Scotland’s innovators: Past, present, and future

This event reflects on the legacy of Scottish innovation, and explore its present and future.

As part of Scotland’s Innovation Week, the RSE reflected on the legacy and contribution of our Fellows to Scottish innovation and explored the past, present, and future of Scotland’s innovators and their impact on the economy.

The RSE’s history is intertwined with the story of Scotland, and its remarkable ability to lead the world in the discovery and application of science. From the Enlightenment to today, we tell the tale of the RSE and how we enabled a future where Scotland’s innovation can thrive. We looked at the RSE’s present contributions, including our trailblazing Enterprise Fellowship Scheme and the work of our Economy and Enterprise Committee in shaping public policies that enable our innovative sectors to thrive.

Featuring voices from across the Fellowship and beyond, this session invites bold thinking on the structures, support, and strategies needed to drive inclusive and sustainable innovation across the country.

Transcript

This transcript has been automatically generated so may feature errors.

1:41
Hey, welcome to RSE, and welcome those who are in the room. And I presume we have a number of audience online as well. So welcome online. Where is the camera looking at? Are they looking at the slides? Okay, good. So today we are celebrating the first day of the innovation week that Scottish Government launched, and RSE on the first day. We are here to celebrate RSC role and innovation and economy. And we have a large history, which I would like to do. I’m Dr Poonam Malik, Royal Society of Edinburgh, Vice President Business, responsible for economy and enterprise. I’ve taken over this office since first of April, alongside the new council and our president, Professor Anton muscatelli. So welcome. On behalf of that, I’m also chair of economy and enterprise committee in that remit, and we will be discussing the work of that alongside our enterprise fellowship. So where should I start about the work of RSC, the Royal Society of Edinburgh is has a proud history of fostering innovation and societal progress since its founding during the Scottish Enlightenment in 1783 today, which is 242 years of history, the Royal Society of Edinburgh stands as Scotland’s national academy of science and letters, bringing together Some of the most distinguished thinkers, innovators and leaders across academia, business, the arts and public life, and that’s where we differ from some of the other academies in terms of that we combined both the STEM subjects, the arts and the public and societal life in there and business, with A mission to advance learning and contribute to societal, cultural and economic well being of Scotland and the wider world. The RSC has been a long convener of knowledge and ideas, with knowledge being made useful as its motto, RSCs unique strength lies in its multidisciplinary nature, where science meets policy, business connects with culture and evidence informs progress, and that translates into policy for the societal and economic good. Through fellowships, policy advice, international collaborations and public engagement, the RSC fosters an environment where research and innovation can flourish together and deliver tangible benefits to society. Eleanor Roosevelt said The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams, and that is where we are, here, gathered today if, as part of this innovation week, we have chosen a topic which you would have come here, prepared to celebrate our proud history in terms of past, to discuss about where we stand today in terms of present, as there is as much doom and gloom. In the media as there is potential to talk about and then to look and interrogate and be excited and inspired about the future as part of this 242 year old history to past and present, looking at the legacy of innovation that RSE has supported through the lens of RSE detail the ways in which we can support Scottish society by offering a glimpse of our present work as part of both enterprise fellowships, economy and enterprise committee, and through our wealth of 1800 fellows, that’s the greatest asset of RSE And as your National Academy for Scotland, and with Scottish Government’s help, we have Colin cook here from Scottish Government, Director of Economic Development, we want to hear from you. How can ARace support the society you as our communities in future, innovation for Scotland, we will start with, first with past where Katie will talk shared past activities of RSE through the years. Then moving on to present, we will hear about the enterprise fellowships of RSC, which RSE has been running for over 27 years. Next we will discuss the innovation activities through the lens of RSC economy and enterprise committee. And to conclude, what is there to without your participation, we will have an active panel discussion where you can pose all your questions to the present fellows here, and to discuss how we can make and contribute better for utilizing innovation. So to begin with, please welcome Katie to discuss past involvement over this 242 year legacy Katie’s RSCs archives and research officer, and share on that topic. Welcome Katie,

7:02
as we just heard through its Markle fellowship, the RSC has played a central role in Scotland’s remarkable ability to lead the world in scientific discovery and technological innovation, from Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin to John Logie Baird’s demonstration of the first mechanical television, from Charles Babbage’s concept of the programmable computer to Alexander wood, inventing an early hypodermic syringe. The RSC historic fellowship is peppered with inventors and innovators whose discoveries have changed how people live, both in Scotland and around the world today. I’ll present on the RCS role in supporting Scotland’s talent from the enlightenment to the present day, creating the conditions from which Scottish innovation has flourished and continues to thrive. The Royal Society of Edinburgh role in encouraging innovation in Scotland can be traced back to its foundations. At the turn of the 18th century, Scotland was a nation characterized as lacking sovereignty and was torn between religious and political factions. Yet by the end of the century, the intellectual and scientific accomplishments of scholars such as Adam Smith, Dougal, Stewart and Colin Maclaurin had revived its reputation on the international stage. Born out of early philosophical and debating societies, the RSE was unique in bringing together not just academics, but also business leaders, agriculturalists, engineers and clergymen from across Scotland. Its founding principle was that every form of logical inquiry was worthy of attention, not only medical and physical science, every species of literary and full logical discussion. Among its founding fellows were William Cullen, credited as the inventor of the refrigerator due to his work on artificial freezing, and Alexander Cumming, whose design for the flushing toilet is still used in many bathrooms today. The RCS founding objective was to provide facilities for discussion amongst its fellows. This was quickly realized when the RSE took up home in the University of Edinburgh library, providing a platform for men of independent means and thought to test and shape their thinking, particularly those not tied to any university. One such man was James Hutton, often called the father of modern geology, who presented his radical theory of the Earth at the RSE meetings in 1785, the openness of the RSE to all classes of men of research and intelligence, of all ranks of the most varied occupations and acquirements, as stated by Vice President James Forbes, produced an environment in which ideas could be tested, challenged and connected to practical applications. It’s easy to see how innovation would thrive between 1783 and 1836 Edinburgh was the only British city to host both an active scientific society and a university. This gave it a distinct intellectual climate, with Thomas Jefferson declaring that, so far as science is concerned, no place in the world can pretend to compete with Edinburgh. Against this backdrop, the RSE provided a place for fellows, not only to present theories, but also to forge collaborations that translated ideas into practical solutions. In. A noticeable A notable example is the physicist John Robson who discussed the application of science to engineering with James Watt. It’s actually Robson who made the prophetic suggestion to what steam engine might might be used to move carriage wheels, and assisted him with developing an early engine. Amazingly, their discussions took place over 100 years before the science of thermodynamics had even been formalized by another RSE fellow, Lord Kelvin. Another example of the fruitfulness of informal discussion can be found in the field of photography. When Fox Talbot demonstrated the calotype photographic process, a method that made paper light sensitive through an application of chemicals, his method was immediately appreciated in Scotland. Notably, one of his busiest advocates was John Adamson, a medical practitioner and RSE fellow, who introduced his younger brother Robert to the technique. Robert Adamson would go on to form the first photography studio in Scotland, alongside David Octavius Hill, and the pair would produce the first examples of artistic work using the newly invented medium of photography. Talbot’s methods were also well known to a young James Clerk Maxwell, who would go on to produce the world’s first color photograph. By the mid 19th century, the RSE recognized that innovation often required material support. Small pots of funding, around 1000 pounds in today’s money, were made available on a by request basis. One person who benefited from this scheme was Lord Kelvin, who regularly and successfully applied for funding from the RCS Council. While some academics at the time held the view that scientists should refrain from the industrial application of their discoveries, Kelvin was not one of them, as evidenced by his remark about Niagara Falls, beautiful as that work of nature is, it would be far more beautiful still if the waters fell on turbine wheels, every one of which was turning the wheels of industry. This sentiment is evidenced in his numerous practical inventions, which include a mariners compass that was installed on HMS discovery and an astronomical clock said to be as accurate as any in existence at the time. Perhaps his most important achievement was in the successful laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable, which revolutionized communication between Europe and North America. The laying of Kelvin telegraph cable was supported by another RSE fellow, Fleming Jenkin, while much of his work related to the installation of underground cables, he is perhaps most famous for his above ground design early cable tramways that would lead to the production of the cable car. Not all forays into the field of transportation were success, successful as the cable car. John Archibald Purvis patented mono wheel known as the Dinos here was supposed to reduce locomotion to its simplest form with an associated economy of power. Purvis described the dynasphere as the high speed vehicle of the future. Though two key flaws quickly emerged. The vehicle was almost impossible to steer or brake, and some drivers reported the phenomenon of dribbling, whereby the housing holding the driver within the vehicle would spin within the structure. It’s fair to say that sometimes it’s useful to work out what doesn’t work as much as what does. As we saw during the covid pandemic, urgent problems often force societies to adopt creative solutions faster than in normal circumstances. This was certainly the case following the outbreak of the First World War, which saw the RSE create a war Research Fund, making funding available for research which reduced the human cost of conflict among the research it supported were early studies on means of protecting individuals against gas warfare. This research may have later inspired the pioneering work of Charlotte Orbach, who illustrated how mustard gas caused mutations in fruit flies. Orbach was one of the first women elected to the RSE alongside Sheena Marshall, whose wartime contributions were also significant. During the Second World War the UK was unable to obtain Japanese agar, a substance required for growing bacterial cultures and essential in the field of microbiology for advancing medical discoveries. Marshall, a marine biologist studying plankton, was tasked with finding a substitute for the Japanese seaweed. When she was successful in doing so, royalties from the patented British agar were negotiated for her when women were finally invited to join the society in 1949 orback. And Marshall joined a long line of contributors to physical innovation, including James Young Simpson, known for his pioneering work in anesthetics. Thomas Fraser, who produced the antidote to certain snake venoms, and John McCloy, whose discovery of insulin led to him being awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize for Medicine. Today, the oracy’s motto, knowledge made useful continues to reflect the spirit of the Enlightenment from which it was born, whether sparked by chance conversation, nurtured within networks of expertise or driven by urgent social need, innovation in Scotland has long thrived alongside the society’s support. As we look to the future, Scotland is an opportunity to maintain its role as a leading contributor to technological progress, shaping the ideas and innovations that our society. It needs and that make our world a better place. Thank you.

