AI is on the streets, and in our future, guest blog by Matt Jenner, Founder of Coursensu

Picture San Francisco; hilly, like Scotland - but no match for the history. A wee bit warmer perhaps but comparable ambition and also a magnet for global citizens. I recently visited and noticed something striking: AI isn’t confined to labs and offices - it’s everywhere. From self-driving cars weaving through traffic to billboards promoting automation, AI is integrated into the city's fabric. This visual, tangible presence of AI on the streets is a powerful reminder of how technology influences every corner of our lives.

For startups, educators, and innovators in the Scottish tech sector, this is both an opportunity and a challenge. AI is not a distant trend - it’s already here. To keep pace, we need to adopt a tactical approach that evolves into strategic implementation. We can all start with serious learning experiments, pick something and use it to learn AI with purpose. Ultimately, we must aim for deeper, systemic integration.

AI still carries many unknowns, the beauty within this is the inherent flexibility and potential to experiment. In San Francisco, companies test AI in real-world environments with real people, moving from pilot projects to strategic infrastructure over time. Scotland can adopt this same mindset in our own businesses and this willingness to experiment lends itself to our historic culture of curiosity and innovation.

But experimentation without a clear goal won’t get us far. That’s why it’s crucial to have a vision of how these experiments could scale into fully-fledged, strategic technical implementation. AI is a tool, but the way we use it can define whether we’re simply keeping up with trends or becoming pioneers in our own right.

Take Coursensu as an example. I founded my EdTech (Education Technology) company in Edinburgh, incorporated in Scotland and am supported by Techscaler, the Scottish startup accelerator. Coursensu is a learning design platform, it provides a collaborative visual canvas to plan and prepare engaging learning experiences. I started the company because millions of people still learn from courses and training designed in a spreadsheet.

Initially, AI was an optional extra - users could experiment when they wanted. However, I made it a strategic priority from day one. As the platform evolves, so too has the role of AI. Now, Coursensu offers users much more choice with how they want to use the AI co-pilot. This has evolved alongside AI, and as the capabilities have expanded AI has become more embedded.

Our journey with AI illustrates that when we started small with experiments it didn’t curtail thinking big. What began as optional is now integral to the platform’s functionality, and users increasingly rely on AI to assist with tasks, making learning more dynamic and personalised, while operating at scale. This is the trajectory AI will take in many industries - it begins as an add-on, then becomes foundational.

Much like San Francisco’s autonomous cars, AI is part of the infrastructure of modern life. The question isn’t whether AI will become part of your business - it’s whether you’ll be an active participant or just watch as it goes past. Like a taxi, you can either jump in, or you can stand by while others head off. The choice is yours, but make no mistake - AI is here, and it’s not slowing down.

AI: the great enabler for business growth, guest blog by ClearSky Logic CEO and co-founder Darren Auld

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming the great enabler for businesses looking to scale, innovate, and outpace their competition.  No longer reserved for tech giants, AI is now accessible to companies of all sizes.  The question is no longer “if” AI should be part of your strategy, but “how”.  

When we engage with clients and peers, we talk about a four pillar approach that helps to ensure that the AI journey is as effective as possible, while also de-risking the investment to the greatest extent.

 The first step, or pillar, in AI adoption isn’t about jumping into the latest technology, it’s more about identifying a core business challenge that is holding you back.  Whether it’s inefficiencies, bottlenecks, or a lack of scalability, AI should be implemented to solve a specific, measurable problem that’s preventing growth.  This focus ensures that AI is aligned with your business goals from the outset. 

Ask yourself, what is the most critical business problem that, if solved, could unlock exponential growth?  By clearly defining this problem, you can establish measurable metrics and forecast the return on investment (ROI). 

Secondly, the foundation of any successful AI implementation is high-quality data.  Data powers AI’s ability to generate insights, make predictions, and automate processes.  If your data is fragmented, unstructured, or inaccurate, your AI initiatives will struggle to gain traction.  

Businesses in industries like financial services are already using AI to automate underwriting, streamline risk assessment, and improve fraud detection.  But these gains are only possible if the underlying data is accessible, relevant, and reliable.  Investing in data management and governance is not just an operational necessity, it’s a strategic asset that drives the success of AI initiatives. 

The third pillar we espouse is around launching pilot projects once the problem is defined and the data is ready.  At ClearSky Logic, we aim to deliver working AI prototypes within 12 weeks.  The rapid time frame is made possible by the use of cloud computing, which provides the scalability, speed, and flexibility required to deploy AI solutions quickly and cost effectively. 

Throughout the pilot it’s essential to track the metrics you set under pillar one, so is the AI solution meeting your expectations?  If not, evaluate whether the issue lies in the technology, the data, or a larger business challenge.  Pilots allow you to iterate, learn, and refine before scaling AI across the business.

Pillar four is around what we describe as the continuous AI evolution; AI is not a one-time project, it’s an ongoing strategic asset.  The business landscape is always shifting, and so are the ways in which AI can deliver value.

Today, in plain language, investing in AI is a no-brainer, and to not invest may lead to peril.  Consider this: in the next five to ten years, companies with advanced AI capabilities will outpace competitors that have delayed AI adoption.

