Build companies not ecosystems, by Richard Lennox, CodeBase COO and author of 'Framing Scotland's Entrepreneurial Economy' report

In my last column here I suggested Scotland's entrepreneurial economy should be judged by the companies it builds, not the programmes it funds. That statement read very differently depending on whether one's income depends on the companies or on the support programmes around them. Feedback clearly reflected that.

Over the last couple of weeks CodeBase has published my own detailed answer on how we can ensure the publicly funded support we offer businesses will actually deliver. The report, "Framing Scotland's Entrepreneurial Economy", sets out a simple framework whose central claim is simple: align the support we have to founders’ needs, not new programmes.

A thriving startup ecosystem is what you get when business succeeds and companies scale. Those companies hire, pay tax, and recycle talent, capital & ambition into those that follow. Skyscanner did exactly that, seeding founders, operators and investors. Build the companies and ultimately the ecosystem follows. Forget them and the money pays for scaffolding instead of the building. 

Scotland is in danger of the former. We have invested heavily, and it has worked in part: more businesses are forming than ever. Our scaleups however are only 0.52 per cent of Scottish SMEs and improving that could be worth 138,000 jobs and £22 billion a year. Additional funding and more programmes will not fix that. A shared model that makes every pound committed directly traceable to serving a founder's need will have more impact.

The proposed framework has two parts. First, honesty about destination: a thriving small business, a growth-stage employer and a globally significant scaleup are all legitimate. The support these businesses need different layers of support and a system that doesn’t recognise this keeps misallocating resources. 

Second, a simple matrix: the three things founders actually need - capital, customers, and operators who have made the journey before - relevant to one of four stages of business growth.

Held against that grid, the whole portfolio of support activity becomes visible and a real assessment can be made as to the value of each intervention. As we do that, it will become clear that the stage that matters most, the valley of death where viable  companies stall and wither, stays critically underserved. We must stop mistaking activity for outcomes and redirect to where scale up failure is highest and the prize largest.

For founders and operators, this changes everything. Today they face a fragmented, opaque maze of more than 100 organisations, each with its own self-justifying logic. The framework replaces that with clarity and real choice over the support available, where they need it. 

This framework belongs to no single provider, CodeBase included. Codebase may deliver Techscaler but it lacks the contractual agency to sufficiently adapt it to meet the needs of Scotland’s startups and scaleups. This is why we are advocating for change. The Scottish Government must commission and evaluate entrepreneurial support against a framework that does that.

Scotland’s scaleups will be real measure of nation’s tech success, by Nick Freer

I sometimes think of tech startups as shiny new things that hold promise for future success and investor returns.  And, as an agency, we’ve spent over a decade working with some of the shiniest and best.  Two Big Ears would be a good example - founded in Edinburgh by two University of Edinburgh PhDs, the immersive audio startup was acquired by Facebook in 2016.

It’s exciting to advise these fledgling technology companies, helmed by young founders with tons of ambition and big dreams. However, when startups become scaleups, arguably things get more interesting as scaleup companies can transform economies.

They create highly skilled jobs, attract international investment, produce and retain talent, and generate tax revenues that fund public services. One Skyscanner has produced scores of founders building their own startups. One FanDuel has produced a generation of engineering talent.  Then just last month, one Wordsmith funding round reminded the world that Scotland can produce globally competitive tech businesses.

An imminent report on scaleups by a former Skyscanner and Current Health executive Richard Lennox will shine more light on the importance of scaleups and provide a blueprint on how we can produce more of them.  It follows previous reports on the subject by fellow Skyscanner royalty in the form of Mark Logan and Shane Corstorphine.

Last November, entrepreneur and investor Ana Stewart, who is also Scotland’s second chief entrepreneurial adviser to the Scottish Government (Mark Logan was the first), outlined her priorities to increase the number of scaleup companies based here - including closer engagement with the startup community, more tailored support for startups, and more consistent reporting to track progress and provide a more transparent picture of Scotland’s entrepreneurial health.

As Sir Tom Hunter commented at the time: “Scotland needs a laser focus on building scaling businesses. Why? If we double the number of scale-ups from the estimated 675 today, we’d create around 75,000 new high value jobs; that drives economic growth.”

Different authorities and reports chart varied projected numbers in terms of jobs and revenue creation, but by whatever yardstick you use, we’re certainly talking about tens of thousands of high value jobs and into double digit billions in terms of annual revenue.

The transition from startup to scaleup is a significant and challenging one.  Building a prototype as an early stage venture is one challenge. Building a business with hundreds of employees, international customers and recurring revenues is another entirely.  This is where leadership, access to capital, international networks and experienced operators become every bit as important as innovation itself.

There are other small nations and regions punching above their weight, so we need to keep examining, reflecting, and iterating how we plot a course for scaleup success.

Scotland has never lacked entrepreneurial ambition or world-class ideas. The real opportunity now is to build more companies capable of commercialising those ideas and intellectual property on a global scale.  Because while startups capture the imagination, scaleups shape entire economies.

Scotland's rural economy won't grow unless its leaders do, guest blog by Elevator CEO Rachel Ross

When people talk about economic growth in rural Scotland, the conversation traditionally centres on planning policy, infrastructure or skills shortages. The rise in green energy opportunities has filtered closer to the top of the agenda. Those things matter. But after twenty years of working with rural businesses across Scotland, I've become convinced that the biggest constraint on rural growth isn't a lack of opportunity. It's that too few of us step outside the way we've always thought.

That isn't a criticism. It's human nature and it’s lack of access to networks or just being part of the bigger conversation. 

If you've spent decades building a successful farming business, managing an estate, running a hotel or leading a rural enterprise, why would you suddenly question the business model that has brought you this far? There’s comfort in familiarity; achieving a sustainable business that balances the books is often more than an achievement in its self, without pushing boundaries. 

But for Scotland we need our rural business owners and leaders to collectively be challenging themselves and pushing themselves out of this comfort zone. The world around us is changing faster than at any point in our lifetime and the rural opportunities in Scotland are at a peak like never before. Artificial intelligence, satellite technology, natural capital markets, renewable energy, digital communications, robotics, biotechnology and new models of tourism are transforming what is possible for rural Scotland. Creating a thriving Scottish economy over the next twenty years is not necessarily about being the biggest or even the best resourced local businesses.  It will come from a Scotland which creates leaders that are curious enough to ask different questions.