15:12
Thank you, Katie, so much. It was such interesting innovations that have gone through this long history of RSE. As you say, it is better to figure out what doesn’t work versus what works in there. Next, moving on to the one aspect of RSCs work in terms of RSC enterprise Fellowship, which RSC has funded to for the development of enterprise activity, it gives me immense pleasure to welcome Professor Simon best, who’s the chair of our enterprise fellowship Steering Group. We are starting to talk about that recently. Simon will describe but let me introduce Simon. He began his career in music from music a transformation into biotechnology. Simon’s been founding CEO of three major ventures, NCA, Plant Sciences, Roslyn, biomed and ardana. He’s also co founder of investment local in venture house, power equity, and he’s holding permanent leadership roles, Vice Chairman of us biotechnology industry, as well as the startup company which is now scaling my algae here and our se fellow. So in that capacity, it gives me immense pleasure to welcome Simon.

16:28
Okay, yes, indeed, it’s my pleasure to introduce the fellowship scheme, and indeed, three individual speakers who are going to tell you all about it and about their experiences. So the enterprise fellowship scheme was actually founded in 2007 and then took off in 2008 and we have the pleasure tonight to have one of the founders and then Chairman of the fellowship scheme, Edward Cunningham, who helped it grow and evolve right through until covid, when it took a break. And I’m pleased to say that we’re now going to relaunch it. We had our first showcase last week, but we’re going to take it forward, and I’ll tell you a bit more about that after we’ve heard from the speakers. Yeah, that’s fine. Anyway, Edward was educated at Cambridge and at Harvard Business School. He worked in the civil service and in industry. He joined the World Bank in 1968 and was subsequently involved in the setting up of the Scottish Development Agency, which was an important development in the late 1960s and you know, the background for Scottish Enterprise and the many other organs of industry support in Scotland. And he was the, originally, the director of industry and enterprise for SDA. Subsequently, he was involved with venture capital through investment companies and as an investor in his own account, and as a director and chairman of start up and early stage enterprises and as a consultant. He’s been chairman of the Scottish exhibition and conference center on the boards of TSB Bank Scotland, Watson and Philip and the dynamic Earth enterprises. He’s chaired five companies for three i and served on the council of the RSC, and was its treasure treasurer from 2004 to 2008 so Edward, having been had a deep and long involvement with the fellowship scheme, is going to tell us about what it achieved in its first manifestation, and what we’re building on now, which we’re going to tell you about a little bit later.

18:24
Edward, I’m not sure I can add to that. I’m very pleased to have this opportunity to tell you about the enterprise fellowship scheme. It was a considerable success in the promotion of innovation across the UK and over a 20 odd span years, I have to say, from 1997 although it was a small scheme in relation to the UK as a whole, it was a pioneer in demonstrating how university research could be commercialized earlier on, prior to this, so much of research was controlled through an organization called the NRDC, which had the policy of licensing, the government funded research, rather than using research as a basis for commercialization. So how was it that the enterprise fellowship scheme was so successful? Before answering that question, let me first of all mention what its stated objective was, and then how it was structured. The objective was, quite simply, to enable academics to commercialize their research. The structure centered around the RSE, who developed and managed the scheme back in 1997 enterprise fellows were sponsored and paid for by research councils and the Scottish Enterprise, or SBA, the RSC engaged a training provider that delivered a 12 month program. The impact of the scheme. The last economic evaluation in 19, 2019 showed that one pound spent by the sponsors generated a return to the UK economy of 10 pounds, or to be more precise, nine pounds and 74 pence. More remarkable was that out of the 270 enterprise fellows who participated in the scheme, 90% successfully launched enterprises, and of those, 75%

21:19
were still in operation in 2019 So what made all this happen?

21:29
First was a selection process, which ensured that proposals for commercial commercialization were of the highest potential. The applicants meeting this requirement were then assessed to their commitment to changing their career path in order to long launch and subsequently manage a new enterprise with all its risks, and I stress that they were making a decision to move into high risk career path, and the second was the organizational arrangements, which brought together the skills of the RSC fellowship and the technological base of the sponsors and their very extensive networks. And the third feature was the training program, the RSC, together with its provider, shifted the emphasis from lectures and so on towards self learning, and so that the amount of time allocated for this was progressively increased to allow enterprise fellows to interact amongst themselves, to interact with their prospective clients, and also with VC investors. So to sum up, or at least not to sum up, but just to give one final word, I do want to stress that the contribution of the scheme to innovation depended on maintaining its relevance. But if the relevance of Yes, but the relevance of yesterday is different from today, nonetheless, I believe that the experience of the Enterprise Service scheme will help in designing new initiatives for today and for tomorrow, as will be represented by Simon there, who is now chairing the scheme,

24:09
to introduce you to the first of two graduates from the fellowship scheme, and the first is Professor Andy Porter, who’s going to tell us about his experience. And he’s got a wealth of experience, both in industry and academia. He was the founding CSO at haptogen, which was the company he was fermenting and brewing in. While he was a fellow that was eventually sold to Wyeth Pfizer. He was one of the founders of biologics drug discovery company elasmogen, whose CEO, Carolyn Burrell was another erse enterprise fellow. He also holds non executive positions in a number of life science and other businesses, including Roslin technologies, which he chairs microplate dx, of which Stuart Hanna is also an RSE fellow, and more recently, ncimb, he’s a part time professor in the medical biotechnology. Me at the University of Aberdeen and director of the Scottish biology facility. Shall I say any more? Andy, I’ll let you get on. Okay, off you go. That’s fine.

25:13
I’ll try and do it in a northern accent now. So think back to 2001 and there was a dashingly handsome young academic who came through the doors of the Royal Society of Edinburgh for the first time to be then grilled by a series of all gentlemen to try and get my enterprise fellow fellowship. It was quite a harrowing experience. It was a, it was a, it was a serious interrogation of what I was hoping to do with my fellowship. I got it, and when I look back, I think it’s probably the most significant event in the whole of my career, in terms of my career development, it changed my life getting the enterprise fellowship. And you’ll hear that from a lot of enterprise fellows, it really did set them up for the rest of their lives, that one of the key differences about the enterprise fellowship scheme is that it was a 12 month period away from my academic studies, with my salary paid, and it but with time to think, to learn, to plan, and in my case, to actually dismantle the original business that I proposed When I was interviewed here for the first time, which was a diagnostics business, and to actually rebuild that using the same technology, but point it towards therapeutics. And a year after the fellowship, we launched the company in 2002 and as Simon has already said, my big my big line. He’s already taken that away from me. We sold it to wire Pfizer in 2007 so a transformational event for me again, certainly financially. It made things very, very different for for me from that point onwards, and allowed me to take a few other risks in my career. And during that time, in 2005 I was actually made science and technology entrepreneur of the year for the UK, which was pretty cool as well. So the thing about the enterprise fellowship scheme, though, was that you did it as part of a cohort, and the cohort could were all sorts of different businesses, but those businesses hopefully didn’t compete with each other, but they went through a lot of similar struggles, and you kind of worked your way through those problems together, with mentors and with help from others who were more experienced than You were, but that that common learning and that common problem solving was a huge part of the enterprise fellowship scheme. And we all refer to ourselves, most of us, anyway, by our cohort number. So I think I was cohort four, that we were, I was talking to somebody the other night, and they were, they told me they were Cohort Two, so there is this kind of bonding that happens through your cohort, and a lot of the squabbling that goes on not within the cohort, is with the universities that you’re trying to spend your companies out of and trying to get them to be reasonable about the ownership of the intellectual property. You need to take your business forward? I guess. Post doing the enterprise fellowship scheme, I’ve tried to remain active in the entrepreneurial space. I’ve encouraged others to go through the process and Simon’s already mentioned. Caroline Burrell, she very much runs elasmogen now, but we, we set that up together in 2006 and also I’m on the board of microplate dx, where Stuart Hannah, who is a a pretty young scientist, but a really excellent CEO, has been successful in raising a lot of risk capital and winning a lot of grants as well, and has a has a sort of trophy cabinet of awards that’s groaning now. So lucky to get all that learning within the enterprise fellowship scheme. Certainly lucky to get a bit of learning through haptogen. It was a kind of lottery win to get that away to to Wyeth. When we did it, we were very successful in doing that, but it was we were just fortunate about some of the timing and the. I’ve actually, I actually think that I’ve learned more from what’s happened since, and particularly when I failed. So I don’t want to give you the impression that everything I’ve done has been successful. There’s been a few failures, failures along the way as well. And I think it’s actually during those failures, and the sort of badge of honor that that comes with maybe getting things wrong, that the real learning happens. And I guess as long as you don’t make the same mistakes twice, then then you can really, you do really benefit from some of that failing. Failing, one of the real joys for me has been that I’ve been able to get involved with younger people who want to be involved in as entrepreneurs. And so in 2021 during lockdown, we set up a company with some students from Aberdeen University, which is now based down here in Edinburgh, and it’s called white box cocktails limited. And white box cocktails Limited is a canned cocktails business, and quite often is voted the best canned cocktails in the world. They’re doing about 40,000 units a day now in Edinburgh, with an expectation to grow that to somewhere near 70 to 80,000 by Christmas. So really exciting to be able to get involved with that, those young people as well, getting involved in entrepreneurship. So I hope that gives you a little flavor of what the enterprise fellowship scheme is about and how it set me up, at least, to continue a real career in entrepreneurship. Thank you.

