beautiful valuations', which is investor speak for 'this is really cheap'. Investors used the term 'intellectual humility', acknowledging our brilliance technically, but subtly suggesting we need to improve the way we tell our unique stories. To be fair, I think it is a Scottish trait to undersell ourselves.

These key insights suggest we need to embrace new ways of working. Not just what we need to do, but how we do it.

First, we must present Scotland's narrative from an external, 'outside-in' and forward-looking perspective. We need to pivot towards a proposition of growth on the world stage, explaining how we solve global problems. We need to demonstrate how we partner with private investors, and are not dependent on public funding.

Risk-taking is a second area where we can improve.

On the investment side we need more emerging venture funds who can be the new and upcoming allocators of capital and who take more risk. On the founder side, we need to foster a culture and environment of more risk-taking that celebrates and supports those that take those risks and venture beyond the conventional. And we need to drive more ambition to generate bigger outcomes and outsized returns.

Third, our entrepreneurs need to be better educated about venture capital and the dynamics of globally competitive valuations.

As a GlobalScot for the past 20 years, I have observed many Scottish companies struggle to raise adequate capital, often receiving smaller-than-needed investments, or facing excessive equity demands from local investors, making it harder to raise further rounds of investment.

Fourth, to compete globally, Scotland needs 'smarter capital' - investors who not only bring their cheque books but also their extensive networks and expertise. We want their experience around the dynamics of global markets, and how 'go to market' strategies need to factor in cultural nuances in local markets.

Finally, enhancing the commercialisation of research from our amazing public universities is crucial. We need professional accelerators, like smart things specialist Filament STAC in Glasgow, to demonstrate best practices. Changes are needed in equity, licensing, and intellectual rights to remove the barriers for both founders and investors.

As a proud Scot who has spent nearly three decades in the US, I am hopeful about Scotland's potential to continue shaping the modern world. But we need to be clear and honest with what’s happening around the world, and to understand how other emerging economies are accelerating and gaining momentum.

We also need to be cognisant of global market dynamics and cultures, and how we want our innovative Scottish companies to show up on the world stage,

However, hope is not a strategy; we need strategic national actions, such as those proposed by Logan, while we also must integrate fresh outside-in perspectives.

I would encourage Scottish investors to engage with the global investment community, and for the entire ecosystem to lean into a positive mindset of risk-taking and increased collaboration for the greater good.

After all, a rising tide floats all boats. Let’s show our young talent and future entrepreneurs what can be done.

Space is Scotland, by Scottish Space Network founder Andy Campbell

Where is space?  Is it above the clouds, beyond Earth’s atmosphere? Between the sun and planets? Or is it in the vast cosmic realm?

What about the space industry? Is it just rockets, astronauts and ‘Houston we have a problem’?  The reality is space is closer than you think and the growing commercial space sector is right here, right now.

Over the last decade, the sector has rapidly transformed. It has evolved beyond the ‘rockets and astronauts’ stage to become a platform enabling many other sectors - from farming to fintech, life sciences, energy transition and environmental monitoring.

Space is in your hand when you use your smartphone. Space powers every online service you use. It gets you to your destination and even helps farmers track livestock and optimise crop yields putting better food on your plate. In times of crisis, space safeguards our land, sea, and air.

Earlier this week, I attended the “Ignite Space” conference in Leeds, organised by the UK Space Agency. The event celebrated the sector's growth in the UK, showcasing an industry worth over £17.5bn to the economy. It also showcased entrepreneurial leaders building the next generation of space companies.

A key theme was funding and investment. The sector is full of opportunity, driven by sharp entrepreneurial innovation. The challenges of Earth and space call for visionary businesses to produce novel solutions. New methodologies, inventions and business models are being created daily. The growth opportunities are vast and the payoff to those brave businesses who take a ‘giant leap’ are considerable.

This environment is intriguing for investors, but much work is needed to ready companies for investment and attract the right angels and VCs.

It may come as a surprise to some, but Scotland is at the heart of the UK’s space economy. Shetland hosts Europe’s first and only licensed rocket launch facility, capable of taking payloads into orbit. Glasgow is second only to California in satellite manufacturing. Edinburgh is home to a growing number of world-class downstream space data companies.

The Scottish sector is poised for continued growth over the next decade, expected to create 12,000 new roles, growing its market share of the multi-trillion dollar industry to £4bn annually. However, the sector needs critical business support and growth capital from both public and private sectors to maintain its position in the new space race.

Scotland has the skills and intellectual prowess but we must adopt a pioneering economic strategy to deliver public funding, enabling innovation and attracting abundant inward investment to drive commercialisation and market share. We must empower organisations like Space Scotland and Scottish Space Network (SSN) to champion the sector.

SSN has already taken steps to develop Scotland's investment landscape through its partnership with New York-based Sustainable Alpha. The partnership aims to position Scotland as a global leader in space innovation and funding, offering comprehensive investment solutions. It focuses on developing global investment opportunities for early-stage and growing space tech businesses and investors, aiming to unlock alliances and new markets, ensuring Scotland offers a full end-to-end service in the space sector.

Space has the power to transform our businesses, society and planet for the good of humankind and Scotland is ready to lead the way!

Geopolitics means the UK must decide on Chinese plan for Scottish wind hub, by Jeremy Grant

If Ed Miliband ends up heading the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero in a few weeks a priority will be GB Energy, the publicly-owned clean energy company that Labour claims will “position Britain as a leader in technologies such as floating offshore wind”.