Investors and acquirers will seek out companies that are ahead on the AI curve, so a business that successfully integrates AI isn’t just more valuable today, it’s positioned for future value. 

AI is no longer optional, it’s essential for any business looking to thrive in the coming decade.  The question therefore is, are you ready to make AI work for you? 

Floating offshore wind awaits big bang to move Scotland into the future, by Jeremy Grant

“Energy is our heritage, but it is also our future,” declared Gillian Owen, Aberdeenshire Council’s leader last week at a reception for an annual floating offshore wind conference in the Granite City.

Fresh from news that GB Energy’s headquarters is to create hundreds of jobs in Aberdeen, there is a sense of guarded optimism about the prospects for offshore wind in the Northeast.

Much is rightly made of offshore wind’s role in enabling the switch from fossil fuels to tackle the climate crisis. But meeting the ambition for floating wind farms – which are tethered to the sea floor by anchors and cables, unlike their fixed-bottom cousins – is a huge challenge.

That’s because it is commercially unproven at scale. The few floating wind farms that exist, off Scotland and Norway, are small and partly designed to test the technology.

The vision for floating wind’s role in the energy mix is Promethean. The UK is the third largest floating wind market after Italy and the US by announced ambition. Scotland accounts for 75% of what’s supposed to be operational in UK waters by 2030. Most of this is to come from the ScotWind project and INTOG, a scheme under which oil rigs are to be decarbonised by switching to wind-generated power from diesel.

Yet rising costs have dogged offshore wind developers globally, casting doubt on the viability of wind farms far out at sea. Some believe that plans may have to be scaled back, or refocused on fixed-bottom where there is a commercial track record and more parts standardisation. At the conference, hosted by Scottish Renewables and RenewableUK, an American-owned company called OSI Renewables demonstrated a scale model of a cheaper crossover between floating and fixed platform for use at the 60-metre depth where floating starts to be viable.

Industry is disappointed that the UK government’s latest subsidy round to incentivise commercialisation last month included only one floating wind project, an INTOG project called Green Volt, Europe's largest floating windfarm, which will be headquartered in Aberdeen. 

Further hurdles are grid upgrades, supply chain gaps, adaptation of port infrastructure and project consent, although John Swinney, Scotland’s First Minister, sought to reassure the conference with repeated mentions of “policy certainty”.

Still, there are signs of incremental progress, if not the big bang needed to de-risk offshore wind and unlock financing and insurance. Work is progressing on adapting the subsea technology used in oil and gas at the Floating Wind Innovation Centre, the world’s first facility for developing floating offshore wind technology and based in the Energy Transition Zone (ETZ), an industrial park next to Port of Aberdeen. Mooreast, a Singaporean company, is working with the ETZ on plans for a factory that would produce the huge anchors and foundations needed to tether an offshore wind platform to the seabed.

There is also ambition. A report by a government-industry floating offshore wind taskforce, unveiled at the conference, says floating turbines could be Britain’s biggest industrial success story by providing a third of the UK’s offshore wind capacity by 2050, creating almost 100,000 jobs – “if the right measures are put in place to enable more projects to go ahead faster”.

How Scotland can compete on the global tech stage, guest blog by Josif Grace, CEO and Founder of Legado

When I first set foot in Silicon Valley, it felt like stepping into the engine room of global innovation. Working at RocketSpace - a technology scale-up accelerator and corporate innovation consultancy - put me in the midst of a unique and thriving ecosystem.

It was home to unicorns like Uber and Spotify, companies that grew from ideas into global giants through a combination of access to capital, talent, and a relentless focus on innovation. The experience taught me that a powerful ecosystem is essential to nurture tech companies, allowing them to scale rapidly and create world-class solutions.

Fast-forward to today, and I now lead Legado, a rapidly growing technology company based in Edinburgh. Reflecting on my time in Silicon Valley, I can see how Scotland - particularly Edinburgh - has quietly but significantly transformed into a thriving tech hub. Parallels between the two tech ecosystems are becoming more evident with each passing year.

While Edinburgh might not have the same scale as San Francisco, the evolution of Scotland’s tech ecosystem, championed by organisations such as FinTech Scotland, Scottish Financial Enterprise, and CodeBase, has made Edinburgh a standout destination for innovation and growth. These organisations have created an environment that mirrors some of the most important attributes of Silicon Valley: access to capital, talent, and customers, all in one place.

For early-stage companies, these three elements are critical to success. Silicon Valley’s strength lies in its ability to connect brilliant minds with the financial backing they need to rapidly iterate, pivot, and scale their ideas. The region is a playground of venture capitalists, customers eager to adopt new technology, and a vast pool of talent ready to join the next unicorn. Edinburgh, with its growing tech community and vibrant financial sector, is increasingly offering similar opportunities.

While venture capital investment in Scotland may not yet rival Silicon Valley’s scale, it is undeniably on the rise. Edinburgh has established itself as a hub for innovation, supported by a growing number of investors who recognise the potential here. Companies like the FNZ Group and Souter Investments have not only provided essential financial backing to Legado, but also valuable strategic insights.

Alongside these, investors such as Par Equity, Equity Gap, Maven Capital Partners, ForesightEU, and SEP are playing a vital role in fostering the growth of the broader tech ecosystem. Their support has enabled us, and others, to scale faster and smarter, all while developing products that address real customer needs.