31:58
Thank you, Auntie, and it’s my pleasure now to introduce another Aberdeen based veteran of the EFS, Dr sumia pallili, who is CEO and co founder of Brigid bio limited, a novel antifungal immunotherapeutics company out of the University of Aberdeen. So please, we look forward to hearing about it. Thank you. So

32:23
good evening, everyone. It’s a real pleasure to be here today at the RSC part of this event, and thanks to the organizers for the invitation to present so you heard from Andy how the enterprise fellowship works. So what I thought I’ll do, I’ll take this opportunity to highlight how the enterprise fellowship helped me to shape my career as an academic entrepreneur and to equip me with the skills to drive innovation, creating impact. So I came to the UK, funded by the British Council Commonwealth scholarship to do my masters in biotechnology at the University of Aberdeen. This was followed by a PhD in molecular biology, which was funded by a program called knowledge transfer partnership. Some of you might know about KTP or knowledge transfer partnership. So this partnership was between the University of Aberdeen and Pfizer, and I was the KTP associate on that project. So again, that gave me the opportunity to experience, to have that first hand experience how innovation can be driven by academic industry partnership. So that project was selected as the best KTP partnership in Scotland in 2011 and the PhD allowed me to graduate and officially be called an antibody engineer. So So I at that time. So after my PhD, I had this idea that the antibodies that I made as part of that PhD could be developed into novel biologics, therapies to treat drug resistant bacterial infections. And I was fortunate enough to be awarded the RC commercialization fellowship to develop that business idea. But I have to say this was before the landmark report on antimicrobial resistance by The Economist Jim O’Neill, and also the covid pandemic. So there was not many interest from funding bodies on anti infective companies. So I was not able to set up a company or a business at that time as part of the RSE fellowship, but I would say the commercial network that I built, the training and the mentoring support I got through the fellowship allowed me to then land. On a job as the head of Scottish biologics facility at the University of Aberdeen. So the Scottish biologics facility, or the SPF, is an antibody Discovery Center. And as the head of the SPF, I was able to initiate project, manage and deliver on a portfolio of antibody discovery projects, including the 4 million pound Alzheimer’s immunotherapy program, which was funded by the industry partner tower X therapeutics. So we also grew the facility from me as the sole antibody engineer when I started into a team of 10 plus scientists, including post docs and PhD students. And the SBF is also a training facility where researchers from all over the country could come and get trained in antibody discovery techniques. So the key focus of the SBF projects is real world outcomes and creating global impact. And one project I am very passionate about, and this was started during the pandemic lockdown. Is snakebite diagnostics development project in India. Now India, like many tropical countries, have a large number of venomous and non venomous snakes. However, unfortunately, the kind of consequences of envenomation is quite big in India, and unfortunately, India is called the snake bite capital of the world. One snake bite happens every 15 seconds, and one death every 10 minutes. So this contributes to over 50,000 deaths each year, and 200,000 plus permanent disabilities amongst the poorest of the poor. This includes tissue necrosis, amputations, and there are no diagnostic tests in India which can differentiate between a venomous and a non venomous bite, so that the victims, or even the clinicians can be informed that this bite is a venomous bite and you need urgent medical care. So I thought this is where I could make a difference with the antibody engineering skills that I have gained after coming on a Commonwealth scholarship into the UK and all the trainings I’ve received. So I decided to think about making a lateral flow test, just like the test that we were all using at home during the lockdown. And if you think about it, it’s quite a simple technology which could be used to develop this first in kind test in India. So this test prototype has now completed clinical testing with patient samples in India, and we are at the manufacturing stage, and there is a network of local partners helping us with the regulatory process and product launch in India. So over the course of time, my desire to still make an anti a company, a biologics therapeutics to treat infectious diseases never left me so collaborating with Professor Carol Monroe at the University of Aberdeen, who’s an expert in medical mycology, human monoclonal antibodies were developed to the to some of the novel drug targets that Carol has identified as part of her research, and these drug targets play a key role in infection and drug resistance in fungal pathogens. So fungi can cause life threatening, serious life threatening infections in immunocompromised hosts, and this causes invasive fungal infections. And globally, 3 million people die each year due to invasive fungal infections, the mortality rate is quite high. It goes from 40 to 80% despite treatment, and we only have three classes of antifungals to treat, and it’s kind of a forgotten child in anti infectious fields. When we talk about Amr, people think about antibiotics resistance, but antifungal resistance is on the rise, and this results in a lot of treatment complications, treatment failure, and unfortunately, a lot of immunocompromised patients died due to these infections. So Bridget bio Limited was set up as a spin out company from the University of Aberdeen to pioneer the development of novel immunotherapies to treat serious, drug resistant, invasive fungal infections. We raised over 1 million in pre seed funding to date by a combination of commercial grants from Innovate UK icure, the Scottish Enterprise, and an organization called incate, which is a European antimicrobial therapies incubator. We also won a small number of business awards in Scotland, including the converge and the regional Scottish edge award. So I feel like I’ve come full circle here at the RSC, where it all started, 15 years back when I was a enterprise fellow in 2010 but with all. The years, the experience and the skills that I’ve gained finally allowed me to launch an anti infective drug discovery business. So thank you for listening.

40:18
Thank you very much. Just to briefly round off this part of the session this evening, I’m just going to tell you what the new features are of the relaunch enterprise fellowship scheme that we’re now taking forward again and for which we hope to start canvassing for a first cohort of fellows in the beginning of next year. So the scheme is still a year long, it provides a salary for a year. It still involves a baseline of training, which, as Andy has described, both with peer to peer and external training programs. And in fact, we’re pleased that some of the programs that the first enterprise fellowship scheme developed have actually been, continued to be used by other enterprise schemes, particularly the Royal Academy of Engineering down south, where Ian Ritchie is both a fellow there and a fellow here, and he’s taken forward training programs, which we can still use and take forward as part of the scheme. But there are two new features I want to focus on. The first is that, having sort of taken a look at what other support there is now for academics who want to do this, there’s much more available for students and for PhD students than there is for postdocs. And yet, actually we think postdocs, in many respects, are a sweet spot to aim at, because, hopefully, because they’ve been thinking about this for a bit longer, some of their ideas will be more developed and more ready to take forward with the benefit of the year’s program. So that’s worth focusing on in the at least in the first instance, is postdocs. The other thing that we’re going to do that wasn’t part of the original scheme is actually to leverage the increasing international scope of the society. So over the past 10 years, we’ve in every year, we’ve brought in international fellows, as well as the domestic fellowship Fellow Program. And that there’s we now have a significant number of international fellows around the world. We also have a growing number of partnerships with other learned institutes around the world. There are now 22 of those in place. So as part of the scheme, we’re actually going to encourage the fellows to spend three to four months overseas at a center of excellence in their area of interest. So actually, to go out there, have both training, formal and informal, where it’s available, but really meet up face to face with others working in the field, both in companies and in universities, to get both a clear idea about what’s possible and indeed what things to avoid. But I think this international dimension is actually quite unique, and it perhaps addresses, you know, one of the sort of curses of the innovation culture and startup culture in the UK, which is that we build things here, but then don’t take them beyond that internationally. So what we’re hoping is that by spending time, you know, with fellow peers and a center of excellence overseas, they can be thinking big, thinking expansion and international from the beginning, and just have a more solid basis to a higher ambition to take things further. So on that note, watch this space. We hope to be taking forward our first fellows next year, and look forward to bringing their stories and their experience back in due course. Thank you very much.

43:50
Thank you, Simon so that was an enlightening session about RSCs role in terms of how enterprise fellowships have been hosted. And since we are talking about lot of full circle moments, as all speakers have tried to do it, if I were to link, because, as I said, I’ve not spoken anything about the work, it is good to see that star RSC enterprise fellowships, which started in 1997 I’m board member of Scottish Enterprise for past seven years. And Scottish Enterprise, as Scotland’s national sort of innovation or enterprise agency, has funded it for 25 years, since 1997 till 2023 22 when it was paused during after covid. So like every baby that has to grow and eventually leave the nest. It is the enterprise fellowship time its evolution to spin out and become self sustainable, which is the current model to look for financial and funding raise in its new version of it. And Andy mentioned microplate dx and. Currently executive chair and co founder of microplate DX alongside and it’s a perfect example of those postdoctoral fellows who can train so when Stuart Hanna met me during one of those converge awards which I was judging, unfortunately, they didn’t win that year, but there was something in that technology, and as part of that process, I introduced him to enterprise Fellowship, which next year we managed to successfully win for him, he got that and since then, we’ve basically grown the company into multiple rounds of investments and Multiple Awards, and it’s doing great thing. So post doctoral fellow who’s been on the bench or developing technology, but have no business acumen or about spinning out the company, I think this is where it shows the value of it. Any other enterprise fellows in the room who have been so plenty, so Exactly, I think you all have stories to share and during a panel discussion or post after that, if you’re happy to share or during the panel session, please share your experience in there, so that really shows the value. And I suppose lot of you will reiterate what has been discussed on the panel. Now, moving on to the other aspects of RSCs work, in terms of its contribution to innovation through the policy support. As I said, I chair enterprise and Economy Committee, and in that case, to their basically knowledge made useful through support in policy advisory as well as converting into something useful, which is where the government’s role come in. And our next speaker is Colin Cook, who’s director of economic development for Scottish Government. Colin will be discussing how creating the right environment for innovation to thrive. I’m not pre empting your talk, but just to introduce you so in your current role, you are responsible for the implementation of Scotland’s national innovation strategy, because we are very good at producing lots of strategies, so implementation definitely is expectation here, promoting entrepreneurship, working with universities and colleges to commercialization research. Your team supports Scotland’s chief economic Chief Scientific Advisor, and Scottish Science Advisory Council sponsors enterprise agencies. As I mentioned, among the board of Scottish Enterprise manages Scottish Government’s strategic commercial assets and leads on city and region deals Freeport and investment zones. So lots to say. Colin and we are looking forward to your talk.