One of the biggest lessons I have seen running the Scottish Rural Leadership Programme is that entrepreneurial leadership isn't about teaching someone how to run a better farm or estate. It's about helping people see possibilities they couldn't see before. Sometimes that comes from visiting a totally business. Sometimes it comes from sitting beside someone from a completely different industry: A crofter from the Western Isles learning alongside a satellite engineer from Shetland. A family estate owner working with a digital entrepreneur. A renewable energy specialist challenging a tourism business. A conservation leader learning from a technology company.

When those conversations happen, something remarkable begins to emerge. People stop thinking about "their business" and begin thinking about "their region". Innovation stops being something that happens in cities and starts becoming something that happens in communities.

Diversification stops meaning converting outbuildings into self-catering units and starts asking much bigger questions. How could this land support new businesses? How do we create value from natural capital rather than simply manage it? How do we build supply chains around offshore wind, forestry, biodiversity, space or data and who can work with to do this?

How do we create careers that encourage young people to stay in rural Scotland rather than leave it? These are leadership questions, not technical ones.

That is why I'm delighted Elevator has been reappointed to deliver the Scottish Rural Leadership Programme and to run Scotland's Rural Leaders Alumni Network, of almost 1,000 rural leaders from every corner of the country. 

The next chapter of the programme will deliberately push people further. Working alongside partners including the Glasgow School of Art's Rural Lab and SAC Consulting, we'll challenge participants to think more creatively, collaborate more widely and see innovation not as something separate from rural Scotland, but as central to its future. We'll mix people who might never otherwise meet.

Scotland doesn't need every rural business to become a technology company. But it does need every rural leader to become more entrepreneurial and to understand the tool box that unlocks opportunities for them and their business. 

Scotland has crossed the AI tipping point, now comes the hard part, guest blog by Zudu CEO Paul Duffy

A few years ago, every business conversation about AI started with the same question.  Should we be using it? That question is over. According to research we carried out this year, 94 per cent of Scottish businesses are now using AI and 80 per cent use it every day.

We surveyed more than 50 companies during Q2 2026, ranging from small and medium-sized enterprises to larger corporates across a broad range of sectors. AI has moved from experiment to everyday. The gap between those using it well and those still finding their feet is widening faster than most people realise.

Surprisingly, the survey revealed that the IT or technology team is not the primary driver of AI adoption. Leadership and individual employees drove it in roughly equal measure.

Marketing and content led the charge, with 77 per cent of businesses applying AI in these areas first. That makes sense, it’s the most visible entry point and delivers results you can see quickly. 

But the figure I find more significant is 62 per cent using AI for data and reporting. When AI starts shaping how decisions get made, not just what gets published, its impact on a business becomes structural.

Almost 70 per cent of Scottish businesses are spending less than £500 a month on AI. A fifth are spending nothing at all, relying on free tools to get by. Only 13 per cent are investing at a serious scale. For now, that’s not necessarily a problem, but it will be. The businesses that run AI as a low-cost experiment and those that treat it as a core capability will look very different in two years’ time. The window to close that gap is narrowing.

What’s holding people back? Not money, at least, not primarily. Sixty-nine per cent cited lack of expertise as their main barrier. That’s more than double those who cited cost. And 93 per cent said their top concern is accuracy. Put those two figures together, and you get a pretty clear picture - Scottish businesses are using AI, but many don’t yet fully trust it, and they don’t have the internal knowledge to close that confidence gap.

That raises a question that should concern anyone thinking about Scotland’s economic future. If AI is now embedded in daily business operations, and it is, but 14 per cent of organisations have no clear owner for it, and most haven’t yet built custom solutions, governance frameworks, or proper measurement of outcomes, then we are running a significant amount of our economy on something we haven’t properly executed. 

The good news is that value is showing. Two-thirds of organisations are seeing clear return on investment (ROI) or early positive signs from their AI investment. But a quarter aren’t measuring ROI at all. You cannot improve what you don’t track, and you cannot justify further investment without evidence.

Adoption without strategy is a treadmill. Scotland’s businesses have proved they can pick up a new technology and run with it. The next test is whether they can build something durable with it.

What 15 years in Scotland's tech scene taught me, guest blog by former journalist and scaleup operator Lisa Venter

I arrived in Scotland in 2011. Exactly the wrong time for journalism and exactly the right time for digital.

I’d trained as a journalist in South Africa during the recession, as newspapers continued moving online. Twitter was so new that I was teaching university students how to use it responsibly because lecturers didn't “get it”. My degree was rooted in newspapers and storytelling. “Digital” was blogging and basic websites awkwardly bolted onto the side.

Working across agencies, propertytech, fintech, traveltech and ecommerce in Scotland taught me a series of lessons through 15 years of technological change that has only made sense in hindsight. First, attention online could be engineered. Second, even beloved products lose to changing customer behaviour. Third, companies can be right too early, building behaviours and infrastructure that don't yet exist. And finally, the businesses that grow fastest are those that learn fastest.

I saw that most clearly at Skyscanner, where a Scottish company became global because it understood something simple: intent matters. If someone searched "Scotland World Cup Boston", they were already telling you exactly what they wanted.

Later, at Snappy Shopper, I watched Covid accelerate digital adoption overnight and then partially reverse as customers returned to stores. The lesson wasn't that online would replace offline. It was that customer behaviour rarely moves in a straight line.

So now… AI.

Some of the AI conversation feels familiar because I've lived through several waves of technological change already. Technology changes. The challenge of helping people adapt rarely does.

What gives me confidence isn’t the technology. It’s the people adapting around it. Take Ross McNairn, a fellow graduate of the “Skyscanner mafia”. Like many of us who learned to scale companies there, he is now leading Wordsmith AI and applying those lessons to the next technological shift.

Over the last fifteen years, Scotland has developed a generation increasingly comfortable operating through technological change. Not because they can predict what comes next, but because they have learned how to test, adapt and keep moving when customer behaviour, business models and assumptions begin to shift.

Capability matters now. AI will change products, roles and operating models, but the companies that benefit most won’t necessarily be those that adopt the most tools. They’ll be the ones that help people understand what’s changing, experiment and translate new technology into better decisions and ways of working.

That doesn’t mean Scotland has solved the startup equation. There’s still scepticism around funding, opportunity and whether enough companies can successfully scale.

But fifteen years ago people were still trying to prove that Scotland could build globally relevant technology companies at all. That argument feels mostly settled now.

I’ve lived through the decline of print, the birth of search, the rise of social platforms, the acceleration of Covid commerce and now the emergence of AI.

Every time, somebody declared everything was about to change.

Usually they were right.

What they got wrong was thinking the technology was the difficult bit.

The difficult bit has always been helping people change with it.

