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.