But it’s not just about the capital. The strength of Edinburgh’s ecosystem lies in the collaboration between tech companies and forward-thinking institutions. With a rich talent pool driven by the city’s globally renowned universities and a well-established financial services sector, there’s a perfect blend of expertise and opportunity.

Scotland’s tech landscape is undoubtedly fertile, and we’ve seen this play out in the success of local technology scale-ups such as Amiqus, Aveni, and BR-DGE. These companies are blazing a trail, showing that Scottish innovation can thrive on the global stage.

However, to truly compete we need to foster a culture that embraces greater ambition and the kind of risk-taking that drives monumental success. The future is bright for Scottish tech, but to fully realise that potential, we must adopt the mindset of Silicon Valley - where calculated risks lead to transformative rewards.

AI powering 'Fourth Industrial Revolution', by Nick Freer

In a recent Bloomberg interview with Bill Gates, when quizzed about artificial intelligence (AI) the Microsoft founder said he thinks we’re seeing a “fundamental advance as important as any in the history of digital technology”.

Tech giants like Microsoft are investing tens of billions of dollars into AI, not only backend capacity but also to reengineer their applications so they are more productive.

On the subject of AI chipmaker Nvidia becoming the world’s most valuable company earlier this year, Gates was asked if he worried that we’re seeing bubble valuations around AI stocks.  “Multiples aren’t as high as during the internet bubble and the growth is real”, said Gates, “I mean, AI is not Pets dot com”.

This week, Nvidia’s stock rose by more than 2 per cent after an industry report projected “unprecedented” levels of investment in artificial intelligence and related technology infrastructure to stay on top of the AI boom.

AI has an insatiable need for electricity and it is draining power grids worldwide.  For Gates, this presents an obvious conundrum.  In 2015, he founded Breakthrough Energy, a venture capital firm set up to invest in emerging climate technologies.

Taking a quick look at artificial intelligence stories across the news this week, we can see its phenomenal scope - from detecting new archaeological sites in the desert, to actors John Cena and Judi Dench providing voicing for Meta’s chatbot.  Unquestionably, AI is now all-pervading, and it is no surprise that many commentators describe it as being the main driver of the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’.

The idea of algorithms pretending to be humans and distorting information systems is one of the concepts considered by author Yuval Noah Harari in ‘Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI’, published earlier this month.

Harari uses the example of going onto Twitter/X, where you see a story with a lot of traffic and traction, and the natural assumption is that a lot of humans are interested in it.  Many of these stories, asserts Harari, are actually generated by bots and algorithms.  As he puts it, “we shouldn’t have a situation where algorithms that pretend to be humans are running our conversations”.

Nexus outlines how the corporate algorithms of Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and others deliberately spread fiction, hate, fear, and greed because this is good for their business interests.  Further still, this is what they should be liable for, namely the decisions and actions of their algorithms, as opposed to what human users are doing on their platforms.

Comparing organic information (human) versus inorganic information (algorithms), Nexus gets to the root of one of our great modern dilemmas: human beings work in cycles, sometimes we work, sometimes we need sleep, but algorithms are tireless.  “What see in the world now”, says Harari, “is that algorithms increasingly make us work at their pace, there is never any time to rest - the news cycle, markets, politics, they are always on”.

Harari frequently returns to paradoxes: for instance, we have named ourselves Homo sapiens, meaning the wise human - but if we are so wise, why are we doing so many self-destructive things?

Right, I’m off to unplug our Alexa, at least for the weekend.

A new dawn awaits the Scottish space sector, guest blog by Dr Andy Campbell, CEO and Founder of Scottish Space Network

“Earth sure looks like a perfect world.” The words of Jared Issacmann, Commander of the privately funded SpaceX mission ‘Polaris Dawn’, as he exited the Crew Dragon capsule on 12th September. Travelling at over 18,000mph at an altitude 450 miles above earth, Issacmann’s EVA (Extra vehicular Activity) or spacewalk in common parlance, marked a new era in commercial space exploration, laying the foundations for a shift towards civilian and commercial led missions.

 These missions, unfairly dismissed as billionaires having fun, are critical for testing new space flight technologies, spacesuits, science and human ability, essential steps towards future commercial operations for low earth orbit, lunar and deeper space activities.

 As space activity becomes more commercially driven, the Polaris Dawn mission opens the door for a new type of space workforce of the future, a workforce who could, in the near future, be responsible for constructing and maintaining habitats and infrastructure in space and on the moon.

 Similar to Scotland’s oil and gas industry sending engineers ‘offshore’, space will soon require a skilled, versatile workforce capable of working ‘off planet’ with all the training, logistics, H&S and infrastructure behind it. This vision will be supported by advancements in robotics to augment human capabilities, enabling construction and maintenance operations safely in the harshest environments.

 As Issacman was experiencing the ‘Overview Effect’ my feet were on terra firma at the inaugural Space-Comm Expo at the SEC, Glasgow. This event underscored the rapid growth and ambition of the Scottish space sector. With Glasgow recognised as the largest small satellite manufacturing hub outside of California, Scotland has become a key player in the global space economy. The sector is expected to generate over 12,000 highly-skilled jobs within the next decade, driven by innovative companies such as AAC Clydespace and Spire who’ve made Glasgow their Scottish base.