Enough about programmes, lets build companies, guest blog by CodeBase COO Richard Lennox

I recently attended the Dublin Tech Summit, chairing a panel on a question that has occupied my thinking and driven my most recent actions: whether the ecosystem we have built around founders is serving them, or serving itself. Founders and operators across Europe are asking the same question, yet are the customers of that same ecosystem?

Scottish Enterprise's 2025-26 Ecosystem Guide lists over 100 organisations providing entrepreneurial support across the country. The guide opens, with complete sincerity, by declaring that Scotland is "the best place in the world to start and scale your business." We all have a right to ask: when will that support produce outcomes?

Having met Irish founders, VCs and ecosystem operators in Dublin, I saw that Ireland's answer is delivered in producing durable and sustainable companies. Ireland has built a culture that backs ambition loudly and early, treats a founder's failure as evidence of serious intent rather than personal embarrassment, and measures its success by the number of globally significant businesses it produces rather than the volume of interventions it funds. The contrast with Scotland is not subtle.

I took on my current role at CodeBase, including leading Techscaler’s delivery, specifically to attempt to address this. Every founder, regardless of what stage they are at, ultimately needs three things: access to customers, access to capital, and support from people who have actually built and scaled businesses before. 

What they do not need are generic playbooks nor advice from those who have never built anything. The hard question for every programme operating in Scotland, including Techscaler, is whether it is organised around meeting those needs or something else entirely.

Scotland has too many rooms where founders are talked at by people whose careers and reputation depend on the existence of the room, and too few where operators who have actually scaled a business sit with founders to work through their problems. Techscaler needs to be the latter, and that's what you should expect going forward. 

It must serve the needs of the businesses it supports first, before serving any broader narrative about Scottish entrepreneurship. A programme that cannot demonstrate it has helped move a company forward is not worth funding.

We have invested seriously in our entrepreneurial economy, an investment that will likely take a decade or more to fully realise the value it creates. The long-term measure is how many companies Scotland built that are still growing in ten years. 

Scotland now has a clearer sense of what public support actually means. It needs the policy environment to match. One that gives real agency to the operators best able to deliver the promise; that funds business outcomes not programmes, and backs the businesses that emerge with the same confidence Ireland brings. 

That is how the ecosystem reaches the tipping point of self-sustainability. The companies we build become the capital, the customers, and the operators for the companies that follow, and the system pays for itself.

Nigeria's future is being built today, guest blog by Forrit CEO and founder Peter Proud

I arrived in Lagos with a mixture of curiosity and expectation, but nothing quite prepares you for the scale and energy of Nigeria until you experience it first-hand. From the plane, Lagos stretches endlessly, a vast expanding landscape that mirrors a country growing rapidly in both population and economic ambition.

That ambition is immediately visible. Nigeria remains rich in natural resources, with oil and gas dominating revenues and exports, yet there is a clear shift underway. Increasingly, the conversation is moving towards minerals, agriculture, and most notably, technology as the drivers of future growth.

This shift was on full display at the Bluechip Data & AI Summit 2026. The event opened with the national anthem, sung by thousands of attendees with a genuine sense of pride and a collective statement of the belief in the country’s future.

Inside the conference, the atmosphere was striking. Entrepreneurs, developers, policymakers and business leaders with a shared conviction that technology can enable Nigeria to leapfrog traditional constraints.

AI and data are not abstract ideas here; they are tools already being applied to real challenges, from financial inclusion, healthcare access, to agricultural productivity and government transparency.

One of the most encouraging aspects of the summit was the focus on women in leadership. The all-female panel on diversity and opportunity stood out for the quality of discussion and the influence of those involved. Across the event, women were not only present, but leaders shaping policy, building businesses and driving change across all sectors.

The conference also addressed the realities facing Nigeria. Security concerns are still an issue and infrastructure, particularly power, internet connections and transport, can be inconsistent. During my stay, power interruptions were a regular occurrence, highlighting the problems that businesses must navigate daily.

Yet what stood out most was not the presence of these challenges, but the response to them. The resilience and optimism in Nigeria felt distinctive. The country’s young population is energetic, digitally connected and increasingly well educated.

That conviction was evident throughout the week. Founders spoke confidently about competing in global markets. Engineers discussed scaling infrastructure solutions, and entrepreneurs described ambitions to build businesses capable of lasting impact. There is a strong desire to succeed and create enduring value.

This spirit was epitomised by Bluechip Technologies founders Kazeem Tewogbade and Olumide Soyombo. They represent a new generation of Nigerian leadership, globally minded, ambitious and grounded in local realities. Their focus extends beyond personal success, to building ecosystems, backing talent and demonstrating that world-class companies can be created in Nigeria and scaled across Africa.

As my visit came to an end, what stayed with me was the intensity of belief and the momentum driven by the people. Across the city, I met individuals actively building Nigeria’s future.

From afar, it is easy to focus on Nigeria’s challenges. After spending time in Lagos, I left with a different perspective. The story of Nigeria today is not simply one of potential. It is a story of transformation already in motion.

Technology should sit at the heart of Scotland's growth strategy, by Nick Freer

At the Scotland 2050 conference in Edinburgh this week, politicians and business leaders gathered to discuss the country's long-term future. Energy, housing, healthcare and economic growth all featured prominently. Yet one topic appeared notably underrepresented: technology.

That omission matters when you consider that today, 12 of the world’s 14 trillion-dollar companies are technology or technology infrastructure businesses. Whether artificial intelligence, cloud computing, semiconductors or digital platforms, technology has become one of the primary drivers of economic growth.

For a country seeking to improve productivity, attract investment and create high-value jobs, the question is no longer whether technology should be part of the economic conversation. It is whether it sits at its centre.

The next frontier is likely to be quantum computing. While still in its early stages, the technology promises to tackle problems beyond the reach of even today's most powerful supercomputers, with applications ranging from drug discovery and energy systems to advanced manufacturing and logistics.

Alongside artificial intelligence, quantum computing is set to become the defining technology of the coming decades. Jensen Huang, chief executive of NVIDIA, has suggested that "very useful" quantum computing may emerge within the next twenty years. If so, the economic opportunities created will be seismic.

Scotland has growing credentials in quantum. Last year saw the launch of the Quantum Networks Hub, led by Heriot-Watt University and supported by £42 million of UK research funding. Its objective is to develop the technologies, protocols and standards underpinning secure and scalable quantum communications networks.

However, the longer-term ambition is not simply academic excellence. It is to translate research into commercial success: new companies, new industries and new sources of economic growth.