47:49
So in other words, I’m not an enterprise fellow, but I am a civil servant, hopefully a non venomous one would be my aim for today, I’ve been involved in innovation for forever, as far as I can remember, certainly throughout my career. And I first got really fascinated by it in when I worked for Royal Mail on the post office. And although they’ve had some serious knocks to their reputation recently, particularly for their their IT abilities. I mean, they was an organization used to pride itself on its history of innovation, people like Tommy flowers that invented the electronic computer Colossus. I mean, these were, you know, serious impacts on the British economy. And I was in charge of the innovation team. And I used to have and people used to write in staff, people, postman public, would write in with lots of ideas, and I was responsible for looking at them and evaluating them and trying to work out whether they had any any merit. And I used to have a thing on my desk saying, You do not want to be the person who turned down the Beatles. That’s good. Ah, I said that to a group of recent graduates in in the in the government the other day, and nobody really knew what the Beatles were, but I reckon I’m I reckon I’m playing to the right audience here. So I’ll go with it. That the day that decision was made to turn down the Beatles. The guy at Decca had a choice. He had a choice between the Beatles. And here’s one for the kids, Brian Poole and the tremolos. Well, there you are. And there are three things about that decision that I think have relevance to everything we do in innovation. First, he turned them down because he believed that guitar groups were on the way out. Now, how many of us have looked at data and not interpreted it with intelligence and ended up with the wrong conclusion? The second reason and the Marcus. Guru Ruri Sutherland points this out, if you ever get the opportunity to hear him speak, was one of the key reasons was that Brian Poole and the tremolos lived in London, and the Beatles came from Liverpool. One would cost a taxi or an underground ticket to get to the studio. The other, you were talking rail fares and hotels. Now this is a warning about procurement having too much of a role in the innovation process. And thirdly, there was the thing that said that Brian Epstein, who barely put a foot wrong in any anything he did, basically told them to be a little bit conservative that day and play to the sort of suits in the audience, whereas actually what they really wanted to see was the energy and the vibrancy of what they were doing in the Cavern Club. A warning, I think about getting your pitch right and staying true to your values. So throughout innovation, and I hope I’ll be able to demonstrate that we’re trying to do that within Scotland, we’ve got to remain true to our values, remain true to our strengths. Now we’ve heard about the proud history of innovation in Scotland, but as any of us who’ve ever listened to financial services adverts will tell you, past performance is no guarantee of future success, and we monitor innovation in Scotland using an innovation scorecard and comparing it comparing our performance, not only to other parts of the UK, but to other European countries. And we use a scorecard that correlates to the EU wide scorecard. It looks at innovation at every stage of the process, investment, in preparing the ground, in fundamental research, in concepts, in conversion, commercialization and ultimately adoption. It measures concepts by the granting of patent applications, the academic income that comes from business and community interaction that we’ve been hearing about conversion, where it looks at the capital deals of under 10 million pounds and levels of business investment in R, D, commercialization, where we where we measure the number of high growth businesses in our countries. And later stage, equity deals. And finally, adoption, where we look at the number of innovative active, or innovation active businesses, by which we mean those that introduce new products and services or new processes during the course of the previous three years now as part of this week. And thank you. Sorry. I should have said thank you to the RSE for being part of Scotland’s first national innovation week. Our minister for business, Richard Lochhead, is about to publish the results of our most recent scorecard. So I can’t, I’m not allowed, as a civil servant to, you know, steal his his thunder. But what I can say is, although there are some encouraging signs, and you may have read recently that Scotland is the second most vibrant part of the UK when it comes to entrepreneurial activities, start ups at that part of the part of the continuum. It is clear that we still have further to go, and we certainly have further to go if we want to take our place at the top table of countries across Europe. Now, if you ask chatgpt for that league table, which I suspect many of us do when we’re doing research for things like this, it’ll say Singapore, Switzerland, Estonia, Israel, Ireland, Luxembourg. Now their success can encourage us. I mean, it shows that size does not dictate your ability to be innovative. And it also offers a route map, because almost in every case that I’ve just cited, they have as a deliberate matter of public policy, set out to promote innovation and set out to harness their understanding of their strengths. To do so Singapore with its open outlook, to trade its access to capital, its extraordinary levels of digital connectivity. Switzerland, its research institutions, its stability, its global leadership in pharmaceutical industries, for example, and Ireland, its generous financial packages, its international networks, the way it leverages its diaspora. In almost all cases, somewhere high on that list is a high quality education system, whether that’s through the investment in research or the preparation of the next generation of innovators. And as I said, in almost every case, there’s a clear and consistent policy that favors innovation. Now our policy, our approach was set out back in 2023 in Scotland’s national innovation strategy. It’s our attempt to follow suit, to learn from these countries and try and climb that International Table. It sets out to try and focus that triple helix, as they call it, of government. Academia and business on harnessing our natural strength and push the economy forward our abundance of natural resources and natural capital. This is, after all, a country whose natural resources, such as the strength and consistency of our wind, whether that’s onshore or offshore, play straight to the heart of the net zero agenda. We have some of the UK is arguably the world’s leaders, leading academics and universities, and whether by accident or design, I’ll leave that to you. Much of that research, much of that expertise that competes on the international scale is in the very areas that is shaping the future economy, whether that’s life sciences, AI critical technologies like quantum and photonics. And of course, we have a size that means that we have an ecosystem here where we can do events like this. We’re sufficiently large to make an impact and for tests and trials to demonstrate that impact, but we’re sufficiently small to get in a room, talk, debate and push our ideas forward. Now we set out a 10 year strategy in that plan, and we’re only on year two to build successful clusters around our research and development strengths in the energy transition, the move to net zero, in health and life sciences, and I think, wider biotech, in digital data and critical technologies and advanced manufacturing, areas where we have research strengths, areas that are in great demand, areas at the way, at the forefront of the way In which economies are changing all over the world. We set out an innovation investment program, the creation of what your colleague Paul at power equity called an innovation mindset, or an innovative mindset, funds that are better integrated where we speak the language of the private sector investor and better focus and integrate public sector investment the various streams and things that are currently available, so we become an anchor investor in innovation and not an easier alternative to the private markets,

57:15
an innovation led entrepreneurship program and commercialization program to support University spin outs to encourage staff and students on our universities to have ideas, the creation of what we call entrepreneurial campuses, to put that at the heart of the academic offer. And finally, a national productivity program to encourage businesses to focus on being more innovation active, and that’s now a core part of the mission of Scottish Enterprise, who we’ve mentioned, and incidentally, I think the recent appointment of Sir Jim McDonald as the chair of Scottish Enterprise is a signal of this intent to bring business and academia and government together and use it as a powerful force to drive innovation. But there is much more we can do, and perhaps we can get into a discussion later. I think there’s more we can do to make bring economic value from our universities. I believe that universities, and we all believe that universities are a precious resource, and if an innovation comes out of our academic strength, it is far stickier than some of the other innovations that we have attracted to these shores over many years. But there’s a few things that flow from that we need to protect that leader, leadership position. It doesn’t just happen. It doesn’t just stay. You know that we need to invest in applied and fundamental research to make that happen, we’ve got to encourage collaboration. We were talking about internationalization and the International the need to work with partners overseas. You can’t confuse progress with ultimate success. And in areas like robotics and AI, there are many countries that are, you know, further further ahead of us coming up with ideas, and we’ve got to make sure that we get the right partnerships in place. We’ve got to attract the very best innovators from across the world to come and work here, and we’ve got to work cross discipline. I think our former chief entrepreneur, Mark Logan, was recently appointed as the entrepreneur in residence at the Royal Conservatoire, and I think that’s a great example of how multi disciplinary work can drive innovation. We’ve got to make we’ve got to do more to make research visible, to make it more accessible to private sector investments. And that does mean tackling some of those challenges that we all know about, in terms of IP and for government, we can do far more to use our our investment, our procurement, to stimulate challenges. Few years ago, I was involved in setting up something called civtech. It was one of the world’s first business incubators that was focused. Specifically on public sector challenges. That’s two aims, firstly, to improve the quality of public services, secondly, to stimulate opportunities for new business. And those two things are not contradictory. They can be the same. But I think now we’ve got to go even further to build those partnerships between business, academia and government to tackle some of the big societal challenges that we have, we’ve got to find a new model for doing it, long term, sustained partnership and collaboration, and I think over the next couple of months, few months, if you look at not that any of you necessarily look at the plans that government has to publish new strategies, as Poonam says, but we’ve got both the launch of an initiative called AI Scotland that is about to which will try and map out how Scotland is going to take its place to retain its leadership role in artificial intelligence, and a new life sciences strategy, both of which offer huge opportunities for that partnership and collaboration. I believe we can do that, and I believe we can build those partnerships. The guy that turned down the Beatles did sign the stones. So you can make a difference. You can come up from the rear, you can do all things you need to do. You can make a difference. And I hope today we can start to discuss how we do that. So thank you very much.

