On a mission: Scottish Enterprise sets out three ways it hopes to add new jobs and investment

Plans echo approach adopted 20 years ago to boost levels of research and development.

The energy transition, including the adoption of offshore wind power, is one of the three Scottish Enterprise missions.

Scotland’s economic agency has set out three new “missions” that promise to unlock thousands of jobs and billions of pounds of investment.

Scottish Enterprise said it was targeting a future economy “benefiting all of Scotland” with its new strategy focusing on energy transition, innovation and productivity - the last of those being a consistent area of underperformance. To deliver this, the agency is changing the way it works with businesses and entrepreneurs, pledging to help them to grow through the introduction of a “mission-based approach”.

It pointed to a similar focused approach it had adopted 20 years ago, when it identified low levels of investment in early-stage companies and business research and development (R&D) spending as barriers to growth. The agency re-focused its resources to support companies to tackle these challenges, resulting in “significant improvements” in performance in the years since.

As part of its latest initiative, dubbed Our Focus on Economic Transformation, Scottish Enterprise will target the high growth opportunity areas of energy transition, including offshore wind and hydrogen production, space, photonics and quantum technology, industrial biotechnology, life sciences and fintech - financial technology. It said that its mission to scale innovation alone was expected to help businesses create more than 60,000 jobs and enable companies in these industries to generate almost £14 billion in additional annual turnover by 2030.

Scottish Enterprise chief executive Adrian Gillespie said: “Scotland has a phenomenal opportunity to harness its unique capabilities to transform the economy and now is the time to sharpen our focus to help drive this.

“Scotland has an excellent track record, for example in foreign direct Investment, but there is room for improvement in other areas. We need a future economy that drives up levels of investment and innovation that positively impacts economic performance and generates wealth for everyone in Scotland. We are changing the way we are organised, how we work and what we do, to help secure that.

“Our Focus is our blueprint to enable our businesses to deliver high value jobs, boost their levels of innovation and productivity, and create wealth for Scotland’s economy.”

The agency said that, over the last five years, it had delivered 75,000 new and safeguarded jobs, raising additional income tax of £900 million.