Offshore wind is central to the UK’s ability to transition from fossils fuels as we tackle climate change. And Britain has more capacity for offshore wind power generation than any other country apart from China. Most of this is in the North Sea centred on the vast ScotWind wind farms project. 

Yet it is China that should be at the top of the ministerial in-tray (even as a decision on where in Scotland GB Energy is to be headquartered is keenly awaited). Specifically: plans by China’s largest offshore floating wind turbine company, Mingyang Smart Energy, to build its first manufacturing plant outside China, right here in Scotland.

Mingyang has impressive form. Last year it installed more offshore wind turbines globally than nearest rival Siemens-Gamesa of Germany, according to energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie. It also offers some of the keenest pricing, as Siemens-Gamesa, Vestas of Denmark and GE Vernova of the US know to their cost.

This has commercial appeal for ScotWind developers faced with inflationary cost pressure, worsening shortages in the offshore wind supply chain, and the need to be able to bid competitively in government offtake price auctions.

Mingyang’s Scottish hub would provide local content for the supply chain and create green jobs. That’s why the company is one of 10 projects designated “priority” under an industry initiative to kick-start an offshore wind supply chain known as the Strategic Investment Model. 

Yet commercial priorities cannot be the only consideration. Geopolitics is part of the calculus too.

Geopolitical instability and conflict were the risks most cited by executives for the second quarter in a row in McKinsey’s latest global survey of economic conditions, published in March. For some, geopolitics may seem a remote concern. Others may argue that there is nothing to see here because China has been involved in Scotland’s offshore oil industry since the 1990s. 

Yet this fails to recognise that the world’s a very different place today. The lesson from Europe weaning itself off reliance on Russian gas is that energy independence matters. By extension, it also matters who you allow to be strategically involved in your energy infrastructure. Ultimate control of wind turbines resides with the manufacturer through its control of the software embedded in them. 

At a time when Brussels is probing Chinese wind turbine companies for allegedly benefiting from unfair subsidies and as the Biden administration ratchets up tariffs on Chinese green industries, the UK is taking a different path.

What message would it send to the UK’s G7 allies if London was prepared to see a Chinese wind turbine manufacturer set up a European beachhead in Scotland without having first done appropriate due diligence, and explain its reasoning? 

The dilemma is that China’s global heft in renewables means it is essential to our collective ability to reach net zero. Yet how to reconcile this with national energy security policy isn’t being addressed. Over to you, Mr Miliband.

Show Her The Money, by Nick Freer

On a rainy Tuesday afternoon in Edinburgh this week, an invitation from SIS Ventures to the Dominion cinema in Morningside for the showing of award-winning film “Show Her The Money” was a nice interlude during the working week. 

In partnership with Pathways Forward, SIS Ventures hosted the film’s producer Catherine Gray as part of a 100-city global tour.  Essentially, the main theme of an excellent and insightful movie is around how women entrepreneurs aren’t getting their share of venture capital. 

While star power is provided by American “Cagney & Lacey” actress Sharon Gless, herself a pioneer in the television industry, the real stars of the show are the pioneering entrepreneurs and investors featured in the film.    

Dawn Lafreeda, who owns more restaurants in the US than any other woman and also invests in early stage ventures, is an absolute powerhouse.  Possibly even more impressive is Pocket Sun, who co-founded a female-led VC fund, SoGal Ventures, which has already helped power a number of billion dollar startups, so-called unicorns, in less than a decade. 

Since Ana Stewart published the Scottish Government-commissioned Women in Entrepreneurship review, co-authored by Mark Logan, last year the whole subject of gender imbalance in business has come increasingly under the microscope.  Some of the stats around the gap between male and female founders are alarming, including that women-founded startups received a paltry 2 per cent of venture capital funding in Europe and the United States in 2023.   

Entrepreneurs showcased in the film include Diipa Bulle-Khosla, founder of Inde Wild, a startup that develops skincare products targeted at South Asian women, Dapper Boi’s Vicky Pasche, on a mission to grow the gender-neutral segment of the fashion industry; Marian Leitner of canned wine producer Archer Roose; and Jasmine Jones, founder of online post-mastectomy clothes line Myya.  

After the screening of the movie, my esteemed colleague Ness Collingridge chaired a panel alongside the LA-based producer Gray, Scottish EDGE CEO Evelyn McDonald, and Pathways Forward founder Ana Stewart, a partner with impact investment firm Eos and a successful entrepreneur in her own right. 

My takeaways are that there is an acute need to increase women’s participation in venture capital, improve financial literacy from an early age, and more collective action is needed to support and invest in diverse, underrepresented groups.  As expressed by one of the panelists on the day, the further away you are from white middle-aged males, the bigger the barriers are to entrepreneurship.  

I guess that is one of the nuances here, in that we can become overly focused on gender imbalance, which can be to the detriment of other marginalised demographics. 

A report released this week by Dechomai, a social enterprise on a mission to empower ethnic minority individuals, unveils some of the barriers preventing ethnic minority entrepreneurs from accessing investment. 

The report’s findings don’t make easy reading, with the vast majority of investment firms not having targets around engaging and investing in the space.  Dechomai’s CEO and founder Bayile Adeoti says, “There isn’t a silver bullet, this requires a system-wide approach, and unless everyone in the ecosystem is involved, it will only be seen as an ethnic minority issue.” 