 At the expo, Richard Lochhead, Scotland's business minister, pointed out that Scotland is continuing its long tradition of innovation as the space sector increasingly supports crucial industries like telecommunications, agriculture and financial services to name a few. It’s now becoming clear how space technology can transform various sectors and economies here on earth.

 The UK Space Agency has been pivotal in fostering Scotland's space ambitions, supporting the development of launch capabilities at SaxaVord and Sutherland spaceports. These facilities are set to handle up to 42 vertical launches annually, further solidifying Scotland's role in the global space race. Additional investments demonstrate commitment to ensuring Scotland becomes a leading destination for innovation driven space entrepreneurs.

 As Scotland builds its "end-to-end" space sector capability, from launch, satellites and data, a wealth of opportunities for business and employment will be created, driving economic prosperity and growth. This will need to be powered in part by private sector investment and dedicated entrepreneurial and commercial support.

In the coming decades, I am in no doubt we will see a future where workers trained in space operations will leave Earth just as routinely as engineers head offshore today from Scottish soil. The fusion of human ingenuity, robotic innovation and scientific research will accelerate the commercialisation and industrialisation of space, cementing Scotland's place as a gateway to the stars.

To Infinity and Beyond! By Nick Freer

To infinity and beyond!  We all know space from the big screen, but the cosmos can also seem like a place in a galaxy far far away.  However, all things interstellar came into much closer view this week as the UK’s largest industry space event, Space-Comm Expo, landed in Glasgow.

With a focus on the commercial future of space, we were reminded that turnover in the UK sector reached over £17 billion in 2022, the latest recorded year, equating to around 6 per cent of the global space market.

Within the UK context, Scotland’s space sector is projected to achieve revenue of £4 billion within the next six years, more than doubling the current level of jobs, estimated to be in the region of 10,000 today.   

Among our starring domestic players is Scottish rocket manufacturer Orbex, recently raising £16.7 million, including a large cheque from Scottish National Investment Bank, as the company, whose technology is powered by renewable biofuel, gears up for the launch of its satellite transportation vessel Prime .  To date, Orbex has raised over £100 million from domestic and international VCs.

The UK’s only other rocket manufacturer, Skyrora, is also Scotland-headquartered, based in Glasgow with a manufacturing site in Cumbernauld.   On a similar trajectory to Orbex, the company’s three-stage Skyrora XL rocket, powered by 3D printed engines, continues to prepare for its inaugural launch at the Sutherland Spaceport, located on a remote site at the A’Mhoine peninsula, west of Tongue on Scotland’s north coast.

A relatively new entrant to the nation’s space conversation is the Scottish Space Network, which recently set out plans to secure more inward investment for the sector here.  Look out for a more informed piece here from its CEO, Dr Andy Campbell, next week.

Only a giant leap away from Space-Comm Expo, at Skypark in Glasgow’s Finnieston on Thursday evening, Scotland’s Smart Things Accelerator Centre (STAC) marked the opening of its ‘thebeyond’ campus, a facility comprising product development labs and co-working, that CEO and co-founder Paul Wilson says is set to be Europe’s largest “smart things” hub.

As STAC approaches its 3rd anniversary, with a blueprint based on his time in Ontario where a similar accelerator launched over 500 startups and created over 5,000 jobs, former Blackberry executive Wilson has ambition built into his DNA.

Writing for The Scotsman a few weeks’ back, STAC’s CEO puts it like this: “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.”

STAC has already helped to create and support over 50 early stage ventures in Scotland, companies who have collectively raised over £15 million, and equating to hundreds of jobs.

In June, STAC announced a strategic partnership with Volvo Cars to provide an innovation pipeline for the Swedish carmaker that is a pioneer in the global electric vehicle (EV) market, and a reminder of sorts that until Elon Musk takes humankind to Mars the majority of technology innovation will take place on terra firma.

Connecting our tech ecosystem around the world, guest blog by CodeBase's chief strategy officer Steven Drost

The main function of Techscaler, the Scottish Government’s startup growth programme run by CodeBase, is to grow the economy by inspiring and helping more people to become startup founders in Scotland. We do this by creating a platform that brings together space, education, community, mentorship, and fundraising pathways.

If you want to build a startup in Scotland, Techscaler will always have a next step, a signpost, or a connection for you. In terms of the numbers, the programme has already onboarded over 1,000 startup members, many of whom have gone on to raise money, make hires, and more. Raising investment is one of the hardest things you can do, and we would never want to claim startup founders’ fundraising successes; with that in mind, it’s worth noting that Techscaler member companies have raised an impressive £50m in 2023.

Techscaler itself makes the effort to embody the startup spirit - always moving fast, iterating, seeking to better understand our market and how we can help best, making small bet experiments, measuring outcomes, pivoting, refining - rinse and repeat.

In this very spirit, Techscaler is itself taking a new step and has added a new feature: cost-effective international Techscaler pop-ups.

In February and now again in September, we have opened light touch Techscaler pop-up hubs in San Francisco, where Scottish founders work from a common location, pitch investors and customers, attend and present at meetups, and get to network and learn from Silicon Valley peers.

