Team Scotland's inward investment support: evaluation

8. Recommendations

The approach taken to this evaluation used mixed methods to provide a holistic understanding of what impacts have been achieved and how, with research strands looking to evaluate direct and indirect impacts, and the implementation and delivery of support. The large part of the analysis was conducted externally, and as a result some recommendations have been put forward to help build on the current evidence base for spillovers and suggest ways that future evaluations can be conducted with improved outputs. These recommendations include:

• Improved data collection – having access to business data would allow for a robust assessment of the survey sample, provide higher certainty on survey representativeness, and allow to add survey weights if needed.
• Target support - financial support (grants/ subsidies) was shown to be the greatest incentive for companies to consider investing in Scotland again, with other beneficial types of support varying by business type.
• Maximise inclusion of supported firms – a large share of supported firms were not included in the analysis due to opt-outs and other reasons. Including participation in surveys as a condition of the support received could help circumvent this issue in future, improve the sample size, and therefore the robustness and representativeness of the findings.