The great and the good (of Scottish tech), by Nick Freer

Due to the quality of guest contributors of late - including former Financial Times reporter Jeremy Grant writing on renewable energy infrastructure, Pathways Forward’s Ana Stewart considering women in entrepreneurship, and Stellar Omada CEO Colin Frame sharing his thoughts on digital education - it’s a while since I’ve penned this column and I feel a little out of practice.

So, like Bridgerton’s Lady Whistledown after a Netflix mid-season series break, perhaps a notable society event is a good place to restart putting ink on the page - in which case, Contini’s recent 20th anniversary celebration deserves a special mention.

Italian and Scottish inspired restaurant Contini’s is surely an Edinburgh institution as much as it is an eaterie, where the city’s great and the good, including from the business world, meet up for coffee and treats, or to eat great food and drink fine wine in the former banking hall immaculately styled on a Florentine palazzo.

Over a decade ago, when we launched our agency, Contini’s was our office before we had an office.  More than that, when contacts, clients or friends from out of town came to Edinburgh, Centotre at 103 George Street was always my first port of call.  A decade later, in spite of the addition of so many shiny new restaurants around town, Victor and Carina’s place remains my number one.

A week or so ago, my latest meetup was with Glasgow-born GlobalScot Ross Hamilton, a New York-based businessman who is on a mission to bring international investors to Scotland to experience what he describes as “the country’s dynamic sectors” firsthand, helping to take our entrepreneurial ecosystem to the next level.  Watch this space, as I hope Ross will write for this column in the near future.

On the subject of moving the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the right direction, it was encouraging to see the Scottish Government’s commitment earlier this week to extra funding for some of the main initiatives in place to support our most promising startups, through organisations like Scottish EDGE and Pathways Forward.

As a longtime adviser to Scottish tech brands like Skyscanner and CodeBase, and many startups and tech ecosystem players along the way, I have written extensively on the trajectory of the nation’s technology sector down the years, and it feels like the retooled Scottish cabinet has a better understanding of all things tech.

While former Skyscanner COO Mark Logan has been front and centre of the so-called ecosystem building process since he published the Scottish Technology Ecosystem Review in 2020, another Skyscanner chief has engaged himself in the tech narrative and debate in more recent times.  Shane Corstorphine, the online travel site’s former CFO, has published a series of LinkedIn posts around what he describes as “Building a world-class scale-up ecosystem” which have caught the eye of the tech scene.

Referencing a piece on Forbes, Shane agrees that scale-ups must have achieved a high degree of product-market fit, while demonstrating sustainable annual growth of more than 20 per cent over three years.  However, to be defined as truly world-class, startups must jump a higher bar.  Having walked the talk, small wonder that guys like Mark and Shane are now among the leading voices in Scottish tech.

China role in Scotland’s offshore wind supply chain poses tricky dilemma, by Jeremy Grant

It’s been a big week for renewable energy in Scotland. 

First, a £100 million loan from Scottish and UK development banks was given to develop a port at Ardesier in the Highlands for assembly of offshore wind farms. Then ground was broken at Port of Nigg for a subsea cable factory. Plans were also unveiled for green hydrogen production at Grangemouth.

What do these have in common? Foreign investment. Ardesier is backed by Texas-based private equity firm Quantum Capital Group, the Nigg factory involves £350m from Sumitomo Electric of Japan, while German energy group RWE is behind the hydrogen project.

Contrary to some of the economically illiterate analysis I’ve read recently, foreign investment is good for the build-out of renewables and creates jobs.

This new investment comes at a time of wars in Europe and the Middle East, which are fracturing geopolitical alignments that have been in place for decades. The world has suddenly become a more dangerous place. It therefore matters which foreign investors are involved in your critical energy infrastructure. 

This is why a question was recently raised in the House of Commons about whether plans by China’s Mingyang Smart Energy, the world’s largest maker of offshore wind turbines, to build a factory in Scotland should be reviewed on security grounds. 

At issue is that fact that electronics and data in a turbine are ultimately controlled by the company that made them, not the wind farm developer (like those involved in the ScotWind projects in the North Sea). There are also concerns about alleged unfair subsidising by China of its renewables sector, undermining European turbine manufacturers Vestas and Siemens-Gamesa.

Yet the issue of Chinese involvement in the UK’s offshore wind supply chain is more nuanced. There are two unavoidable truths here. 

One is that China’s wind turbine manufacturers are deeply embedded in the global supply chain – one undergoing its own version of globalisation due to the huge amount of activity involved. 

The other is that inflationary pressures mean developers have no choice but to consider cost. Mingyang not only has an industry recognised track record as a manufacturer but is also highly competitive, including offering generous financing. The prospect of a new wind turbine factory creating jobs in Scotland will have natural appeal to policymakers on “just transition” grounds, even as it may alarm Vestas and Siemens-Gamesa.

Jonathan Cole, chief executive of offshore wind developer Corio Generation, told a renewables conference in Glasgow: “If you look at the amount of deployment needed in renewable energy to hit energy transition targets and the current capability of the supply chain, by about 2026/27 every region of the world except China has a shortage of critical components. So, if we extract China from the supply chain what we’re actually going to do is delay the energy transition and make it more expensive. And that’s not in our national interest.” 

There are no easy answers. But whether to allow a deepening of China’s role in Scotland’s energy transition is turning into a significant policy dilemma facing the Scottish and UK governments. 