The feedback we received from San Francisco was great, founders were excited and investment connections were made. So, we are doubling down and doing more.

In October, Scotland-based startup founders will travel to Singapore, working alongside local peers, pitching to investors, and engaging with potential customers. Scotland’s generous and experienced Global Scot community in Singapore are helping prepare the startups with their local knowledge so they hit the ground running. Founders will also be attending the Singapore Week of Innovation and Technology (SWITCH 2024) conference, which is one of Asia’s premier networking conferences.

The pop-ups seek to connect our Scottish tech ecosystem with other ecosystems around the world. Connecting ecosystems is the modern approach to economic development. It exposes local talent to global investors, which leads to inward investment. It helps local businesses open new markets and sell abroad, and plugs them into best practice trends and practitioners who are trying to do the same.

More concretely, the international hubs enable our startups and founders to learn about and establish new markets. Think about online travel site Skyscanner, founded in Scotland before opening its first international office in Singapore. From this base, a gateway into APAC, Skyscanner could access regional customers and build its business in Asia.

Of course, Skyscanner also went onto secure investment from Asia-based venture capital firms. And there are other examples of Scottish startups securing investment from APAC VCs, including pureLiFi (the world leader in the innovation and development of mobile communications tech that uses light to transmit data) being backed by Singapore sovereign wealth fund Temasek.

By exposing our startups to best practice startup techniques from across the world, we can fulfil an important function, because if you want to compete internationally you have to be at least as good as the best startups in your sector, no matter where they are based worldwide.

Steven Drost, Chief Strategy Officer, CodeBase

Sustainable growth and the importance of business tourism, guest blog by EICC CEO Marshall Dallas

At the EICC, we are focused on promoting a more responsible events industry. Last week's launch of our inaugural Impact Report fits directly with this strategy. 

Looking at our performance over the last decade, we disclosed a 60 percent reduction in carbon emissions Scope 1 and 2, a 41 percent reduction in electricity and waste, and a 46 percent reduction in water usage. All whilst doubling the number of events.

Our commitment to making a positive impact on the environment and society is central to our goals as we strive to reach net zero by 2030. Whilst we’re passionate about being one of the most sustainable conference centres worldwide, our raison d’etre is to generate economic impact for Edinburgh. Last year, the economic benefit of events held at EICC totalled £58 million.

To meet global environmental standards, we continuously look at ways to improve.  Last year, we partnered with You.Smart.Thing., an online travel platform that provides personalised low-carbon travel plans. This enabled us to chart that 85 percent of delegates using the tool opted for sustainable travel en route to the venue. 

Locally, our partnership with Olio enables surplus food to be redistributed to community groups, which so far has equated to 750 meals for households around the city.  Nationally, through our Climate Action Contribution initiative with RSPB Scotland, we have secured around £70,000 to date via delegate and dinner guest contributions, with funds going to peatland restoration.  

A series of recent international awards encourage us that we’re on the right track – with the latest this week as the British Chamber of Commerce announced EICC as a finalist in their 2024 awards for Green Innovation.

On the financial front, in February we reported record revenues and profits for 2023.  I am pleased to report that our pipeline of conferences and events remains strong, thanks to the incredible work of our sales and support teams. 

With the support of city partners, including Edinburgh Airport and Edinburgh Hotels Association, we agreed to take Edinburgh Convention Bureau (ECB) out of hibernation and into our guardianship between November 2021 and June 2024. Over that period, 80 new events were confirmed for Edinburgh, generating over £43 million in economic impact. 

While we were disappointed with the decision in May to transfer the ECB into a department of City of Edinburgh Council, we look forward to the evolution of the Convention Bureau.  Edinburgh competing in a global marketplace is essential, and we will support those who do that important work.  

The buoyancy of the hotel sector presents challenges for EICC as bedroom availability decreases while room rates increase. This is primarily due to the popularity of Edinburgh and the vast number of leisure visitors it attracts. Successful cities enjoy a balance of leisure and business visitors. Sustaining this mix over the long-term makes the city less reliant on any single market, protecting it from over-tourism in peak times and maximising occupancy and revenues in trough periods. 

According to VisitScotland statistics, an international business visitor to Scotland spends £447 per day versus £182 spent by a leisure visitor. Therefore, it is vital for Edinburgh’s economy that it has sufficient bed stock to meet the demands of a busy capital city.

Pathways in entrepreneurship, by Nick Freer

Through our longstanding advisory work with St Andrews-based investment firm Eos, we got the opportunity to meet Eos partner Ana Stewart a few years’ back, from memory the first time around was with our go-to contact at the firm, Mark Beaumont, and very possibly at Contini’s in Edinburgh.

I have yet to meet anyone who doesn’t like Ana Stewart, and I’d worry about anyone who bucks the trend, and then there’s obviously her acumen as an entrepreneur, investor, and non-exec, with those NXD roles including a notable first as the first ever female board member at the Scottish FA.

Arguably, Stewart is now best known for chairing and co-authoring ‘Pathways: a new approach for women in entrepreneurship’, commissioned by Kate Forbes in 2022, at that time the Scottish Government’s finance secretary, subsequently published the following year in February.