That distinction is important. Research and development generate knowledge. Prosperity comes when that knowledge is commercialised, scaled and anchored locally. Scotland’s world-class universities have delivered breakthrough innovations for generations. The greater challenge has often been converting them into globally significant companies.

While it is important to look ahead to a future quantum era, there remains a more immediate challenge. Scottish technology companies need access to the computing infrastructure in order to innovate today.

Writing for this column recently, CoreWeave's vice-president of strategy, Ben Richardson, argued that delays in providing sufficient cloud computing capacity risk slowing innovation and pushing investment elsewhere. In the age of AI, access to compute is increasingly becoming a prerequisite for economic competitiveness.

No one can confidently predict what Scotland, or the wider world, will look like in 2050. But one conclusion already seems clear: the countries that prosper will not simply be those that anticipate technological change. They will be those that help create it.

Scotland's potential is already visible. This week, Edinburgh-based legal tech startup Wordsmith AI secured a $70 million Series B funding round, prompting inevitable comparisons with Skyscanner, still for many the benchmark for Scottish technology success.

But if Scotland wants to help shape the world come 2050, technology can never be a footnote.

The biggest market Scotland keeps overlooking is its own government, guest blog by James Buchan, CEO and co-founder of ePass

A new Scottish Parliament has been elected. A new Cabinet is settling in. Scotland has strategies for digital public services and for AI. The question is whether sovereign public sector spend gets serious attention, or ends up as a footnote.

Scotland does not lack ideas. We have the universities, the technical talent, the innovation programmes and the founders to build serious companies. The harder question is whether we are creating the conditions for those companies to scale in areas where Scotland can genuinely lead.

Shane Corstorphine put it plainly in his recent contribution to Scotland's scale-up debate: procurement represents a substantial gap - and closing it is arguably one of the quickest, cheapest and most impactful things the next Scottish Government could do.

As a Scottish GovTech founder who came through the CivTech accelerator, I agree. But if we are serious about that ambition, we need to look beyond the usual suspects.

Public sector spend should be one of Scotland's defining scale-up opportunities.

That may sound less exciting than AI, fintech or clean energy. But government is one of the largest, most complex markets in the world. Every country is wrestling with rising demand, stretched teams, fragmented systems and higher citizen expectations. The companies that learn to solve those problems, and solve them well, can take that capability anywhere.

We live in a fair, open, globalised market, and that should remain. The opportunity here is not protectionism. It is making deliberate choices that serve Scotland's economic interests as well as its public services.

The CalMac ferry order going to a Polish shipbuilder while Ferguson Shipyard sat idle is not an isolated incident, it is a symptom of procurement that does not weigh economic impact enough alongside price. Scotland can do better. From our own experience, thoughtful public sector spend can carry a company from startup to scale-up, generating tax revenue, skilled jobs and exportable IP in the process.

There is also a sovereignty argument the incoming government should take seriously. 

Governments across the world are waking up to the fact that who builds and owns your public digital systems is a strategic question, not a procurement one. Scotland should be no different.

As AI becomes more embedded in public services, the data beneath it, how it is governed, where it lives, who controls it, will matter enormously. That is not a technical detail. It is a question of national capability. And it is one Scotland is better placed to answer if the companies building that AI factory are rooted here.

We can build reusable public sector technology in Scotland, around real operational needs, and then take that capability into other markets. That is exactly the scale-up story Scotland says it wants: companies rooted here, solving hard problems, creating skilled jobs.

That requires more than strategies and ambition. It needs procurement that rewards innovation, capital that understands public sector markets, and a government that sees Scottish founders as strategic partners, not just suppliers.

The strategies are written. The ambition is stated. Now Scotland has to back the companies that can help deliver it.

How Scotland can turn AI ambition into lasting economic value, guest blog by Version 1 CEO Roop Singh

With the Scottish Government launching its new AI strategy for the next five years and launching AI Scotland to help businesses adopt the technology, the direction of travel is clear.  But Scotland could still be at risk of missing the AI boom.

There is no shortage of talent, the challenge is what happens next, because too many good companies reach the point where they need to scale - and suddenly Scotland becomes the place they used to be based.

You can see the pattern.  Founders from Scottish universities build an early team in Edinburgh or Glasgow supported by local investors.  Then the big decisions drift as cloud and computing is bought elsewhere, senior posts are created in London or in the US, and clients are increasingly served from outside Scotland.

When that happens, the region loses more than jobs, it loses tax receipts, supplier spend, experience, and the next wave of spinouts.  AI can only be transformational when it’s turned into working services.  That needs problems worth solving, enough computing power and people who can build, integrate and run systems safely.

Scotland is strong on research, and more investment in compute is arriving.  The weaker link has been delivery, or put simply, the engineering and operational muscle that gets AI out of a demo and into a call centre, a hospital ward or a council office.  The question for Scotland is not whether it can invent, it is whether it can repeatedly deliver.

Version 1 recently announced the acquisition of CreateFuture, a Scottish business built around the hard work of making technology stick, turning AI ideas into systems that operate inside real organisations.

Keeping more of that capability based here is very different from watching it be absorbed and directed from somewhere else.  When delivery happens locally, so do the rewards, because investment follows the expertise, and clients reinvest where the teams sit.

Version 1 has already been delivering in this way for the Scottish Government’s Agriculture and Rural Economy (ARE) Directorate, helping to maintain and modernise the digital services that farmers and crofters rely on, enhancing the very fabric of Scottish society and a key part of its economic engine.

That is the wider point - when Scotland builds deep, long-term capability, it keeps more of the true value, the experience, the senior jobs, the supplier spend, and the tax money, instead of watching it leak away as firms scale.

Scotland can be a place where AI businesses stay, scale, and lead.  We have seen how clustering works, but to have the same pull in AI big decisions need to be made. Public procurement should reward delivery capability, not just glossy pitches.  Employers need routes that grow engineers into leaders here.  And we need the practical infrastructure of compute, data access, and secure environments that enable teams to ship real systems, not prototypes.

CreateFuture joining Version 1 is one step towards a stronger Scottish base for AI delivery.  But Scotland should be aiming higher than individual deals.  The prize will be when the next Scottish AI success story scales up in Scotland, not away from it.

Building Scotland’s future through AI infrastructure, guest blog by CoreWeave VP of Strategy, Ben Richardson

Scotland has a long history of shaping the modern world through invention, from Alexander Graham Bell to John Logie Baird and Alexander Fleming. The opportunity with AI is no different. But breakthroughs face a bottleneck: can Scottish innovators access the computing capacity they need?