Gulf interest in Wood Group highlights Scotland’s renewables promise, by Jeremy Grant

Here we go again. Last week, Wood Group rejected a takeover offer from Sidara, a private engineering and consulting group with roots in the Middle East. The offer for the London-listed company, founded in 1982 by Sir Ian Wood, came a year after it rejected four successive offers from Apollo Global, a US private equity firm. 

The Aberdeen-based company is emblematic of Scotland’s heft in the oil and gas sector, forged in the 1970s when the North Sea was emerging as one of the world’s most promising prospects. It provides the services and technology needed to oil the cogs of the energy business such as pipeline maintenance and equipment overhaul.   

Yet Wood has been navigating choppy waters. Two years into a three-year restructuring it has made progress transitioning from oil and gas clients to those in renewables (hydrogen, wind, and carbon capture). But its shares had fallen by about a third since the collapse of the Apollo approach and before the Sidara offer. 

The challenge lies not in the health of its business (pre-tax earnings and margins were up in the first quarter) nor in whether its transition makes sense (it does, because tackling climate change is urgent). It lies instead in the difficulty a publicly listed company has persuading myriad shareholders to keep the faith with a process that has no precedent. 

That process involves riding two horses at once. As Barclays analysts put it: “The energy narrative … no longer is renewables instead of fossil fuels in transition, rather it is improved fossil fuel utilisation complementing renewables adoption.”

The public markets are a schizophrenic lot, impatient for jam today even as they may feel inclined to reward a compelling renewables transition story at some point. 

Executives in a recent annual survey by consultants Bain revealed that they think it’s getting harder to generate adequate return on investment on energy transition-oriented projects. Yet it’s a transition that holds out genuine promise. Recent deals in Scotland point to why Sidara - founded in 1965 in Dubai by four engineering professors and now a sprawling operation in 60 countries – might be interested in Wood. 

Scotland is home to many companies that made their name in oil and gas servicing but which are pivoting towards renewables because they know there’s no long-term future in hydrocarbons and future cashflow lies in net zero. 

That’s attracted the attention of buyers. “There is significant interest globally in businesses that have developed deep technical skills in offshore engineering and construction as a result of servicing the oil and gas industry for years and which are now channelling these skills into new energy technologies,” says Jon Shelley, head of deals at PwC Scotland. Last year, Japan’s Mitsui bought STATS, a 26-year-old Aberdeen pipeline repair company that’s now working on hydrogen pipelines.

The question is whether Wood is better off riding both horses as a publicly-listed company, constantly under the glare of shareholders to perform, or whether its ability to win more renewables work and make the transition is more likely to come good under the ownership of private – and patient - capital. 

Do we need to view the business events sector through a different lens? Guest blog by Professor Gary Hutchison, Edinburgh Napier University

As a senior academic, the value of attending business events and conferences over the last 20 years has been essential in learning my trade and is a significant part of any academic’s career. So why now should we revisit this topic, and what is the significance to those that work outside of academia and events management?

To frame this, it is important to understand the policy landscape and the frameworks created by the Scottish Government. Universities must respond and adapt to a plethora of reports, reviews, and recommendations. One key focus of government is how the knowledge generated in Scotland’s universities can be released to support economic growth and innovation in both the public and private sectors. So, how does this impact business events?

It is important to highlight two documents that detail the expectations of the sector over the next 10 years, namely Scotland’s National Innovation Strategy, and The Entrepreneurial Campus, both seen as vehicles to help deliver the National Strategy for Economic Transformation. These set a direction of travel for universities to align and interact with organisations in regional ecosystems to accelerate entrepreneurial thinking through social and impact-led activities in areas of strength for Scotland - Energy Transition, Health and Life Sciences, Data and Digital Technologies and Advanced Manufacturing.

Knowledge exchange (KE) from universities is not a new concept. What has changed is the motivation, recognition, and assessment of this activity.  Universities have developed ways to incentivise staff, from inclusion of KE activities in promotion criteria, specific career pathways and financial incentives to work with businesses, to help realise beneficial economic impact from research expertise.

Edinburgh Napier University’s success with the Mountain Bike Centre for Scotland has delivered 367,000 public engagement opportunities, engaged 317 individual companies and aided product development to a value of £16 million. Looking to the future, the innovation and academia connection with the Lost Shore surf resort project in Ratho demonstrates future financial and societal impact to the city.

If universities have been doing this for a long time, then why the re-emphasis?  After attending this week’s Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce and Convention Edinburgh business breakfast, it crystalised that we may all believe we are doing this, but we are all speaking a slightly different language with slightly different motivations. To address this, we must ensure business events become more interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral to progress a shared understanding and focus.

Post pandemic, people are returning to in-person meetings. For me this is key to achieving deep collaboration and understanding. Online has a role to play, but in a world seeking a reduced carbon footprint we need to recognise the value of activity and the carbon we expend as delegates and event organisers.

So how can business events support economic growth in a city and help universities deliver on the KE agenda? Well, the EICC, NHS and four universities in Edinburgh have created a UK first, named the Exchange Initiative (EI). The EI’s remit is to provide strategic thinking on how to attract business events to Edinburgh, that supports translation of innovation, with a focus on the needs of Edinburgh city and its priorities. It is a different approach and perhaps it will provide the glue and common language that will allow everyone in a city see the value, impact, and legacy of knowledge exchange.

Scotland’s offshore wind ambitions at a crossroads amid global competition, by Jeremy Grant

Next month, a blue plaque commemorating James Blyth will be unveiled in a village set in the rolling fields of Aberdeenshire.