1:01:29
Thank you, Colin, hopefully we are finding both our beetles and stones on the same piece, but that is where we are here. There was lot in your address to pick up, and hopefully we’ll take that during our panel session, some of the things that picked up. My particular interest alongside the AI, which is everywhere, omnipresent. It’s the valuation for any business is ridiculous, and it’s one of those things, but it’s there to here, to come stay, but also the life sciences, because, as we say, this is one asset of Scotland. And innovation can come from anywhere. So it’s not only just spin outs, it can be startups. It can come from the society, but life sciences and deep tech businesses predominantly come from universities, because it takes number of years of long term research background and as a vice president research, and you’ll say Royal Society is particularly keen and supports through small amount of investments making larger impact in terms of engaging with the universities. But the life sciences infrastructure for scaling companies requires certain requirements, which is a different mindset from everything else, investor mindset, not depleting long term investment, patient investment, but also infrastructure that is required for that, because infrastructure that’s for developing and growing these scale ups. But also a market, where is our industry, here in Scotland, which left in 80s. Are we inviting them back to come to Scotland? Are we earmarking certain investments which can be there? And are we not just investing in digital but life sciences, biotech, med, tech, therapeutics, if we want to take advantage of our universities, we will pick up more that in there, but it’s my pleasure next to invite Professor Graham. Roy Graham is assistant vice principal and Deputy Head of college at Social Sciences at University of Glasgow, but first and foremost for RSE here, he’s RSE fellow. Is a former civil servant. So in your camp, and we can probably get your insight from both sides, but you are now in academia camp, where you were in First Minister’s policy unit, past director of Fraser of allander Institute, and head of economics at University of Strathclyde in 2022 for your important role here, you were appointed chair of Scottish fiscal commission and Scotland’s independent and fiscal forecasting body. So I’m sure a lot of to unpick there in terms of your panel discussion. And Graham,

1:04:02
great, excellent. Thank you very much. It’s a great and my thanks. It’s a great pleasure to be here and speaking with this evening. I should say, I’m not the Beatles. I play the bagpipes, so that’s a good way of clearing a room if it goes on too long. I just wanted to pick up a bit on some of the conversations we’ve we’ve had, and I won’t speak for too long, because I know we’re quite keen to get into the panel discussion, but we’ve heard a bit about the setting up of the enterprise fellowship back in 1997 and also Katie’s excellent summary of the history of the RSE and RSS role in supporting innovation. There’s an absolutely fantastic paper in the archives in the RSC. It was, it was published in 1996 which was a major review undertaken by the Royal Society of Edinburgh at the time, but also by Crawford Beveridge when he was chief executive of Scottish Enterprise. It’s a 200 page report which. The archives here managed to dig out for me, and it was looking at how we can commercialize research. So how can we boost innovation in Scotland? And if you get a chance, and I’m sure that colleagues in the archives will be, will be happy to help dig it out for you, because it’s absolutely fascinating to look at that report and to reflect on the differences, but crucially similarities, to the conversation that we’re having and we’re having today. I mean, 30 years ago, that was talking about, how can we commercialize research from our universities? How can we get more academics interested in being entrepreneurial? What can we do to try and boost the levels of investment within our core business base, within innovation? What can government do more to boost innovation? What countries in the world can we look at that are best, the best leaders of the pack in innovation that we can learn from Ireland, Luxembourg, South Asian economies, and it’s and it’s amazing just how, if you look back at that report, how similar the policy prescriptions, the policy diagnosis and the comparisons and the ambition about what we were trying to achieve remain similar to today. But that was, that was 30 years ago. That was 1996 and I guess one of the challenges we’re being honest with ourselves, is how much further forward has the debate moved over those 30 years? Yes, there’s been examples of things like the enterprise fellowship scheme that came out of that report by Crawford Beveridge. We had the CO investment fund that evolved out of that as well. But if you take a step back and look at the fundamental policy prescriptions and policy challenges, they’re just exactly the same as they were back all those all the all those years ago. Now that’s not to say that consistency is necessarily a bad but if we’re still lagging behind the best countries in the world, if we’re still not meeting our ambitions about where we want to be in innovation, that probably points to one of three reasons. I mean, firstly, it’s because that we actually haven’t got the policies right, and we need to review and start on a completely different tangent. Or it’s that there’s been some other factors that have an impact that actually means we’re doing okay, and if we hadn’t done these things, we would have ended up in a much worse outcome as a third one, which is that that we have the right ideas. It’s just the execution and the delivery of those ideas that haven’t held up over time. And there are some examples about where we’ve had some great success. The Enterprise fellows have heard as one example. We’ve had some examples of things I mentioned, like the CO investment funds, the tech scalers in the recent times have real potential and are and are really highly significant, but we’ve also had quite some significant failures too. So people here will probably remember the intermediate technology institutes that were set up to try and support that exactly that collaboration between academic research and and and the business base. What’s quite interesting, I think, about the itis is a lesson is not that they were maybe didn’t achieve everything that they had hoped to achieve, or they were set up in a way which ultimately meant that we’re going they weren’t going to be successful. But it’s interesting to look at the overall budget that was available for the itI. So the itis were set up in the 2000s to try and support demand for academic research and development and innovation. Their budget was half a billion pounds. The current budget for Scottish Enterprise is 220 5 million pounds. So purely just on one innovation project, you are spending double the amount of the Scottish Enterprise budget for a year. So there’s a question about ambition, and there’s a question about relative priorities in the in the scheme of things, and that’s before adjusting for inflation. And I guess one of the other things, if you look at what’s happened to innovation policies over time that, yes, we can think about how policies are well set up, but actually, if you look at what drives a lot of the policy agenda, innovation, but in broader aspects of public policy, not just in Scotland and the UK, but there’s a really important political economy dimension in here. I don’t mean the raw politics of party political things. But a lot of what you see in terms of innovation agenda driven by the personalities of the time. You can see that through who we had as leaders in public policy, or the leader, the chief executive of an enterprise agency, driving that agenda. But when you have a churn, when you have a change in that leadership, then you start off in a completely different policy agenda. The relationships that exist between policy makers, agencies, businesses and universities all evolve over time, and that leads to a constant churn in the policy agenda. And clearly, paradigms change as well. I mean, it’s interesting. We’re now back talking about clusters. Is I remember, I’m old enough to remember a time when clusters were in vogue, and I’m without a Vogue, and I’ve now come back again, and I guess that’s one of the key takeaways, I think, or one of the lessons for us, I think, when we start to look at examples like the enterprise fellowship scheme and see the success of that, is that ability to play the long term game and to make policies and ideas resilient to these churns of personalities, relationships and paradigms. So just a couple of three quick reflections before I leave you, and again, drawing on the success of the enterprise fellowship scheme, I guess the first thing we’ve got to be patient. The scheme has been set up in 1997 and success doesn’t happen instantaneously, so we need to look at how we can actually build policies, not just things. At the enterprise fellowship scheme, innovation, more broadly, that can overlap political cycle, cycles. Secondly, the interesting thing again, the lesson from the enterprise fellowship schemes is it wasn’t really about innovation. It was about everything that went around that it was about business support, it was about encouraging relationships with academia. It was about peer mentoring. It was about education. It wasn’t just about one aspect of it. It was all encompassing and comprehensive. And I guess one final thing I would say is that when someone tells you to get a new idea, the idea will have happened in the past. And I think we need to get better as a country, about learning from where these ideas have worked, where these ideas haven’t worked. And I think the enterprise fellowship is a really good example of one where the idea did work, and what can we learn from that, not just to continue it and evolve it into the future, but to upscale it into all aspects of what we’re trying to achieve with innovation. Thank you.

1:11:42
Applause. It. Thank you, Graham for that overview of in terms of policy thinking 30 years ago, a review predicts certain things, and we still talk, after 35 years on the policy point, a pause for thought, but also that kick started certain initiatives, and those initiatives, success of that is what we are discussing today. So as I said, as part of the 30 year ago review that Crawford beverage started enterprise fellowship, kick started Scottish Enterprise supported it for 25 years. If you think about the budget aspect that you mentioned in 2015 Scottish Enterprise budget was over 800 500 million. Today it’s about 300 and the asks are increasing every day in terms of, and this is not so that’s 65% reduction in terms of a line directly of going into innovation and other activities, so that can show about what can be expected. But at the same time, universities potential and awareness about commercialization is increasing, but there are financial challenges that are there, and naturally academics are more aware. Wanted to, want to turn out into a business opportunity, but what is their support? There are IP challenges and there are other development aspects. So I suppose, moving on to that, my it’s my pleasure to invite Professor Jim Gallagher. He’s chair of Think Tank our Scottish future. He may take us into that same zone that we are talking about what they were talking and for pleasure, he’s also a member of RSC economy and enterprise committee. And as an executive career in public service in Edinburgh and number 10 in London. So you can probably give us ideas from both sides of the world. And you are also a non exec in the life and pension, so something where the money is, so show us the door.

1:13:36
Thank you very much. I stand between you in the conversation. So I shall be reasonably quick, but I want to do a little more on perspective of why innovation matters economically. From about 1963 until about 2018 2015 maybe the Scottish economy actually outperformed the UK economy per capita, which is interesting. We grew from being one of the poor bits of the UK to be one of the well off bits. Since then, we’ve underperformed the rest of the UK, and back on, the rest of the UK has done relatively badly. We can’t even keep up with them. We need to do something about this. And going forward, the jobs of the future come from the intricacies of the future, looking backwards and trying to save the ones we have had and are losing, will not be successful. So innovation will bring the jobs of the future, which come from the knowledge of today. I want to say four things about that. Too good. Too bad. Two good things. First, our research base is still pretty good. Actually, Scotland’s research base is excellent. Our university sector is disproportionately large, and they’re good at what they do. You can measure it, you can see it, you can touch it. Sometimes you can even get prizes for it. I was looked within. Enthusiasm at the league tables. I’m sure lots of people in this room do. So that’s a plus, a second plus actually may be a side effect of the of the enterprise fellowship scheme, and actually pretty good at start ups. We’ve good start up systems. We’ve got good angel investors to start them up the capacity for starting businesses out of our sector is actually pretty strong. Could be better, which is why we’ve got to relaunch the enterprise fellowship team, among other things, but we start from a relatively strong base. So those are two good things, two bad things, and they’re connected. Thing we’re not good at is growing these small companies into big ones, and we’re not good at creating those so called clusters, that’s to say the ecology in which a set of companies, people with skills, investors with knowledge, all get together. And we know historically that that’s how economic development actually happens. Happened that way in the 19th century, happened that way in the 21st the 20th century happening in the 21st but we’re not we’re not there and managing that stuff the place. When innovation happens, it happens in a geography. Does not happen on the internet, hands in a physical place where people are they haven’t learned to manage that right yet, and that’s why I’m a big supporter, actually, of the approach of doing this geographically, by the city deal, which Michael Gove get some of the credit for Keir Starmer claims some of the credit for Scottish government, I think, is being supportive of them. Two reasons, several reasons for that. One, that’s the way you create the networks in a place. The second is that one size does not fit all, and what one place will need will be different from what another place needs in geography, in terms of infrastructure, in terms of training, terms of the things it does. And for the harder reason, to put it crudely, you do not have all your eggs in one basket, and at the moment, a single national innovation strategy carries that risk, so I think we should put more effort into that. And finally, a word, very briefly, about money. There is no money nonsense. There is plenty of money, right? And we used to think really quite hard about this, how we spend our money is what matters, and that relates to our public money. Even today, if you look at the data, we spend about overall in Scotland, about a billion pounds a year on economic development support. We could spend twice that. We’d have to spend it on some stop spending on something else. These are the choices that politicians have to make. The second thing is, actually there’s plenty of private money as well. There’s a wall of money waiting to be productively investment, and I know I manage some of it, and we are looking in the pensions industry for high returning, relatively safe, long term investments actually quite hard to find. We haven’t got the infrastructure for doing that right yet, and we haven’t got the incentives actually on our pensions industry right either. And this takes us back to the so called Mansion House story, which has to go further and faster. Put all those things together, structure this geographically, get the right mix of public and private investment, which means a change in the private world and some hard decisions in the public world, which are going to be very painful. But we need to put the money into the future and not into the past. We have every prospect of turning the world from one which we are a declining region of the UK, in which we are, once again, one of the most successful ones.