Generally, pushing the boundaries of AI is not about owning the infrastructure, but tapping into high-performance compute through the cloud. The speed and ease of that access determines what can be built, and where.

Scotland has developed real momentum in AI.  The Scottish Government recently published its AI Strategy. It recognises the importance of research, talent and collaboration in shaping a competitive AI ecosystem, and sets out an ambition for Scotland to play a leading role in AI infrastructure.

Speed is of the essence, and while the 2027 objectives in the strategy are the right ones, these need to be met on time, or sooner.  AI progress is measured in months, not years. Delays in enabling access to the compute required will slow innovation, and risk it moving to other economies. Ensuring that Scotland’s strengths translate into real economic advantage will require coordinated action across government, industry and academia.

Scottish universities remain at the forefront of research, and programmes like Techscaler are helping convert research into credible commercial ventures.  Since 2022, companies within this network have raised more than £250 million, reflecting a growing pipeline of founders building AI-driven businesses.

But we need to use this momentum to address a new challenge.  Demand for AI compute is no longer limited to large technology firms. It is being driven by startups, scale-ups and organisations across both the private and public sector. This demand will benefit Scotland,particularly from a public sector productivity perspective. AI is expected to free up 62.1 million staff hours per year in Scotland’s public sector alone by 2030, releasing officials from routine tasks.

As we move from AI experimentation to real-world deployment, demand will grow exponentially. Already, demand is outpacing access, which underlines the critical need to deploy cloud computing at scale. The value of this infrastructure will lie in how quickly it can be provisioned, how reliably it performs and how easily it scales.

Building on these foundations, Scotland is well positioned to deliver on the opportunity. As a result,CoreWeave is committing to invest £1.5 billion to deploy a new AI cloud location at the Data Vita site in Lanarkshire and has recently announced a partnership with tech ecosystem builder CodeBase, helping Scotland realise its AI potential.

Scotland combines structural advantages that are increasingly important in the AI economy: a renowned research base, a growing pipeline of innovation, and access to abundant renewable energy to support the scaling of advanced computing.  Taken together, these are not isolated strengths. They form the basis of a system capable of competing with other emerging AI economies.

Should Scotland get this right, and maintain or even quicken current momentum, it can play a wider role as a platform for building AI that serves both domestic and European demand.

The framework for development is clear. It is now incumbent on the Scottish Government to turn this hard-earned momentum into a lasting advantage.

Scotland must plot route up AI mountain, by Nick Freer

In late March at the Edinburgh Futures Institute at Quartermile, the Scottish Government launched Scotland’s Artificial Strategy 2026-2031, setting up the AI Scotland body and detailing areas where action should be taken to ensure an effective response to AI as an emerging technology. 

The Futures Institute itself, an entrepreneurial campus developed with funding from the UK and Scottish Governments, has quickly become a jewel in Quartermile’s crown, a section of the city that has been a fulcrum of Scotland’s emerging tech scene over the last decade or so, and being home to the country’s first two tech unicorns, Skyscanner and FanDuel. 

The AI strategy outlined on the day covered AI users, adoption and skills, companies and products, innovation and R&D, data centres and infrastructure, semiconductors, data, and regulation. 

Already in Scotland, we can see our AI scene move from a fledging phase to something more mature, although experts concur that we are still near the bottom of the AI mountain as AI superpower nations and other European countries closer to home make much bigger strides.   

On the upside, in June last year the University of Edinburgh was announced as the home of the UK’s next national supercomputer, to the tune of £750 million. Then in September, US cloud computing giant CoreWeave led a £1.5 billion infrastructure investment into Scotland - marking the first major investment of its kind here, alongside DataVita, Scotland’s largest data centre.

Also last year, one of the world’s most storied AI venture capital firms, Index Ventures, led a $25 million investment into Edinburgh-headquartered Wordsmith AI, an AI platform that helps in-house legal teams review contracts, draft documents, and run fast AI-powered legal research.

And only last week, the Financial Conduct Authority said the results of its small language model for financial services with Malted AI, another Edinburgh-based AI startup, had delivered “extremely encouraging” results. 

While Edinburgh and Scotland have considerable pedigree on the academic and R&D side of AI, we must produce even more world-beating AI companies like Wordsmith to be considered a bona fide AI nation. 

In April 2025, a deeptech AI initiative was launched to bridge innovation between university postgraduate talent and NHS Scotland.  ‘AI Discovery’, delivered by CodeBase via its Techscaler programme in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh, University of Glasgow, and NHS Scotland, now helps postgraduates harness the latest AI technologies and build AI-enabled startups that can address some of the greatest challenges faced by the NHS.  

And CodeBase was behind the wheel again earlier this year, debuting digital skills provider CodeClan’s applied agentic AI programme, a UK first, in partnership with University of Edinburgh Business School and Qwasar Silicon Valley, equipping senior engineers to build, deploy and optimise enterprise-scale agentic AI systems. 

So, the early signs are encouraging that while Scotland may still be near the bottom of the AI mountain, the route upward is becoming clearer.  The challenge now is execution, and whether Scotland can turn intellectual excellence into lasting economic impact. 

It’s not the AI’s fault, guest blog by Zudu CEO Paul Duffy

Every boardroom conversation seems to land on AI right now, from “we need it” to “be careful with it,”  to “why don’t we have it yet?”  Budgets are being allocated, pilots seem to be underway, and innovation teams are busy.

The problem is that most of that activity isn't translating into real outcomes. The easy explanation is that AI is “still early.” It sounds reasonable, and it buys time, but it is not accurate. The models work. The tools are accessible. In most cases, the limitation is not the technology - it is the business that the AI is being dropped into.

What I see time and time again, is organisations expecting AI to compensate for years of operational compromise. Systems that have been layered on top of each other without much thought for how they connect. Data is spread across platforms that were never designed to work together. Processes that rely on people manually stitching everything together just to keep things moving.

Most businesses have a small group of people who hold that together. They know where everything is, how it fits, and how to fix it when it breaks. They are essential, but they are also a sign that the operation is more fragile than it should be.  AI does not solve that.

Even if you introduce very capable models into that kind of environment, you tend to get the same outcome. Early excitement, a promising proof of concept, and then a slow drift as the reality of integrating it properly sets in. When it stalls, the technology often gets the blame.  In reality, it is doing exactly what it should. It just has nothing solid to work with.

The businesses seeing genuine returns from AI are not starting with tools. They are starting with how the business actually runs. Where time is being lost, or where decisions are slowed, or where people are doing work that should not exist in the first place.