Blyth was an electrical engineer who developed the first turbine capable of producing electricity from wind power, and his home in Marykirk became the first building to be powered by wind-generated electricity in 1887.

Scottish Renewables, the industry body organising the event, says this marked the “very start of Scotland's renewable energy journey”. Over a century later, where is Scotland with offshore wind?

Answering this question may seem tricky given the mixed signals sent by the dumping of the Scottish government’s 2030 net zero target and a series of announcements by offshore wind developers of progress with their North Sea projects. The latest came last week from Green Volt, jointly owned by Tepco, a Japanese utility, Italian energy group Eni, and Norway-based private equity investors, that it had received offshore planning consent for a wind farm in the North Sea.  

So, are the wind turbines half full of wind, or half empty? The answer is that Scotland, and the vast ScotWind project that’s at the core of its offshore wind ambitions, is at a crossroads. 

There is still insufficient port infrastructure to cope with all the planned wind farm assembly that happens quayside before turbines are shipped out to sea, while the national grid is in urgent need of upgrading.

Some progress is being made on kick-starting the supply chain required, notably as a result of work by an offshore wind industry body called the Strategic Investment Initiative working group, in which the Scottish government has observer status. 

But the world has changed in the two years since ScotWind first came to public attention through the award to 20 consortia of subsea options to build wind farms in the North Sea.  This is pressuring the project timelines set by the companies in the consortia, including SSE Renewables, BP, Orsted and Marubeni of Japan.  

Two years ago, the UK was almost the only offshore wind game in town. It may still have the second largest amount of installed offshore wind capacity in the world after China, but many more countries are in the game now. 

The Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) says there was a 50 per cent increase in offshore wind installations in 2023, compared with 2022. And 54 countries across all continents built new wind power, including Japan, which last week inaugurated the country’s largest commercial offshore wind farm.

 All of these projects are scouring the globe for increasingly scarce kit like turbine towers and blades, anchors, electrical systems and cables. That means one thing: competition. 

Dealing with this in the right way matters because Scotland accounts for 52 per cent of the UK’s future pipeline of wind farms.  

RenewableUK, an industry body, this month published an “Industrial Growth Plan”, setting out how to triple offshore wind manufacturing capacity over the next decade. It identifies strategic manufacturing capabilities that it recommends the UK build up to protect against supply chain risks.

As the report says: “As global competition for renewable energy supply chains intensifies, countries with a long-term, strategic approach will be the most successful in attracting investment in new industry”.  James Blyth is watching. 

Earth Day 2024 is a time to look at local solutions, guest blog by Julie Hutchison, Director for Charities at LGT Wealth Management

The environment and human health and wellbeing are in focus at present, with Earth Day taking place worldwide on 22nd April shining a spotlight on positive actions which can be made locally to safeguard the planet.

One thing we can all do to help the cause is find a way to repair, recycle or re-use old tech, and this is exactly the raison d’être for award-winning social enterprise The Edinburgh Remakery.

Colleagues from LGT Wealth Management in Edinburgh recently spent time helping the Edinburgh Remakery to segregate e-waste, and to prepare materials for the charity’s forthcoming textile workshops. It was also a chance to hand in a range of electronic equipment no longer in use, including old routers, cameras, and mobile phone chargers.

Following this visit, LGT Wealth Management will be hosting one of Edinburgh  Remakery’s tech donation boxes at our Edinburgh offices as a way to pass on other colleagues’s old electronic devices.

If you are struggling to know what to do with old cameras, mobiles, laptops, and tablets you are not alone. Electronic waste is a growing consequence of generations of obsolete tech, which often ends up in a box in a cupboard or, worse still, thrown away as refuse.  Clearly, this is not waste which should be thrown into landfill as electronics contain toxic substances detrimental to human health, water, and soil. If electronic waste is dumped or incorrectly recycled, hazardous materials such as lead and mercury present a real risk.

From its new premises at the foot of Leith Walk, the Edinburgh Remakery diverted almost 45 tonnes of electronic waste from landfill in 2023, of which around three quarters was repaired and around a quarter was responsibly recycled. Edinburgh Remakery doesn’t just focus on recycling, its positive social impact also tackles digital exclusion, making refurbished devices available for sale at more accessible prices.

Over 9,000 tech items have been refurbished and sold to date, raising money which is then put to good use by the charity when delivering its programme of activities.  Beyond this, its tech gifting programme distributes devices for use in the local community, enabling more people to get online.

The Edinburgh Remakery also runs a Repair Café, as part of a global network of thousands of centres that stretch across Europe to Asia, offering support with repairs in order to pass on the skills which many of us have never learned.  Its weekly session on a Friday between 11am-1pm invites people along to visit if they need help with tech repairs. This includes laptops, monitors, and games consoles. Repair Cafés are a further step towards a circular economy, extending the life of products and moving away from the linear economy where resources are extracted, turned into goods, then thrown away.

This Earth Day, if you have a box with old chargers and devices, don’t throw it away.  Take it along to Edinburgh Remakery if you live nearby, or donate your tech waste by placing it in one of their tech donation boxes; a map with their locations around Edinburgh can be found on the charity’s website.

And it goes without saying that charities like Edinburgh Remakery are always looking for more support and volunteers.  They should also be celebrated as we look ahead to Earth Day.

Scotland must invest in digital education, guest blog by Stellar Omada founder and CEO Colin Frame

People are important to every business, they help us to innovate and grow, and to drive future and long term success. 