During 2023, our agency became a key adviser to Ana, managing PR and comms, with former BBC broadcaster and associate Vanessa Collingridge and I managing a series of events and related media coverage, advising on overall strategy, leading to the creation of Pathways Forward to help guide the recommendations of the Stewart Report towards tangible outcomes and effective change.

Next week, Pathways stages the inaugural Female Founders Growth Summit at RBS Gogarburn, which in Stewart’s own words, “brings our scale-up founders together with the investment community and is focused on energising this often challenging growth stage of the founder journey.”

Our press announcement earlier this week illustrates how far Pathways has come in eighteen months, with Pathways ‘Pledge partners’ - who now include Deloitte, Scottish Enterprise, the University of Strathclyde, the Scottish National Investment Bank, CodeBase, and many others - committing to a number of measures, ranging from the capture and publication of enhanced gender data to evidential increases in female participation rates.

When in Bordeaux

On our summer holiday this year, we travelled to Southwest France, about an hour’s drive west of Toulouse.  Out in the sticks with no WiFi or TV, it was an interesting experiment for the family.  Somewhat ironically, it was difficult to watch the Olympics that were taking place only a few hundred miles north in Paris, but on the night of the men's 1500m final we huddled into the back of a local cafe with locals to watch Josh Kerr’s bittersweet silver medal performance.  Work wise, a couple of urgent matters arose, but by hook or by crook, I was able to jump on a few calls and exchange the necessary emails.

On a trip to Bordeaux, taking a TGV train to the capital of France’s Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, an Airbnb with fully functioning WiFi brought smiles back to young faces.  Alas, those same young faces found it difficult to be torn away from their devices when we ventured out to find a restaurant on the first night in the city often described as ‘Petit Paris’.

To my shock and horror, the majority of our ‘hangry’ bunch decided on an Italian restaurant, and to make matters worse there was not a single Bordeaux on the wine menu… sacre bleu!  Fortunately, we found an authentic local restaurant the following night, the Bordeaux flowed, and I would jump at the chance to return to this charming city.

Festival city relies on a wide variety of support, guest blog by Julie Hutchison, director of philanthropy and charities, LGT Wealth Management

It takes a huge base of support to make the Edinburgh Festivals happen, and as public finances continue to be squeezed, philanthropy will play an ever-more important role. We’re four years on from the becalmed summer when most things came to a sudden halt. It got me thinking about the support which underpins the creative arts; how creative work is developed, staged and presented within the context of the larger occasion of a festival, and the role of philanthropy in all phases of making work which is performed and seen by an audience.

Exactly how many summer festivals are there in Edinburgh? For some, it has become a six-week marathon of eight festivals encompassing Jazz and Blues, the Edinburgh International Festival, the Fringe, the Book, the Film, the Art and the Television Festivals as well as the Military Tattoo. Looking back, I’ve enjoyed shows across three of them, including Things We Will Miss (thought-provoking) Oedipus Rex (rawly immersive) and Club Life (simply joyous).

The summer festivals, with their focus on arts and culture, are all registered charities. Many of the shows are performed in venues which are themselves charities.  Some of the larger theatre companies and music ensembles giving those performances are also charities. When you reflect on it, you can be watching a charity perform in a charitable venue as part of a charitable festival. It’s a fragile eco-system which receives an element of government and council funding, and which relies hugely on other sources of support. It’s no surprise, therefore, that the role of donors is a vital part of that picture. Patrons, benefactors, membership and friends’ schemes all contribute. Funding comes from afar too: the Scottish diaspora contribute via specific US donor programmes. Beyond this, it’s possible to take a more holistic view of philanthropy which recognises other contributions. Volunteers give their time and skills; some may also lend support with network connections and introductions. These all underpin the staging of the festivals.

It can be seen as a privilege to be able to afford to experience a renewed sense of appreciation of life enriched by the creative arts but, increasingly, free or discounted tickets and practical assistance are being made available to positively support open access.  The compelling vision of the Fringe ‘to give anyone a stage and everyone a seat’ still needs financial support to help make it a reality, however.

The Charities Aid Foundation estimates that £13.9 billion was donated to charities in the UK last year.  However, only 3% of this was for the arts. The inflation of recent times has hit hard all round, including those in the creative arts sector. For some donors, this only reinforces their determination to do what they can to ensure venues can keep the lights on and shows can still be staged.

Reminded of the Greek roots of philanthropy as ‘love of humanity’, perhaps the simplest act of philanthropy is the generosity of sharing space with others who visit during the summer weeks, in pursuit of the joy of community. For that goal alone, the Edinburgh Festivals have arguably never been more needed.

Pressing the expansion button in APAC, guest blog by Novosound CEO and Co-founder Dave Hughes

Expanding into the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, particularly South Korea, is an exciting new chapter for Novosound. As a Scottish company focused on ultrasound technology, we’ve spent years working in North American markets. Now, entering APAC brings new challenges and opportunities that align well with our expertise.

South Korea is renowned as an innovation and tech powerhouse, where many of the leading tech groups in the world are headquartered, so much so that the nation is regularly ranked at the top of global indices with innovation strategies that are much heralded worldwide, including by Silicon Valley itself. 