Once those problems are clear, AI becomes useful. Before that, it is just another layer on top of an already stretched system.  Turning that into something that works in a live environment is not straightforward. It means connecting to production systems, structuring data properly, and changing how teams operate day-to-day. That work is not particularly visible, but it is where the value sits.

There is a gap between what the technology can do and what most organisations are set up to support. Closing that gap is a delivery challenge, not a technology one.

So the question for leadership teams is not whether they are doing enough AI. It is whether their business is ready to make use of it, and whether they have the capability to turn potential into something that actually operates at scale.

That is a harder conversation than approving another AI pilot.  But crucially, it is the hard conversations that lead to the most beneficial results.

Could “braided careers” solve Scotland’s computer science teaching crisis? Guest blog by Mary Porter, Chief of Staff, KPE4 Charitable Trust

For almost two decades, the number of computer science teachers in Scotland has been in decline. As a result, today’s high school pupils struggle to access high-quality computer science teaching.  In turn, this means fewer pupils develop the interest, confidence and qualifications needed to pursue the subject further. With fewer computer science graduates, there will be a shortage of home-grown talent and a costly challenge for Scottish companies to compete globally.

While AI can automate many routine coding tasks, the need for human oversight, complex system design and the ability to build and maintain AI systems means the demand for technical roles remains high.  It is therefore essential Scotland attracts more computer science graduates to careers in the classroom.

The decline in computer science teachers is now reaching a crisis point with retirement looming for 20% of current computing science teachers, while fewer people are signing up.  In 2025-26, just 16 people accepted places on PDGE Computing Science programmes, against a national target of 52, and of these, only a small number will make it to become long-term teaching staff.

Teaching computer science is a tough sell for several reasons; the pay gap between teaching and industry roles makes it an unrealistic option for many, regardless of motivation. For others, there is a concern that moving to teaching could mean technical skills become outdated or that they might lose professional respect and status compared with industry roles.  Added to this is the negative media coverage around teaching — particularly during and after Covid — which damaged perceptions of workload, wellbeing and support.

Retention is also an issue.  While 66 Secondary schools have no dedicated computer science teacher (affecting 1 in 8 Secondary pupils), in schools that do, there is often only one, leading  to professional isolation.

However, an innovative new collaboration between University of Glasgow, KPE4 Charitable Trust and Skyscanner is piloting a different model; the braided career.

In this model, individuals work across education and industry sectors simultaneously.  Not only does this mean the salary gap is reduced, but they also benefit from career opportunities in both roles, greater variety and less isolation. Fresh technical skills are maintained, also benefitting pupils who gain from teaching that draws on rich, real-life experience.

Crucially, it reframes teaching as a complementary and equally valuable strand of a professional career.

The pilot began in August 2025 with a one-year, full-time PDGE Computing Science programme followed by a two-year probationary teaching post two days a week at a local authority school, while working at Skyscanner for three days a week.

An evidence-based approach assessing the pilot will be undertaken to determine whether braided careers can be an effective solution for meeting teaching needs.  If successful, the model could be replicated for other critically low teaching subjects, such as maths and physics, potentially transforming the education sector and laying the foundations for a strong Scottish economy.

If we want a strong economy tomorrow, we need to change our approach today.

Build to Rent is back in Scotland, guest blog by John Boyle, Director of Research, Rettie

Build to Rent (BTR) is an emerging housing tenure in Scotland. It usually involves big institutions (like pension funds) funding new development to rent. It has been successfully delivered at scale in many parts of the likes of Manchester and London and has a growing presence in many other UK cities. Its major advantage is that it can deliver new homes at pace and scale, including affordable homes.

However, it has been slow to take root in Scotland. We only have around 5,000 BTR homes operating here (mostly in Edinburgh and Glasgow and there is also a volume of BTR homes in Aberdeen and Perth). There is the clear potential to get this number up to 20,000 and possibly beyond in the next few years. The value of this potential development is around £2.8 billion.

Some of the recent Scottish BTR milestones include the £30 million purchase of Dandara’s Forbes Place development in Aberdeen (the first operational BTR scheme in Scotland) by the Germany-based ECE Living Fund. In Edinburgh, the Council is set to deliver a mix of Mid Market Rent (MMR), social rent and open market rent tenure homes through its Edinburgh Living operator at Forth Port’s Western Harbour site in Leith. In Glasgow, the Solasta 324-unit development overlooking the River Clyde was sold to US-based Hines Property Partners for £80 million.

Although there has been activity, politics has been a factor in hindering BTR in Scotland (the Scottish Government’s rent freeze froze the market). But viability issues have also had a dampening effect, as the costs of delivering has become more burdensome for new housing across all sectors (for example, build costs have been rising at twice the rate of rents in Edinburgh and Glasgow since 2022).

We tend to think of BTR as large multi-storeys full of flats but Single Family Housing (SFH) BTR has emerged as another category of housing, providing houses rather than flats, often in the suburbs of main cities, and aimed at families and downsizers. The viability challenges seem more manageable for this type of housing. We have only seen a few hundred or so units of SFH BTR delivered, but we believe that the country could get to a couple of thousand quickly with potential schemes in the Central Belt alone.

The Scottish Government’s new Housing (Scotland) Bill exempts BTR from its provisions, which are mainly around rent controls. BTR’s affordable cousin MMR is also exempted. The Scottish Government has also engaged with the sector through its Housing Investment Taskforce, which provides possible routes into unlocking more institutional funding into Scotland over the long-term.

With a more certain environment to operate in, BTR is capable of making a comeback in Scotland. In a country with a housing emergency, where there are significant issues around the availability and affordability of housing, we need more housing of all tenures, and quickly.

Beyond the glass ceiling, guest blog by Emily Walters, Chief Growth Officer, Stellar Omada

We are living through one of the most extraordinary moments in technological history.  Artificial intelligence is reshaping industries, redefining productivity and accelerating change at a pace few of us could have predicted even five years ago.

Yet at the same time, the technology sector is facing a quieter and more uncomfortable reality as, in many ways, progress for women in tech has stalled.  Women represent roughly 26% of the UK technology workforce, and the numbers narrow even further as careers progress towards leadership.

Despite years of mentoring schemes, diversity initiatives and graduate programmes, the pipeline to senior decision-making roles is still leaking talent.  This matters not just socially, but economically.

Research highlighted by Dr Vanessa Vallely shows that less than 2% of venture capital funding goes to female-founded businesses. At the same time, the The Rose Review estimates that unlocking female entrepreneurship could add £250bn to the UK economy.