We also recognise that the talent pipeline in Scotland is not working as efficiently as it could be, and we are well short of the skills we need.  This is a problem because you can only grow a business if you have the right people in place to enable this.   

I share the view of many that we need to fix the problem at the very root, at the grassroots level in schools across the country, taking a bottom-up approach to how tech skills become embedded in individuals.  

Along these lines, we have spent the last few years supporting the provision of digital skills to young people in partnership with Heart of Midlothian F.C. and its pioneering Innovation Centre, alongside other corporates like Baillie Gifford and Dell Technologies.  We think it’s an important template from which others can learn, but we know we can only make so much difference, and it will take others in government and industry to really move the dial.  

When we look beyond our borders, we see examples of countries who outperform us in no small part because of the ongoing investment they make into digital education.  When we talk about the Future of Work, it is nations like Germany and Switzerland who are walking the talk by really investing in digital skills.  

At Stellar Omada, the company I founded five years ago, we recently launched a digital education programme aimed at securing jobs for people with little or not experience in the tech sector.  Following a pilot earlier this year where the seven candidates went on to gain full-time employment, Stellar Elevate commences this month with up to twelve people on a seven-week software testing course that will prepare them for a career in tech. 

As one of Scotland’s fastest-growing technology companies, we have never been short of ambition and we want to have as many as one thousand people come through this programme over the next five years.  Some may see this as overly ambitious, but when you want to make transformative change you have to dream big.  

We are starting off with software testing because that is our bread and butter at Stellar, but we see Elevate evolving over time to cover a host of other tech disciplines.  And yes, while we will want to employ some of our graduates, our initiative is also about addressing the wider digital skills gap for Scotland as a whole.  

As a leader of a Scottish scaleup, we see firsthand how a shortfall in tech skills can hold back the pace of growth, and ultimately top-line economic growth in this country.  We saw CodeClan fold last year, where we lost the main provider of digital skills education at a stroke, and that’s a concern when you’re trying to build a tech group that can compete on a UK-wide level and internationally. 

We want to bring other industry players into the fold as our Elevate programme progresses, and would love to speak to other tech and business leaders over the weeks and months ahead.  If we can truly collaborate, perhaps we can really move that dial. 

Scottish Rugby's brand reaching for new heights, by Nick Freer

In a briefing with the media this week, Scottish Rugby’s chairman John McGuigan said the governing body that runs rugby union in Scotland needs to “step up our performance as a business”.  With the Six Nations still underway for Scotland Women (more on this later), McGuigan was also quizzed about what many consider to be an underwhelming 4th place finish for Scotland Men in their Six Nations equivalent. 

A quick caveat from my perspective is that I’m not sure I ever enjoyed a performance much more than this year’s game against England at Murrayfield, capped by Duhan van der Merwe scampering down the touchline for a try as I lifted my son above the madding crowd to share a sporting moment we will never forget.  How a man of van der Merwe’s size and strength can scamper, well that one remains a mystery…

There’s that saying in sport, that you only remember the victors.  I’ve never been totally convinced by that one.  If this Scotland Men’s team never win a championship, millions of people from New Berwick to New Zealand will remember the style and grit on display against the top teams in the world.  At the same time, it’s hard to argue that we could not have progressed further and reached higher.  

Talking of reaching heights, we (my wife, son, daughter and I) were lucky enough to have pitch side seats for the France game at the Hive Stadium last weekend, a vantage point from which you really get to appreciate how ridiculously high some of the forwards jump when the ball is hurled into the lineout. 

Fresh off a win against the Welsh in Cardiff, marking their seventh test win in a row, the Scotland team went into halftime 5-3 up in a battling performance against the world’s third-ranked team.  A late try in the second half flattered the French, who will feel lucky to have escaped Edinburgh with a win, a year on from a blowout win against Scotland in Brittany.

Much of the credit for this much improved performance must go to head coach Bryan Easson and his team, illustrating what is possible when a coach is given time and resource to develop a set of players, and build culture and trust.   As World Rugby wrote after Scotland’s triumph at the WXV 2 tournament in South Africa last year, “Scotland is on the crest of a wave under Bryan Easson”.

When Easson talks about players, it’s not always the playing attributes he notes first, instead he often talks about “excellent role models” and “inspiring youngsters” as ways to grow the sport and then strive for more global success. In business we talk about brands, and on the eve of the France game last weekend Easson talked about the growth of the Scotland Rugby brand from the perspective of the women’s game.  “It’s going up, and up, and up”, he said, “people want to watch your performances”, and “you’re building a legacy”. 

Sitting in the early springtime sunshine watching his team last weekend next to rugby legend Gavin Hastings, ultramarathon sensation Jasmin Paris, and singer Cammy Barnes, you could see and hear that brand and legacy building with every pass, every kick, every tackle, every cheer from the crowd.  C’mon Scotland! 

Scottish tech can rock, by Nick Freer

At The Scotsman’s Annual Investment Conference at The George Hotel in Edinburgh last week, Baillie Gifford director Ben James spoke about artificial intelligence and how AI means “business as usual is over”. 

Covering tectonic shifts in the computing paradigm in recent decades - through mainframes, mini-computers, PCs, cell phones, IoT devices - James went on to describe how graphic processing units (GPUs) are foundational to today’s generative AI era. 

