Technology ecosystem review - Towards the Tipping Point: progress report

5. Forward Look & Next Steps

As we continue to deliver the STER recommendations, our priorities include mobilising our national TechScaler network and ensuring we support communities, start-ups and businesses across our tech sector as much as possible.

Next, we will:

• Open the TechScaler network from November 2022 to all tech start-ups in Scotland
• Publish the Ana Stewart Review on Women’s Entrepreneurship
• Deliver Computing Science teacher upskilling and recruitment initiatives
• Develop more investment vehicles to support entrepreneurship
• Deliver a new innovative way to embed entrepreneurship in colleges, and universities, through Entrepreneurial Campuses.
• Bring all of our work on entrepreneurship - as set out in STER, NSET and the forthcoming Stewart Review - together under a single national programme to establish Scotland as a leading Start-Up Nation

In keeping with this broader focus, our 10 year National Strategy for Economic Transformation also commits to eventually broadening out the support offered through our national TechScaler network to all start-ups in Scotland, regardless of sector or type of business.

In July 2022, Professor Mark Logan was appointed as Scotland’s Chief Entrepreneur. Recruiting the right person into this post was a key commitment in the National Strategy for Economic Transformation in order to ensure entrepreneurship is embedded in our economy, and partnerships with industry and investors are prioritised and strengthened.

The Chief Entrepreneur will:

• Engage with Scotland’s existing community of start-up founders, entrepreneurship programmes and small businesses to ensure that government policy and operational delivery meets the needs of businesses
• Ensure that entrepreneurship is embedded in the education and skills systems with clear routes established for entrepreneurs who want to set up a business
• Support increased diversity and inclusion in business start-up and scaling, and
• Embed an ‘entrepreneurial-first’ approach across the public sector.

Afterword – Mark Logan, STER author and Chief Entrepreneur

I’m particularly encouraged by two aspects of how key recommendations contained in STER are being implemented. The first is the collaborative partnership approach being adopted between government, education and industry stakeholders.

The second is the systems-oriented approach being applied, which recognises that we must both create the best possible environment for today’s start-ups (for example through initiatives such as Ecosystem Fund and our TechScaler network), while also preparing for the longer term (for example, through our educational initiatives designed to improve the supply of talent into the ecosystem.)

These efforts bring together infrastructural, educational and funding components to create an enhanced platform for technical entrepreneurship in Scotland. Our opportunity now is to continue to build upon and extend that platform, providing a world-class environment for entrepreneurship in all its forms.

This work will continue through the delivery of the National Strategy for Economic Transformation, the implementation of the upcoming Stewart Review, and further initiatives currently in development under the auspices of the Chief Entrepreneur initiative.

For Scotland’s people to thrive, we must create opportunity. In the current uncertain environment, that is more important than ever. Creating opportunity depends on people starting new things. We have a responsibility as a nation to create an outstanding environment in which to do so.

This report is an important milestone on our journey. It illustrates that such a goal is achievable when we work together with ambition, purpose and clarity. It’s now time to move forward again, to make our next update just as compelling.