These were the themes that framed a recent Women in Tech leadership session hosted by Stellar Omada in Edinburgh, bringing together leaders from technology, finance and business at investment firm's BGF’s ‘Bothy’ in Edinburgh, supported by Cazenove Capital and Heart of Midlothian FC.

The intention was not another networking event. Instead, we created a working session to ask a more difficult question: why are talented women still leaving the industry just as they approach positions of real influence?

The research gave us a starting point. Sam Cooper-Gray highlights that female-led technology companies in Scotland remain rare. Meanwhile, Gill Whitty-Collins’s Why Men Win at Work explores how workplace systems often reward visibility and confidence over capability and potential.

But the most valuable insights came from the room itself.  Across our discussion tables, one message emerged clearly: talent is not the issue - structure is.

Participants spoke about the need for women to be visible in the right places, leading major programmes and commercial initiatives rather than being confined to operational delivery. Others highlighted the importance of active sponsorship from senior leaders, ensuring talented women are genuinely put forward for leadership opportunities.

Transparency was another theme. Many felt that access to financial information and commercial decision-making remains uneven, limiting the ability of women to influence where organisations invest and grow.

Confidence also featured heavily. Some spoke about imposter syndrome, while others pointed to more systemic barriers - lingering “boys’ club” cultures, assumptions around family responsibilities, and workplaces that still reward the loudest voice rather than the strongest idea.

We were fortunate to hear from Ann Budge OBE, whose leadership across both technology and football has broken new ground in Scotland.  Her advice was refreshingly direct: focus on the big things that matter, fight the battles worth fighting and ignore the trivia.  It was also fitting that we announced that Ann will be joining the Stellar Omada board as a Non-Executive Director.

If technology is shaping the future of our economy, then the people designing that future must reflect the society it serves.

And that requires more than conversation. It requires leadership, accountability and organisations where the best ideas — not the loudest voices — rise to the top.

Female powerhouses are fuelling Scottish economy, guest blog by Irene Graham OBE, CEO of ScaleUp Institute

If you want to see today where the Scottish economy is firing on all cylinders, look at your women business champions.

The number of visible, scaling female founded or co-founded  businesses has surged by a staggering 81% over the past year. These 139 powerhouses - including the likes of pizza disrupter Ooni, creative arts giant LS Productions, and life sciences firm Amici - now generate £1.5 billion in revenue and employ over 16,000 people.

These women-led firms are growing at twice the national rate, the new Female Founder Scottish ScaleUp Index shows.

The data is key: the Government’s Pathways Report identified better reporting as critical for change. Our Index shows Scotland already ranks second in the UK for female scaleup growth, outperforming the national average in turnover and employment.

Scottish Female-run, scaling firms presided over a 65% uplift in turnover and a 48% rise in employment last year. They already comprise 19% of all visible scaling businesses in Scotland. They cross every sector, from food to professional services, wellbeing to hospitality, with 39 percent in the industrial sectors and every region of Scotland - 47 percent reside outside Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Eight in ten Scottish female entrepreneurs feel they have little business support, compared to 40% of Scottish male-led firms. These companies want better access to funding; overseas market introductions and insights with specialised export funding; procurement opportunities, easier access to talent, including NXDs, alongside university R&D collaborations, to navigate the leap from scaling Scotland to global players.

While equity investment into these women-founded businesses jumped 80% last year to £116.5 million, that money is being funnelled into a small pool. Of Scotland’s 139 scaling female-run firms, the lion’s share of that capital went to just around 20 businesses.

This leaves an enormous pipeline of female businesses bootstrapping, or relying on important bank finance, while their male counterparts find it far easier to tap the equity  funding keg and deploy equity growth. Only 10% of total Scottish scaling investment goes to female founded firms.

That's why the Pathways Pledge remains so vital in connecting investors with female founders. Pledge participants such as BGF, OCC Ventures (University of Edinburgh), Par Equity, and Scottish Enterprise, are leading the way in backing these scaling firms and it remains vital that not only they continue to do so but others dial up their focus, including in angel investment, as the opportunity is clear.

We also continue to need to rethink how our education system serves entrepreneurship as the Pathways report is focussed on. Scaling female founders want to see a more entrepreneurial curriculum including a maths curriculum that reflects modern technology; better education on investment and funding; and enhanced accreditation for digital skills.  Pathways Pledge members like AccelerateHER are key.

The potential scaleups of the future, such as carbon testing firm Agricarbon UK, make up brand Vieve and crop protection business Solasta Bio, can soar within a supportive ecosystem that the Pathways Pledge is building.

The opportunity is sitting right in front of us: let’s not waste it.

https://www.scaleupinstitute.org.uk/reports/female-founders-scottish-scaleup-index/

Beyond the Podium: Why the biggest wins are now off the field, guest blog by Professor Ross Tuffee

In 2020 the world’s most valuable sports team, the Dallas Cowboys, was worth £3.5 billion - just 5 years later their value had almost tripled to £9.6 billion.

Sport is big business.  Teams’ valuations have grown with the surge in media rights fees, but investment is flowing into sport for other reasons.  Over £50 billion was invested in the sports sector between 2020 and 2025, with 28 new funds announced in 2025 bringing £7 billion of fresh capital into sports.

Investment in sport is on the rise closer to home, with unprecedented outcomes.  With a third of the football season to go, Hearts of Midlothian remain at the top of the Scottish Premiership. A closer look reveals the role that data and technology are playing in closing a historic performance gap with clubs who have traditionally topped the League.

Why is so much money flowing into developing sports technologies?

Funding doesn't just help teams recruit the best talent to bolster team performance, investment in technology accelerates post injury return to play; engages fans on gameday and beyond; supports live decision making; helps manage events, incidents and venues and eases athlete career transition/retirement/2nd career, etc.

Investment in the sport sector is not the whole story, however.  Sport provides an access point to other industries which have potential to deliver huge impact (both economic and social) across Scotland.  Solutions originating in performance improvement and injury prevention/recovery deliver benefits into health and wellbeing and, ultimately, longevity.

Fan engagement relies on constant, granular content creation, a capability applicable to any consumer facing organisation. Sports also provides routes to market for technologies that support incident management, sadly relevant for any venue hosting large gatherings of people from sport to music, to shopping centres.

And what about the barriers to scaling these technologies?  Investors want proven solutions and SportsTech founders therefore need test-beds where they can validate their prototypes and access data and athletes/users.

Scotland hosts many international sporting events, from the Six Nations Rugby (yes, we really did need to mention that!) to The Commonwealth Games 2026 and The Tour de France 2027 (Grand Depart in Edinburgh and passing through The Borders). These, and future events, provide ideal testing grounds for technologies ranging from automated vehicles and drones to pay per view.