Baillie Gifford knows its stuff on the subject, with semiconductor giants like Nvidia and ASML among its stock holdings.  Nvidia became the first chipmaker to reach $2 trillion market capitalisation last month, a valuation resulting from the group’s hardware used to power AI, via its H100 and upcoming H200 chips.  

In a Silicon Valley tech scene where CEOs and founders are compared to rock stars, only this week Mark Zuckerberg said of Nvidia chief Jensen Huang that “he’s like Taylor Swift, but for tech”.  

In his concluding remarks, Baillie Gifford’s James said AI marks a major computing paradigm shift, where OpenAI has democratised AI, and is driving changes in software development, autonomous driving, pharmaceuticals, and beyond. 

A fireside chat with investment firm Eos’s partner Mark Beaumont wrapped up proceedings at this year’s conference, with the world record-breaking endurance athlete comparing “adventure” with “venture” (capital) and sharing his view that founders often learn more from failure than success, using an analogy of a capsized boat during a row across the Atlantic. 

As an agency, we’ve worked with Mark and the Eos team, which includes Pathways report chair Ana Stewart, for a few years now.  The term impact investment gets banded around a lot these days, but from where I sit Eos can credibly be called an impact investor.  

Last week we supported a portfolio announcement where Eos led an investment into Neupulse, a university spinout that is advancing the world’s first wearable device aimed at tackling Tourettes Syndrome.  The device stimulates the median nerve in the wrist, reducing the frequency of tics, a condition that is thought to affect as much as 1 per cent of the world’s population.  Closer to home, Scottish musician Lewis Capaldi is one of the individuals to have trialed the innovative technology. 

In a similar vein, we worked with Scottish remote sensor specialist Novosound this week as the company announced it had secured the world’s first patent for its wearable ultrasound technology.  As CEO Dave Hughes commented in the press announcement, “This technology builds on the legacy of ultrasound in Scotland, where it was first demonstrated as a medical diagnostic technique at the University of Glasgow in 1954, and now as a Scottish company moves it out of the hospital into the home via a wearable device”. 

Overall, while our Scottish tech scene faces ongoing challenges, including access to investment and talent, it does feel like we’re in pretty rude health in 2024.  If we can tell our stories of innovation to the rest of the world, the hope is that the investment will then follow. 

Another signpost in the right direction came this week when Techscaler, the Scottish Government’s startup support programme run by CodeBase, revealed a strong first year of operations where it supported over 500 startups who collectively raised over £50 million of investment during the year. 

Scotland’s contribution to learning and sustainable finance in Dubai, by Jeremy Grant

For the first time visitor to Dubai, a ride on the elevated metro that runs parallel to Sheikh Zayed Road, one of the Emirate’s main road arteries, is eye-opening.

Glass and concrete office towers crowd the financial district and, as you head south, your eye is drawn to vast billboards promoting ultra-luxury residential developments sprouting on the outer rim of the 16-lane highway.

“All Dreams Lead to Atlantis The Royal” proclaims one. Another, “Iconic Tower”, has enlisted Pininfarina of Italy to add some designer chic to the architectural lines of its 60 storeys.

Nor does financial services pull any punches. On one billboard, Standard Chartered bank offers cashback in local currency of up to £4,600 for opening a “priority banking” account. MultiBank Group, a foreign exchange and securities trading firm, simply proclaims: “Life is Better With Money”.

It’s easy to conclude that Dubai is defined by a headlong dash for riches. Certainly, the Emirate and its oil-rich neighbour Abu Dhabi, not to mention awakening giant Saudi Arabia, are in the midst of a boom that’s attracting foreigners and their money as much as these Gulf states are projecting their sovereign wealth abroad. 

In the week I was there, two large investments were concluded by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in UK renewable energy. One was Masdar, UAE’s renewable energy company, acquiring a 49 per cent stake in Dogger Bank South, one of the world’s largest planned offshore wind farms. Another was state energy company Adnoc buying 10 per of UK-based Storegga, which is developing a carbon capture and storage project in Scotland. 

Yet there are activities that tell another story, one of investment in human capital and sustainability. Two of them happen to have roots in Scotland.

The Global Ethical Finance Initiative (GEFI) is a Glasgow-based organisation that convenes action on sustainable finance. It held an event in Dubai when I was visiting to assess progress by UAE financial institutions in advancing the COP28 agenda since the climate summit was hosted by the UAE in November. 

In partnership with consulting firm PwC, GEFI announced the launch of a year-long series of meetings known by the Arabic word “majlis” (council, in English) for local financial institutions to discuss opportunities and challenges in sustainable finance.

Across town, about 4,000 students gather at the Dubai campus of Heriot-Watt, the Edinburgh university known for its pioneering work in engineering and business since it was founded in 1821. 

Heriot-Watt has operated a satellite in Dubai since 2005, becoming the first campus of a British university to open at the invitation of the government, providing courses in management, engineering, built environment, food science and fashion. 

The university moved three years to a striking new building near the Dubai headquarters of Google, Cisco and Huawei. Professor Dame Heather McGregor, Provost and Vice Principal of Heriot-Watt University Dubai, says the campus has “extremely strong academia-industry collaboration”, adding that it will “continue to invest in the region in line with our ethos of being one of Scotland’s most international universities, and in our quest to provide opportunities for learning at all stages of life”. To which one might add: life is better with learning. 

