Mark Logan reckons Scotland must normalise entrepreneurship in society and throughout the education system if the country is to achieve greater startup and scale-up success.
The former Skyscanner chief operating officer and recently-appointed chief entrepreneur for the Scottish Government, believes entrepreneurial potential is “latent in us all” and a more “systems-based approach” is required.
Addressing the annual EIE22 tech investor conference yesterday, Logan said he believes the roll-out of Tech Scaler hubs in seven locations across Scotland are a key component of that approach.
As he has previously stated, higher education education is also key to economic growth and productivity. Logan argues that while Scotland’s universities are world-class in teaching and research, they must to do better at entrepreneurship to “complete the triangle”.
Logan also expressed his belief that by co-locating industry sectors like life sciences and creative industries with internet-economy technology companies, greater scale-up success will follow.
“Keep watching Scotland”, said Logan, “because great things are happening, and great things will follow.”
Scottish Enterprise chief executive Adrian Gillespie, who spoke later in the day, concurred on the importance of getting more international investment into the Scottish start-up scene, something which he stated is high on the agenda at governmental level.
Meanwhile, Ana Stewart, chair of the Women in Enterprise Review - a report that is being co-authored with Logan - reiterated her belief that Scotland can bring about transformative change when it comes to moving the dial on gender imbalance.
The other main keynote talk was by Hannah Jones, chief executive at the Earthshot Prize, an organisation founded by the former Prince of Wales and the Royal Foundation in 2020 to search, spotlight and scale solutions that can repair and regenerate the planet.
A year on from COP26 in Glasgow, climate tech companies were among the start-ups pitching at EIE this year.
They included Robotics Cats, a business aimed at tackling wildfires via artificial intelligence-enabled detection software, and Ocean Biofuels, a company seeking £4m of investment to help develop autonomous vessels powered by green hydrogen and solar to harvest sea kelp for a variety of applications.
Overall, 39 start-ups pitched to investors across the UK and beyond on the day, including eight extended pitches to investor panels featuring Kerry Sharp, director of entrepreneurship and investment at Scottish Enterprise; Paul Callaghan, investment director at the Scottish National Investment Bank; John McNicol, founder of Kelvin Capital; Devina Paul, founding partner at Galvanise Capital; Amelia Armour, partner at Amadeus Capital; and Fraser Lusty, director of Equity Gap.
The EIE Investor Readiness Programme, delivered by the University of Edinburgh’s Bayes Centre, has helped more than 540 companies raise more than £1.1bn since 2008.
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