South Korea is a natural fit for what we’re doing at Novosound. Our Ceilidh system, designed for monitoring corrosion, aligns perfectly with the needs of South Korea’s large number of refineries and petrochemical sites. Meanwhile, our Slanj platform, which enables the integration of ultrasound sensors into consumer devices like smartwatches and smart rings for blood pressure monitoring, sparked significant interest among several APAC leaders in consumer electronics devices.

Our journey started in Songdo, viewed by commentators as the world’s first truly smart city. Songdo is a great example of South Korea’s commitment to technology and innovation. As a smart city, it is filled with all kinds of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors enabling efficient traffic and waste management systems, set against a large amount of public modern art, making it a unique blend of tech and culture. Staying in Songdo set the stage for our visit and showed us how integrated technology can be part of everyday life.

What struck us most was how open South Korean businesses are to working with international companies. This eagerness reminded us of North America, where there’s a similar enthusiasm for innovation. The mix of Scottish ingenuity and South Korean willingness to collaborate creates a strong foundation for impactful partnerships.

Business in South Korea moves at a fast pace. Conversations are direct and efficient—if something isn’t a fit, they’ll tell you right away, which helps everyone move forward quickly. This approach suits us well, as it allows us to focus on meaningful projects and collaborations.

A big part of our success in South Korea was thanks to a local business consultancy. They helped us navigate the language barrier, set up meetings, and understand the local business culture. Their guidance, especially in social settings, was invaluable and helped us build strong relationships from the start.

A highlight of our trip were the many nights out enjoying Soju and Korean BBQ with some of our new business partners. It was a great way to connect on a personal level, share stories, and build trust—key ingredients for successful business relationships.

For Novosound, expanding into the APAC region isn’t just about growing our market—it’s about building lasting partnerships that connect different cultures and meet the needs of South Korean businesses. And with ongoing initiatives like Horizon Europe, which aims to foster international collaboration in research and innovation, we see even more potential for cross-border partnerships.

As we continue our journey in South Korea and the broader APAC region, we’re eager to see where these new opportunities take us. The relationships we are building have a lot of potential, and we’re looking forward to contributing to this vibrant and evolving market. This is just the start of what we hope will be a long and successful journey in the region.

Has Edinburgh's Princes Street finally turned a corner, by Jeremy Grant

Take a walk down Princes Street in Edinburgh – as tourists and locals are doing this weekend – and pretty soon you will be asking: what has happened to this place? 

At one end there is the Victorian splendour of Jenners, the former department store once dubbed “The Harrods of the North”, closed since 2021. A few blocks west we find a graffiti-strewn “American Candy” store, and the bargain-basement offerings of “Pound & Beyond”.

Other than London’s Oxford Street, there can be few thoroughfares in Britain where the fortunes of the high street are more starkly on display. But there is an added poignancy to Princes Street. It is an allegory of Scottish architectural decline, written in retail.

And yet, could this collection of 43 buildings along a strip that began in the late 18th century as a row of terraced houses for Edinburgh’s wealthy, finally be turning a corner? 

There are encouraging signs. In 2021, drinks group Diageo opened The Johnnie Walker Experience at an art deco former department store on the street’s western tip. In April this year, Japanese apparel retailer Uniqlo opened its first store in Scotland a few doors down from Jenners, signalling “an opportunity to bring life back to this iconic shopping street”.

Yet the future will not involve a full retail revival. “That ship has sailed for Princes Street,” says Murray Strang, Scotland managing partner at real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield (C&W). 

Blame a double-whammy of pandemic hollowing out and a shift by big brands to the St James Quarter shopping centre and Multrees Walk, a high-end retail cluster where Gucci will soon open its first store outside London. 

Instead, Princes Street looks set to be defined by what real estate jargon calls “mixed use”, involving hotels, restaurants, bars, offices and “destination” shops - such as Uniqlo and the big Apple store opposite the Balmoral Hotel. 

There are signs of investor confidence in this proposition, if the handful of hotel developments underway is anything to go by. Take “100 Princes Street”, a 30-room boutique hotel that opened four months ago in the former Royal Overseas League building, dating from 1879. It’s part of the Red Carnation collection started by the late South African hotelier Stanley Tollman. A double room with a view of Edinburgh Castle starts at £725 per night. 

C&W notes that Edinburgh’s hotel sector outperformed the UK national average in terms of revenue growth, rising by 22 per cent in the first quarter, compared with the same quarter a year earlier. 

The big driver is tourism. Two thirds of visitors to Edinburgh are from abroad, and the numbers are growing. Edinburgh Airport has seen a 110 per cent rise in international arrivals since 2019.  The turning point for Princes Street will probably have to wait for the re-opening of Jenners, owned since 2017 by Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen. The nine-storey building, dating from 1895, is to be transformed into a 100-room hotel, restaurant, bar and 7,000 square metres of retail space.  

“People’s perceptions of Princes Street need to change,” says Roddy Smith, head of Essential Edinburgh, a membership organisation of city centre businesses, “because it will never go back to the way it used to be.” 

Feelings run high in Aberdeen as energy transitions focuses minds, by Jeremy Grant

For a sense of how Scotland’s energy industry feels about policy emerging from the Labour government, the mood in Aberdeen is a good place to start.