We even have access to “guaranteed surf” at Surf Lab, a joint venture between Edinburgh Napier University and Lost Shore Surf Resort in Edinburgh!

Our sporting universities operate at high levels when it comes to athletic performance, potentially providing access to athletes, teams and individuals as well as equipment that can be used for validating new products.  We need to increase the number of collisions between supply and demand – which is why we are creating MotionLab Ventures “a living lab for sports innovation” and why MotionLabs has teamed up with The Venture Cafe Edinburgh to run a series of SportsTech themed events through 2026.

Our shared ambition – To make Scotland the place where SportsTech founders and businesses come to develop, test and scale their technology.

Professor Ross Tuffee is a tech founder, investor and Entrepreneur in Residence at The University of Stirling, Scotland’s University for Sporting Excellence.  He is the co-author of Scottish Government’s Policy:  The Entrepreneurial Campus Blueprint.

Closer UK-Germany ties spurring Scottish business links, by Jeremy Grant

When you think of Scotland’s links with Germany, perhaps 2024’s invasion of Munich by the Tartan Army for the Euro football tournament comes to mind.

Or the fact that Edinburgh’s twinning with the Bavarian city is the Scottish capital’s oldest such partnership.

Yet recent developments in the bilateral relationship between the UK and Germany that mean those links are now being defined by something far bigger: the rapid re-alignment of the UK’s relationship with the rest of Europe amid a world of “rupture”, as Canadian prime minister Mark Carney recently described global geopolitics.

A key moment came last year with the signing of the “Kensington Treaty”, covering a huge sweep of areas from defence and security to North Sea energy. There is even a taskforce being set up to examine building a direct rail link between London and Germany within the next decade.

Berlin and London also pledged to set up a joint “Business-Government Forum” to promote business cooperation, with the first meeting scheduled for April.

Against this backdrop, activity is ramping up in the Scottish context. This month Germany’s consulate in Scotland convened an event for startups, investors and policymakers at the Glasgow campus of Barclays and backed by the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce and British Chamber of Commerce in Germany. The aim was to explore ways to boost collaboration between the startup ecosystems of Scotland and Germany.

Christiane Hullmann, German consul general in Edinburgh, told the audience this had been limited by German investors and corporates tending to focus on London and the Oxford-Cambridge corridor, while Scotland’s thriving startup sector was still under the radar in Germany. “This is a missed opportunity on both sides, and it’s time to change that,” she declared.

Attendees included representatives from Celtic Renewables, which runs Scotland’s first refinery for green biofuels at Grangemouth; Edinburgh-based Think Tank Maths, which uses mathematics to provide more accurate satellite tracking in space; and QuickBlock, a Stirling-based startup that makes modular structures from recycled plastic for use as exhibition stands, humanitarian relief huts and military training facilities.

Andrew Vincent, QuickBlock chief executive, said he saw Germany as “the doorstep to a growing European market” after the company made its first sale there last summer.

Business going the other way already makes Germany the second largest source of inward investment into Scotland after the US, while over 150 German companies operate in Scotland, employing 18,000 people.

The challenge now will be to attract German startup and investor interest in Scotland’s strengths in artificial intelligence, robotics, life sciences and space, where Glasgow leads Europe in small satellite manufacturing.

There is some movement. German rocket company Rocket Factory Augsburg this week said it had initiated transport to Scotland of the first stage of a rocket that’s scheduled within months to make the first flight from Shetland’s SaxaVord launch site. Travel will be made easier between Glasgow and Hanover with the launch in June of a new route on the Eurowings airline, part of Lufthansa.

Richard Lochhead, Scottish government business minister, told the event: “Like Scotland, Germany is going through rapid technological transformation and one that aligns with Scotland’s strengths”.

Scotland’s Second Enlightenment depends on us, by ClearSky Logic Co-founder and CEO Darren Auld

The Scottish economy stands today at a profound inflection point. Technology is reshaping societies and industries at a pace that feels almost impossible to grasp. Artificial intelligence, automation, and digital infrastructure are transforming the way we live and work. Yet for Scotland, this moment has a deeper resonance: a historical echo that calls us to lead again.

Three centuries ago, a small nation at the northern edge of Europe gave birth to the Enlightenment. Thinkers, scientists, and innovators shaped ideas that rippled far beyond our borders. Scotland once punched so far above its weight that it altered the course of civilisation. The question now is whether we can channel that same creative force into a new, tech-driven renaissance, or risk becoming a country that talks about innovation rather than delivers it.

We can’t, and shouldn’t, attempt to compete head-to-head with the deep pockets of the US, China or the EU. Instead, we need to do what has always defined Scotland at its best: outperform our size, combine pragmatism with boldness, and create global impact from local ingenuity.

That spirit is alive today in our emerging generation of founders, engineers, and academic pioneers. Scotland’s future prosperity will depend on our ability to scale businesses globally from here at home. And the good news is that we have already proven it can be done. 

The success stories of Skyscanner, FanDuel and others haven’t just built wealth; they’ve recycled expertise, capital, and ambition back into the ecosystem. These founders and operators are now leading or advising new businesses across applied AI, healthtech, and green infrastructure, essentially seeding what could become Scotland’s next wave of innovation.

The recently published Entrepreneurs’ Manifesto for Scotland captures this shift. Led by Sir Tom Hunter and The Hunter Foundation, and backed by more than 200 business leaders, it argues that while Scotland has all the right ingredients - talent, ambition, and world-class research - we are held back by over-regulation and fragmented government support. The challenge is not one of potential but of cohesion and pace.

AI is the defining disruptor of our era, and here Scotland has an under-appreciated advantage. We have renewable power in abundance - in 2022 generating the equivalent of 113% of our electricity needs - and a cool climate that reduces the energy burden of data centres. In an age where high-performance computing demands both green power and scale, Scotland’s geography offers a natural edge.

We won’t outspend Silicon Valley, nor should we try. Our path lies in specialisation - in fintech, data ethics, digital health, and green AI infrastructure. Edinburgh’s fintech cluster alone has doubled in size since 2021, with more than £1 billion invested in 2025. That momentum must be matched by policy ambition.

Government can only go so far. Business must lead. We need to connect founders, investors, and institutions around a shared national mission: to build an economy that is innovative, international, and inclusive.

The first Scottish Enlightenment reshaped the world. The second will depend not on philosophers but on entrepreneurs, and on our collective willingness to act.