IWD 2024: seismic shifts in entrepreneurship, guest blog by Ana Stewart, Partner with investment firm Eos and Chair of Pathways : A New Approach for Women in Entrepreneurship

The seismic achievements and sheer volume of social media that surrounds International Women's Day every year serves as a poignant reminder of the huge strides made towards gender equality since the first IWD in 1911. On the one hand, these achievements evoke a sense of pride in society’s progress, on the other they highlight how far we still have to go and the danger of resting on our laurels.

I experienced two seismic activities of a different nature on a recent visit to Iceland. The first was a so-called seismic swarm, where underground tremors occur in rapid succession in a short period. The second one was above ground when, on the very same day, Iceland's economy ground to a halt. I assumed this was because of the swarm, but I was entirely wrong. 

Iceland was closed because women across the country were staging a one-day strike led by female prime minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir in protest of persistent gender inequality and violence against women.  With Iceland setting the global standard in gender equality for the past four years, it serves as a reality check for the rest of the world which lags behind and is a stark reminder of how much we still have to do 

It's tempting to embrace a convenient truth that gender equality is inevitable, “it is just a matter of time”, a “generational thing”, to reference language I’ve heard recently, where the patriarch will be swept aside by our inclusive-minded successors. However, the data tells us otherwise, and nowhere is this more pronounced than in the field of entrepreneurship. As highlighted in the Pathways report last year, just 1 in 5 companies are female-led and only 2p in every £1 of institutional investment goes to female founders in Scotland.

But here is the nub of it, these numbers have not materially changed in twenty years. This demands our attention. 

Merely acknowledging these disparities is insufficient too; we must actively work to address them. This entails implementing policies and structural changes which tackle the issue at a more profound, system-wide level.

Why should we do this? Entrepreneurs are the lifeblood of the Scottish economy and we should be laser-focused on creating an environment which opens up the opportunity to all would-be founders, at all stages of their journey, regardless of gender or socio-economic background. Statistics tell us that gender diverse leadership delivers more profitable businesses. Investing in the other 52% of our population will significantly increase our entrepreneurial base, our scale-ups and increase Scotland’s economic output. In short, it makes economic sense.

By coordinating our individual efforts and taking collective ownership we will have a significantly bigger impact. The Pathways Pledge embraces this approach, where organisations collaborate and commit to measurable actions to influence behaviours, investment, and government policy. The Authority Gap, written by Mary Ann Sieghart, spells out 139 different actions we can take as individuals, as employers, as educators and as parents to narrow the gender gap within a generation. 

Scotland has an opportunity to do something meaningful here, so let’s embrace the idea of welcoming everyone on their entrepreneurial journey. Let’s move forward faster and create our own seismic shift towards a more scalable, sustainable, and inclusive economy.

China factor may emerge in Scotland's offshore wind aims, by Jeremy Grant

As Burns Night celebrations go, the annual black tie “Chinese Burns Supper” must rank as one of the most colourful cultural mash-ups on the calendar, combining the address to the haggis and a Chinese lion dance.

The organiser, the China-Britain Business Council, hands out awards to Chinese and Scottish businesses and at this year’s event a few weeks ago in Edinburgh, “Chinese Corporate of the Year” went to COES Caledonia (UK) Ltd.

COES, incorporated in 2018 and based in Dundee, is a unit of state-owned maritime giant China Ocean Engineering Solutions Group. While the business may not be a household name here, its award highlights how some of China’s largest state-owned energy players have been operating in Scotland for years.

China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), one of the country’s largest oil and gas companies, operates three oil fields in the North Sea including (since 2007) Buzzard, one of the UK’s highest-producing.

Now, a new chapter is unfolding with the arrival of some of the biggest Chinese players in renewables.

Red Rock Power, a European subsidiary of SDIC Power, a state-controlled energy company based in Beijing, owns 25 percent of the entity that has since 2019 operated the Beatrice wind farm off Caithness. It also co-owns, with Ireland’s ESB Energy, a second planned wind farm off Angus that could generate power for 1.6 million homes once completed.

This makes sense as China has proven global expertise in renewables, just as it has in oil and gas.

Chinese turbine manufacturers are naturally keen to sell to wind farm developers in the North Sea. Most of those are part of ScotWind, a vast, 20-consortia strong project involving companies from Japan, Italy, Germany and France. ScotWind has obvious energy security benefits for the UK.

The Scottish government and industry are working on a programme known as the Strategic Investment Model (SIM) to encourage collaboration to develop the supply chain required for ScotWind to succeed.

Last month, China’s Mingyang Smart Energy, which recently unveiled a turbine almost as long as the Eiffel Tower is tall, was among companies listed as involved in SIM with a proposed wind turbine manufacturing facility.

Some in the industry are squeamish about the involvement of Chinese wind turbine makers in offshore wind. They note that ultimate control of the complex electronics that are part of the operating system for a wind turbine as well as transmission to the grid often sits with the manufacturer, not the developer.

A bigger issue may be competition. With Brussels already alarmed by the effect on European solar panel makers of a flood of cheap Chinese products, it is now turning its attention to Chinese wind turbine manufacturers for the same reason.

China’s Edinburgh consulate says renewable energy is “an important area” for “China-Scotland cooperation” and that China’s bilateral trade and business is “always carried out within the framework of the WTO regulations and abid[es] by related rules and laws”. It adds: “Protectionism, exaggerating security concern and politicising business issues will only damp normal exchange and cooperation”.

Ultimately, facts will be what matters. But the risk of Scotland’s offshore renewables ambitions getting caught in the crosswinds of geopolitics, trade and energy security can’t be overlooked.