1:18:54
Thank you, Jim for giving us the belief there’s plenty of money. That’s all we like to hear, whether from public sector instead of the whole of that we keep hearing about how to redistribute it. That’s what you are telling but also giving us the expectation that there is private money which should move into this innovation economy. And as some of you would be familiar about the Mansion House compact that was signed in UK. It is that the pension houses will and some of the large, up to 10 or 12 large pension houses have committed that 5% of their savings they will divert towards the innovation economy. Now the question there is that, how do we make sure that it ends up into the right innovation economy, into the early stage innovation scale up market, rather than the mid market, where it traditionally is there. But the data shows that over a longer period, early stage scale up companies return at least better and not any less than the stock market or other markets. So there isn’t a risk as. You look at the longer term life cycle, and that’s the Mansion House compact. So the question here is, for me that as part of the economy and enterprise committee that we want to look at is, how do we ensure that some of it actually comes to Scotland and gets invested into it? So with that, I would like to thank all the panel speakers for everything that they have said. And now we would like to move into the open panel discussion with all the panelists. If you wish to speak, discuss or ask any questions about RSC, history and innovation, Katie is your person. She’s here if you wish to ask about the enterprise fellowship and their cohort experience, you’ve heard from some there are some alumni. There are people here, and Simon will take guide them. And if you want to talk about and ask questions that you’ve heard about Scottish Government’s role, about lot of money and how it’s being diverted, and how we can turn strategies into actually implementation stages that work, as well as how tax can be angled to make better utilization or pension savings, as well as Innovation Cluster, please direct your questions to the panelists so sort of there are some roving mics. Please raise your hands, and anybody who wish to Okay, right? Steph, think that’s

1:21:27
light just too bright.

1:21:32
Yes, a question for the last speaker. Thank you very much for all of you. Very interesting, but you refer to the decline, perhaps that’s too strong a word. Over the last most of a decade, I wondered whether you had looked at the level of statistical correlation, if any, between that decline and the decline in the success of school students in English and mathematics, arithmetic, which has been fairly well published, publicized across the UK, that Scotland traditionally and certainly when most of us were at school, the Scottish education was viewed as second to none, and consistently, our results in Latin and English were were better than, let’s say, England, for example, and now the position seems to have reversed if what’s published in newspapers and so on is correct, and is there any level of statistical correlation between the two declines,

1:22:43
if I can give an answer in Latin. That is, we don’t know what’s post hoc and what’s Procter hoc. Two of these things, you are right. Of course, these, both of these things are happening the mechanics of correlation, or the mechanics of connection and the factor of correlation. I think it’s probably pushing our luck a bit but education matters hugely in this, and in particular STEM education sums, not just English, but sums. And we’re not doing as well in that, in my view, personally, as we should be. And I’m afraid I might rather sympathize with you thinking that we might turn the educational clock back just a little. But that’s not really going to cure our innovation problem, but it might help.

1:23:28
Thank you. Anyone else wants to add to that? Okay, the next question, then, thank you very

1:23:34
much for the talk, the really interesting talks and really interesting policy discussions. I’m afraid my question is also for Professor Gallagher, again, your third point you made is really important, both for Scotland and the UK. Our inability to grow companies, to make them huge companies. They start off, they do really well, then they get sold. Part of that seems to be this. The parameter of success is setting your company on for making lots of money and selling to it, often overseas money. So that seems to be happening for multiple companies across the UK. If that parameter of success remains, it’s not going to change. I would have thought so. How do we is that? Does that parameter need changing? Do we need to put more success into growing companies over a longer time period, rather than selling them on?

1:24:18
So I think there are people here who have more to say about this than me. But can I say two things? First, risk takers have to be rewarded, and at some point there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, wrong with people cashing in for years of effort. And I applaud that. I think the real challenge is not that, but arranging the world in such a way that we have a set of companies where there’s a natural place for them to stay. And at the moment when somebody gets very successful in whatever field it is, their company is more likely to be taken off by a multinational who will take them somewhere else. We need to build the self supporting I hate the word ecology. Day of businesses that makes it the natural thing to do, to remain but I think you should really hear from somebody who’s been through this cycle,

1:25:09
yeah, well, I say that it’s a real point, which is why we’ve included this overseas dimension to the new fellowship scheme. So if I could make that concrete, so in a domain where I’ve worked in the past, and happened to be working mostly with the two companies that I’m on the board of or chair at the moment. If we have fellows, fellowship candidates who want to go into animal biotechnology, an area where Edinburgh is already very strong, and you know, we would encourage them. We have very strong networks in collaboration with University of California Davis, which is the number one campus in North America for that sort of work, and through our investment communities and in Scotland, certainly in par equity, where I was involved, we actually have a very good relationship with venture venture funds in the Bay Area and the rest of Northern California. And we would be able to introduce fellows who go over and embed in the technology universe at UC Davis. But we also make sure that they spend time down the road in San Francisco meeting investors. So you know that there are ways of actually, you know, plugging candidates in to the global story early. And I think that is very important for the reasons that you’ve just raised.

1:26:26
I think if I understood your question correctly, is you say, are we setting only success criteria that that company becomes unicorns, which is a billion dollar company? So no, that’s not the expectation for every company that is being set. I suppose there are companies, Community Enterprises, social enterprises, which are for suited for Scotland’s communities and family, run businesses which are highly successful. It has its place, and they are the businesses that are the basic Scotland has 99.3% SMEs, the here. And they do provide jobs, and they provide the question, I suppose, why it is being always compared to the larger unicorns or larger growth economy companies, is because the deep tech businesses that has the potential to create global businesses. For them to become successful, they do need to become globally competitive, and that requires larger funds. And possibly that’s the reason that then the funding comes from elsewhere. And because the investment comes from elsewhere, the investors put a condition that the companies move there. In certain companies, the technological or IT solutions have remained there, and the markets have moved there, and the teams have divided. But because we have not had many companies of that level success, that is why, because they are eventually the jobs will grow like that. So it’s the question of what type of companies we want to grow and what type of companies which are suitable for the local and national economy. And there’s definitely place for both.

1:28:04
So I think the question was absolutely the opposite of that. Wasn’t it? It was about why we’re not growing companies, and why companies are not scaling here, and I’m absolutely guilty of taking a business with the possibility of getting bigger, I suppose, and selling it to an American behemoth after five, six years. Why did we do that? I think, quite frankly, because we were knackered that are such hard work, and I think that the Scottish context makes it that little bit harder. It was hard to raise the cash, it was hard to keep building that business. The other thing is that you’re constantly under pressure from investors in the business who are expecting a return, and are working on 567, year cycles, and so that when you’re pitching for your money, the last slide is your exit strategy, where you’re telling them how and when they’re going to get their money back and how much. So I don’t think it’s just a Scottish problem, but we don’t have many large, for example, pharmaceutical companies based here in Scotland, so the exit of those life science companies is often going to be abroad.

1:29:38
Sorry, I totally agree with that analysis, and I think sometimes decisions are taken at the start of a company in its first round of funding, which ultimately do lead it to have to exit more quickly than perhaps the founders would have envisaged. There will always be people, as Professor Gallagher said, who want to cash out. And that’s that’s their choice for all the work and the effort that’s gone into it. I think what we need to do as a matter of public policy is to make it so that there’s no need to making access to the right kind of funding available and the right kind of information on early stage funding, to avoid the situations we’ve just described, making sure that there’s an infrastructure in place. So the availability of lab space, for example, to help retain life sciences and biotech companies has been an issue in the past. Can we make sure there’s a public infrastructure available infrastructure to enable people to do that? We talked about the education system, making sure that the people with the right skills, be they the technical people, but also, I think, the wider business consultancy, financial, business development skills that you that you need. And also, and then finally, we’ve said it a couple of times, those international collaboration that help and support and understanding that you don’t have to domicile the whole of the operation in Scotland, there may be networks that can be built, partnerships that can be built internationally, that can help you retain the core of your expertise here and perhaps find partners to do other things where we may be less competitive. And I think if you look at a huge Scottish success story like Rockstar North and Grand Theft Auto, you know, that’s an international company that does that has its leadership and its sort of intellectual drive here, but other parts of the company have moved abroad, and those are the kind of models that that may work in some certain circumstances.

1:31:34
Thank you. Did you want to follow up the

1:31:40
is it possible to create that eco structure so cross border future or future doesn’t have to fall out all

1:31:47
the time, changing every three years? Is there a different model of finances, infrastructure?

