Scotland can be a Start-up Nation - Mark Logan

It is sometimes forgotten that every job existing today does so because someone, somewhere, at some time started something. In a world of ever accelerating change, our economy must renew itself several times per generation if the jobs of tomorrow are going to exist.

That renewal doesn’t happen magically; it needs starters and the best possible support environment within which those starters – or entrepreneurs, if you prefer – can succeed. In other words, it has never been more important for Scotland to become a Start-up Nation, which we can define as a country that has normalised entrepreneurship as a career option, and which provides an excellent environment in which to start and grow a company. How do we meet that challenge, renewing opportunity for our children such that we might look them in the eye with hope rather than mumbled excuses and lamentations about a glorious past now lost?

The first prerequisite is that we need to be systematic – we must treat the entrepreneurial support environment as a system. Its input is talent, and its output is start-ups. The levers that operate upon that system are Education, Infrastructure and Funding. How we manipulate those levers determines the strength of our output signal.

For illustration, let’s consider the first of these levers, Education. Its role in this context is to normalise entrepreneurship as a career path, equipping people with the interest and skills to consider either starting or joining an early-stage business. We currently don’t sufficiently expose school-age children and, later, students to entrepreneurial thinking and technique. As a result, graduates too often shy away from joining a start-up, preferring to work instead in a “proper” company. It’s easy to see how such omissions directly affect the number, strength and scale of start-ups that Scotland can subsequently produce.

​Scotland needs to offer an environment that supports companies to start and grow (Picture: Vasyl - AdobeStock)

This also illuminates the second prerequisite to Scotland becoming a world-class Start-up Nation: we need to work together, ignoring the organisational boundaries of government departments, its agencies and of private industry stakeholders. In this regard, a shared, systematic model of the entrepreneurial system acts as a binding agent for support initiatives and policy development. When we coalesce around a common model of the entrepreneurial system, support interventions become complementary and mutually reinforcing.

In the past, individual stakeholders have tended to operate in isolation of each other. That hasn’t worked very well. I’m pleased to be able to say that this is changing; collaboration and coordination within the entrepreneurial support ecosystem have strengthened considerably in recent years. The result will be more and better start-ups and more opportunities for our people.

The final prerequisite to becoming a start-up nation is that we need to stay the course. Our goal is a generational endeavour, and depends on strategic consistency, sustained over many years. We’ve seen, in the examples of Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Denmark and other comparably sized nations how world-class entrepreneurial ecosystems can be built if a political consensus can be established and held for long enough for it to bear fruit.

Such economic performance is well within Scotland’s reach. If we adhere to these prerequisites – be systematic, work together, and hold the line – we can grasp it. Our children will thank us for that discipline.

Mark Logan is the chief entrepreneurial adviser to the Scottish Government