Two announcements last week reveal existential tension in the Granite City as it charts the best path between the beginning of the end of fossil fuels and the growth of green energy. At stake, of course, is preserving livelihoods for people in the Northeast – managing a “just transition”.

First, the Treasury said that a “windfall tax” on oil and gas companies’ profits in the North Sea – known as the Energy Profits Levy and in place since 2022 – would not only be raised and extended by a year to 2030, but also that a key element of what the government described as “unjustifiably generous investment allowances” would be abolished.

This triggered a furious reaction from the Aberdeen & Grampian Chamber of Commerce (A&GCC), whose chief executive, Russell Borthwick, slammed the move as “reckless, wrong and economically ruinous for businesses operating in the North Sea”. 

The A&GCC is not alone in making the case that reducing incentives for continued oil and gas exploration will make it more likely that the region faces a cliff-edge of job losses as energy groups scale back or cease operations early. Consultants Wood Mackenzie warn that the EPL changes “could result in the premature slowdown of investment across the upstream sector which could lead to accelerated cessation of production”. 

By contrast, two days later the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero handed a boost to the offshore wind industry by doubling the budget for the annual auction that provides developers with initial subsidies to build clean energy projects.

Claire Mack, chief executive of Scottish Renewables, many of whose members are in Aberdeen, said the bigger budget “sends a positive signal to industry that the UK government is serious about achieving its clean power mission”. 

Aberdeen has long been known as the oil capital of Europe. Yet the growth of green industries there means it has justified ambitions to be the “net zero” capital of Europe too. That is why the AGCC has been campaigning for Aberdeen to be the location for the headquarters of Great British Energy, a new publicly owned company that will use £8.3bn in public funds to invest with the private sector in clean energy projects, including floating offshore wind farms in the ScotWind project off Aberdeenshire.

Politics aside, Aberdeen has cards to play, including a new South Harbour for offshore wind assembly at the port, and a green industries cluster emerging on an adjacent 40-hectare site known as the Energy Transition Zone (ETZ).

Yet so has Edinburgh. It has a well-established financial ecosystem with links to London’s capital markets and a growing legal and advisory scene in renewables. Most of the ScotWind projects’ operational headquarters are in the city. 

The Aberdeen campaign has not always struck the right tone, with the A&GCC recently warning Labour that locating GB Energy elsewhere “will just confirm that our new government is happy to throw our region onto the scrapheap to support areas that chose to vote them in to power”. Let’s see if this wins hearts and minds in London.

Sport and business are fired by the drive to succeed, guest blog by Legado Founder and CEO Josif Grace

Like everyone else, I’ve found myself glued to the TV watching some of the incredible sports this summer has had to offer. Alcaraz winning Wimbledon for the second successive year, a decisive Spanish victory in the Euro’s, Hamilton clinching his ninth Silverstone F1 win, Ireland claiming victory over South Africa in the rugby, and Bob McIntyre’s win at the Scottish Open. 

When we see these accomplishments it’s easy to take them at face value, but the level of grit, determination, adaptability, and teamwork needed to deliver these results cannot be underestimated. 

When I look at the work that underpinned the continued progress of Legado into one of Scotland’s fastest growing technology companies, I gain an ever-greater level of appreciation for what these top-level athletes give in order to compete. There are a lot of parallels between the relentless path to competing at the highest level of sports, and growing a small business into a scaling technology company.

The past six years have seen our team navigate innumerable challenges as we’ve gone from an initial idea that sparked during my time in Silicon Valley, to powering the interactions between some of the UK’s largest institutions and their millions of customers. That said, with global ambitions, even these achievements mean that we’re only just getting through the group stages right now (maybe next time for Scotland’s football team).

When I look back at those challenges, I wonder how Lewis Hamilton must feel as he’s racing around Silverstone. Anything can go wrong, at any moment, from any direction, and you won’t know what it is until it happens.  Rationalising our experience, I think how lucky we are to have such a talent-dense, diverse, and passionate team to navigate those challenges. It would be a mistake to think that Scotland doesn’t have the human capital to build world-class companies. I work with these people every day.

You see that talent manifest in how we've spent the last couple of years evolving our proposition, originally envisioned as a ‘digital vault’ for life planning back when I was working in Silicon Valley. Through new features, and the introduction of an interactive hub, we now help businesses to digitally optimise interactions and communications with customers in a truly modern and intuitive way.

It’s taken a lot of hard work to go through that evolution, but we’re fortunate to now get to lift some trophies as a result, with UK and global corporates making use of our tech. Continuously cheering us on from the stands have been major financial institutions and investors like FNZ and Souter Investments. Their support and strategic insights have been instrumental in enabling us to scale our operations and bring our product to market with some of the biggest financial services brands in the UK. That kind of hands-on investment and guidance is something that Scotland needs more of.

I’m excited about the future and the opportunities it holds for Scotland’s tech ecosystem, in which we are a constituent. We’ve got several more big brand names set to join our roster later this year, and a team that is constantly expanding with new talent, new perspectives, and new innovations. In the meantime, I’ll be cheering on Team GB in Paris, full of appreciation for their relentless pursuit.

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.