1:31:57
I think that was the whole point of saying that there are inherent sort of infrastructure issues and funding, being there management training and management expertise, being there absence of industry. So certainly it will work for certain industries, and there are certain industries that may have slight challenges. Sorry, one question

1:32:22
there thank you. This idea of building unicorns in Scotland has long intrigued me. I don’t, I genuinely don’t. We haven’t been successful at over a very long period of time, not even so much in UK. And the funding structure to build these businesses, I’m not I think the funding structure we have is great, but it’s based on angel funding, which makes it very, very difficult to then scale up those businesses to become unicorns. I’ve thought for quite some time, why don’t we just embrace that and have policy focus on building those companies, selling them in five or six years, but then encouraging the people who have built those companies to use their money and their expertise to then come back into the system. I think Andy laudably has done that. We need to find better ways to encourage people to do that, rather than to go off and buy virgin islands in the Caribbean and sit on their yachts whatever. Not many people do that, but we’d love to see much more encouragement for cash that entrepreneurs to come back into the system. Quite a number of them do that. Let’s be fair. But I think structure policy needs to focus much more on that than building unicorns, which, which is a unicorn, and, you know, it’s pie in the sky, as far as I’m concerned. Thank you.

1:33:50
Thank you. I suppose that was a statement, and you’re not looking for an answer for that. Yeah, I think you are right absolutely. And the only difference in there is that you have the ambition. Because every investor where puts the money in the first round wants to hear that the entrepreneur has the ambition to take it globally, at the depending on the sector you are in some because, for example, you mentioned certain ones, and there are serial entrepreneurs who repeat and put it, the only difference for that is, if it is a founder’s money, it’s their private money. So you can encourage them to invest back into the economy, which lot of them do, but to basically put stipulations around and that can happen for So, for example, any money that Scottish Enterprise co invest, it goes back into the treasury and it gets reinvested. So that exactly has been happening for past 30 years. So the public money certainly goes back. Nothing stays into Scottish Enterprise. It’s an annual budget cycle. Founders, for example, those who have come back and you for gaming industry itself, they have reinvested. It back. Any companies that have recently exited, most of them are becoming either serial entrepreneurs or serial supporters investors. For example, Gareth Williams, Skyscanner became success. He’s probably invested into n number of companies that are there. So similarly, Chris Van der Kal he exited, he sort of made the grant the Minecraft. He’s been now invested into a fund and large number of companies, and similarly for the fund. So that certainly is happening. It’s just the question, we need more numbers. We need more successes of both companies, entrepreneurs and money coming so that the capital increases, and we can see more of these things.

1:35:42
Absolutely. One thing that did happen when we sold to Wyeth was that Wyeth actually moved the team into Scotland. So they in acquiring the company, they acquired the whole of the science team, and added to that, so we actually built around about 50 people who were Wyeth employee, Wyeth Pfizer employees in Aberdeen, and for a brief period of time, I think that was transformational for the kind of biotech life science community in Scotland to have that base up in Aberdeen. What happened, though, was that Pfizer then drew in their horns, and they had to make a decision about whether they would keep Aberdeen open, or whether they would move it to Southern Ireland. And they actually chose to move it to Ireland. And the reason was because a better tax position in Ireland, and because the intellectual property position was stronger for them in Ireland on the technologies we developed. And that was, I think it was, that was a real catastrophe, in a way, for what happened in to Scottish life science for a period after that.

1:36:58
Next question, do question,

1:37:05
so on that point, on that point, do we need to actually, as in the way that something of, if any, national treasure, that we consider a national treasure suddenly starts get headlines appear that the Charles Lyell notebooks are all going to be sold and they’re going to end up outside of the country, and suddenly there’s a massive piece of work done by the University of Edinburgh and by other people to keep them here, because they’re ours, don’t we need to do that for our businesses? Did we need to sell Deep Mind to Google, an AI powerhouse built in the UK, and we’ve learned to go to America? Well, of course, America is our friend, aren’t they? Today, if that had been a Chinese company, that wouldn’t have happened, because today they’re the enemy. Apparently, we, I don’t understand why we don’t use poison pills golden handshakes to keep these technologies as policy here, if the toilet technologies are that good? If the company you built was so good that Wyeth wanted it, they would have bought it at any price, with golden handshake, with gold handcuffs and with poison pills to keep that spa in Aberdeen until it became a flame. We don’t do that. We’re becoming a rentier economy, and we’re becoming incubator UK, incubator Scotland. Is that what we want to be the incubator for other industries? UC Davis, suspension, I have long thought that the size of this country, Scotland, for the amount of academic power and powerhouse universities we have, we have so much friction built into the system, because they’re all individual institutions. The University of California system is a single system with a single Senate, with a single Chancellor, just on salaries alone. That’s better than all universities in Scotland, but a single university system that actually could say petroleum and energy, Aberdeen, that’s your game, artificial intelligence major Edinburgh, that’s your game, quantum hardware, that’s and stop. I mean, we waste so much money on every single university thinking it has to have a duplicate department to another university if we actually sat down. And looked at the country as a whole, and tried to figure out, as a whole what it would take for this country to be a powerhouse along the along the lines of the state of California. Instead, we seem to build in friction all the time, and part of the reason why it’s so knackering is you’re fighting the friction. And the role of government is to reduce the friction, is to actually oil the wheels of industry. And we don’t do that. Instead, we throw sand in the cogs. And I don’t understand, because if we have to go back 30 years to find out a policy that tells us what we should have been doing for the last 30 years, we’re not doing something right? Thank you, Colin.

1:40:47
Oh, thank you. Yeah, thank you. I even looked at the water there, thinking, if I’ve got my hands on a bottle, then I won’t get the microphone. That’s the way I live much of my life next to me. Yeah? Look. I mean, actually, I don’t want to stray into into into difficult and political policy issues I was going to make the point. I think there is even, even without that wholesale reform of the education system, the university system you’ve just proposed. I think there is more that we can do to take a coherent, clear story about Scotland’s academic strengths to the world and to appeal to investors through that. I think there is more that we can do to say to have a joined up story about different organized, different universities working together rather than competing with each other in international markets. I think there’s probably more we can do when it comes to the attraction of students and the best talent around I’m not in a position or able to judge how that would play in the university sector, but from a from an economic development point of view, that coherent message through a Scottish Development International or something, is something we would welcome. And we do see signs of it. It’s signs of it happening. The other question that you’ve raised, which is a really interesting one, is about the I think, is about the role of state intervention in large organizations, large growth organizations. I think I might have to plead the fifth on that one, because clearly it’s a highly political, philosophical question, but there is certainly an appetite in organizations such as Scottish Enterprise to invest in the organizations that they think will power the future, and that’s and some of those are about long term commitments and long term returns, and not just The sort of short term sort of type of investments that purnam was talking about. I’ll give to German then

1:42:47
I’m not so conflicted as poor Colin. There is a problem. And you’re on one view, your diagnosis is absolutely right, and the other view is that, unfortunately, when governments try to put oil machines, it turns out to be sand, right? Governments are not very good at this stuff, and the more power you give them, the more risk, the more risk you take. And sadly, what if we look at the portfolio of businesses which the Scottish Government, sorry, Colin, has been rescuing in recent years. You wouldn’t let them out in a dark night, right? These are businesses which have failed because they failed, and the political process, unfortunately, tends to be driven by the short term, whereas the oddly enough, the private sector, in principle, at least, can think longer term, because it isn’t elected next year.

1:43:41
Thank you. I think what you outlined, there were three aspects to that, initially to say, Why can’t state keep the larger enterprises which are successful? So if we had a Novo Nordisk style trillion dollar fund in which we were innovating, investing so much that government or the public sector was the largest stakeholder. They could have done that, because these investment companies, by the time they reach exit, have raised so much that majority of stake is owned by private investors, where majority of the fund seems to come from overseas. There is very little public control over that in terms of, if I say it from the CO investment point of view. As Colin pointed out, Scottish Enterprise does invest in it alongside and does put as far as as much as possible within reason those golden handshake or poison pills or some what you suggested, poison doesn’t work if you want things to work in terms of Wyatt, means they were here for a year or two, till they were there, and then they disappeared to greener pastures. And you can’t stop those enterprises. If you look at the National UK level, you would remember GSK. There was a time that it is a Scottish uk. Company to keep it here, the government had to. But unfortunately, our political and structural infrastructure works such a way that where the government when it comes to intervention, how and how many businesses will you save so similarly, from the Scottish Enterprise point of view, every time it’s co invested, when the exit happens, the deal is at the same time, the jobs will remain here, the companies will keep an office, and they all agree, but with the private enterprises eventually, five or seven years down the line, when the strategy changes, if they decide to close it because the taxes infrastructure is not favorable, or their policy has changed, they want to focus on a new and emerging market which is more attractive, that business gets wind up. And I did quote in my earlier address that the one of the things where government can really play a role is attract industry here to Scotland. How that happens? Whether we have to follow the green port strategy and give them incentives, not just income tax, but business rates or something, so that the income in companies that are coming out of the university have an innovation uptaker, and then they can grow around that, something that Ireland has done successfully, to something like that, we have to think about, I think that’s what anyone just

1:46:12
to reassure you, that, notwithstanding the fact that we are sitting in the hallowed hall of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, that you know, if you take The Fellowship scheme. I mean, our colleagues here are from Aberdeen, and I can tell you already, with the relaunch of the new scheme, we’ve already got very active engagement and support work with both Strathclyde and Glasgow, Aberdeen and Dundee. You know, we’re this program is going to mean that people work together with their colleagues from multiple universities, and hopefully some good comes of that directly as well. Thank you.

1:46:51
Wait till the people online may not be able to hear you.

1:46:55
Okay? Thank you very much. Fascinating, brilliant introductions. Thank you all. I heard Singapore referenced earlier, right? And these comparisons, as it happens, I’ve spent a lot of time in Singapore and Asia Pacific the last few years. And Singapore, I think, is a fascinating example, because 6 million population, sort of six or eight leading universities, the actual geographical size of Singapore is something similar to Glasgow to Edinburgh, east to west, and something like Perth to Stirling north to south. So it’s a relatively small place, but it acts absolutely cohesively now. It gets a lot of headlines because of a lot of large corporations, including pharma, life sciences, are basing their regional, sometimes global headquarters there now because of the tax efficacy, but the reality is, the powerhouse of the Singapore economy is driven by small businesses based on knowledge worker economy, and that’s coming directly out of the universities. So they’re feeding the talent from the universities now with creativity into the vanguard of phenomenal companies. And I see that actually, my judgment on being in Singapore and Asia Pacific and being here in Scotland, I think we are actually absolutely punching above our weights in the innovation part of the engine. So I agree with what the gentleman saying here about it’s not necessarily chasing unicorns. That’s, that’s, that’s absolutely what the the end game can be about for an economy. If you look at the Singapore example, their GDP is twice the Scottish GDP per head of capital, right? And yet, we have masses of natural resources that we can tap into, as well as our human capital resources. So that’s that’s the background point. My question to the panel is, we just had a visit last week from, I choose my words carefully, the President of the United States and his entourage, tech bro. And we see tech bro throwing numbers around. They just seem to pluck them out of the air and multiply them by insanity and come out with a new valuation. So you know, that doesn’t seem like a very solid route to sustainable success. And we talk about sand in the wheels. We’re about to get, probably coal tar sands or oil sands thrown in the wheels of our particular strategy with this 100 and 50 billion pounds, which doesn’t seem to be very tangible, but to the to the hallowed halls here of the Royal Society. Obviously, this is built off the back of research and educational excellence, right? And the US, a lot of a lot of the California, the bay, the Silicon Valley, was built off excellence in education research, but that seems to be under attack. So are we about to import that here? That similar kind of attack on education? We’re seeing it in certain fringes, already within emerging in the UK. I just wonder how we fend that off, and how we defend the role of education and research going forward.

1:49:59
Thank. Do it. So amongst other hats, I’m advised to the Edinburgh University. I sit on the Governing Council at York so I have some some insight into the what’s going on at the moment. I think that the what’s what’s going on with the the universities at the moment in the UK is that the current administration has decided that the Blair government’s policy of aiming for 50% of everybody going to university is resulted in a sector that’s too big. But rather than take a strategic view about how to reshape it, they’re kind of letting it crumble and collapse until it bottoms out, which I think is terrible. So what we’re doing at York is we’re actually working with several other Russell Group universities to pool our resources to actually do an analysis of the skills and needs of the country over the next five to 10 years, and then take look backwards at those as to what skills are actually we are able to meet and supply, and which ones we no longer need, and which areas need to be expanded, so that we Need to actually take a strategic look at the shape of the UK academic sector in relation to the skills the country needs. But this laissez faire, let everything crumble, see if a few of them merge, one or two of them would go bust, and then take it from there. I mean, we need to do better than that.

1:51:19
Thank you. I think one of the key again, taking I’ve been on the court of University of Highland Island, which is a unique proposition because it’s made up of 14 colleges and the University Executive Office there, the idea was that there are colleges which are already pre existing, and it’s a geography of Highland islands which predicate, but I think eventually the consensus emerges that it has to be centers of excellence, not duplication. Everybody deciding that travel times may increase as a result or challenges, but students will be moving to get the skills that they need. Because as we be on one hand, we are saying Scottish universities are the best and we are creating but at the same time, we are facing the economic crisis that is having, whether it’s too many, too much duplication, or everybody needs to start about as you were suggesting, excellent areas of work or teaching. But because they are independent bodies, colleges are at least Scottish Government purview. Universities are not. They are all independent charitable organizations. And then so eventually it comes to a business model issue. So tech bro have attacked it, because that was an institution which was out with their realm. Here it is naturally evolving because of the financial pressures and the models that in case of Scotland, there is a specific model which probably the politicians need to touch but nobody’s ready to. So that’s another issue. But I think ric, with its independence, can convene a sensible discussion to say, is the current model sustainable? And that’s a topic for another day’s discussion. Anyone else wants to talk on that?

1:52:58
Yeah, I’ve just got a question online as well to comment. And so back to the question on Scottish education, and there was a mention of it being going downhill, but there was a focus on STEM subjects. Does the panel feel that there’s an importance in art and innovation and create? Yeah, creativity.

1:53:21
Sorry, could you repeat that?

1:53:23
Do the panel feel that arts are also important for innovation and creativity, not just STEM subjects? Oh, absolutely.

1:53:32
Anyone wants to pick up, yeah. Well, personally, absolutely, I mean, and I happen to be somebody who comes from an arts background, who moved into science, but, you know, I still actively very involved in the support of the arts. And I must admit, you know, that the devaluing of arts and innovation over the last decade, which is now being driven even faster by AI, is very worrying. I think we’re almost in a situation where we’re going to have to rebuild, you know, most of our modern artistic culture came from folk type artistic activities in communities around the world and around the country, and then gradually got centralized and professionalized and so on during the last two or three centuries. But actually, the economics of you know, the professional creativity are extremely difficult now. They were difficult when I worked in the music industry 40 years ago. It’s even worse now. So I think there is a real crisis, and yet without that creativity. I mean, we’re in a city we know, one of the biggest arts festivals in the world, and a lot of artistic activity which enriches all of our lives, but actually most of that economically is hanging on by a thread, so I think it is deeply worrying. And yes, we should really try and revalue. I mean, the value we place on intellectual property in science is paramount, because without it, you cannot raise the money. The value we place on intellectual property in the arts is just crashed, and it’s getting worse. Worse, and I think it is a major issue.

1:55:03
Thank you. Anyone else wants to add to that? I mean, I would certainly say that the when they talk about STEM there is a discussion about having it a steam so having arts added to it, because creativity and culture, in terms of combination of it, and even with the modern coding and everything the design thinking concept comes from art, and that is very much paramount to it. So both are important. It doesn’t mean that creative and music and culture and science and arts need to be set aside, but it is the basic development that is required where the technology world is moving. So it is in time, but probably it goes down to the specialization aspect of it to say that not everybody doing everything at the same time. It is specialization in certain places, and that’s how we will come with the excellence of it. Any question. It’s front in front here. Sorry.

1:56:00
Its way. Sorry, yeah, hi. First of all, comment, I was lucky enough to be in, I think, phase one of Cohort One of the project. It’s wonderful. It’s fantastic that it’s going to be relaunched, particularly with international dimension. I came back to Scotland to join something called itI life sciences, and I was intrigued by Professor Roy’s comments and also about place based activities. And my question is, it’s a kind of double question, what do you think worked and didn’t work in itI, life science. So I know that’s a leading question, and there was a place based element, and what is going to work in place based innovation? I guess it’s a double question. Thank you.

1:56:54
Okay, so I’ll explain a bit, just for people who maybe don’t know about the itI. So the itis were essentially created up to try and create a base of demand, to demand research coming out of university. So it wasn’t just saying, it wasn’t just saying that what we need to do is get more people universities supplying innovation. You’ve got to have a demand for that innovation, and that’s what the itis were designed to do. So I guess the first point was that that comes back. What worked was it that that basic idea picks up in a lot of the conversation we’ve had here about, how do you actually get interest in innovation, the spin outs of companies coming from? And that’s one of the challenges we have as a small regional economy in the UK context, that you don’t have that large demand base on your doorstep, so that that that concept in the itis was fundamentally, was fundamentally sound. The second thing, which is also important in thinking about the role of universities and the different dimensions to universities, and it’s only it, it’s only relatively recently that universities are really moving in innovation, the big way, because you think about what most universities do, it’s not to think about commercialization of research. Most universities are not even set up in structures that reflect the local economy. There are some exceptions to universities in Scotland at a different time. But most universities are set up for the global stage. They’re also set up to look at industries that are naturally global. So if you’ve got an expertise in your academic base in life sciences, there’s no surprise that the big companies that come in and buy your spin outs are from the United States, because you’re operating in a global, bit, in a global in a global base. And the whole idea, the whole genesis it is, was to create that demand, so that when the spin outs and activity did take place in universities. It then hit the ground, and then it was supported in here. So I think that was the positive side of that. And you’re right, it then had a place dimension to it. So it was then picking up that got that point earlier, about saying, well, some universities have a success in those areas, so that’s where it’s going to grow and develop and nurture the challenges, though, part of it was that the point I made about the short term nature of it, you know, you put a lot of money in. Politicians want a quick answer. They want a quick result. If you don’t get results after year 345, and suddenly the political, the political dimension, moves on. Somebody wants to open up something new, and it doesn’t, and it doesn’t gain traction. And then again, back to the, I guess, some of the point that Colin was making about just the good policy making in there. So the challenges around how they were set up, the governance and it then just meant that they were always going to be difficult to ascertain and to be successful. But the point I come back to, I think the point that’s interesting. And Jim made the point about money. There’s a lot of money in there. And to be fair to the government, at the time, they put a large investment into that, you know, half a billion pounds in those days, relative to the context. It was a big, bold ambition. Now it didn’t work, but at least there was ambition. There. And we spend, it’s been ever saying, you know, about between 250, to 300 million, depending whether you do resource and capital and Scottish Enterprise, that’s out of a budget of 60,000 million. And there’s a question about, you know, how serious are we about innovation? How serious we are about economic development, unless you ultimately put your money where your mouth is,

2:00:21
can I had something on place. I think place is interesting here for two reasons, one reason, which is that if there are to be clusters, they have to be some geographical nature. Now, interesting question exactly, what’s the geography is Glasgow and Edinburgh? One place nowadays or not, my personal view is that it’s not yet, but it might be one day for blue and roadworks stop. But there’s a second point, which I may alluded to earlier, and that’s about eggs and baskets. If you look back over a prolonged period at Scott the history of Scottish economic development phases, you’ve got phase in the 50s and 60s, which is kind of the Macmillan government, with people sent as car sent as car plants. This kind of summer industry was directed actually worked quite well for a while. Got a lot of jobs, and lot of people made a living at it. And then if you look at the 70s, 80s, and 70s and 80s, the heyday of the Scottish Development Agency, where Edward was working away and doing very good things, actually. And they made a host a whole thread through Scottish Enterprise of trying to trying to combine skills and investment, but mostly driving stuff through inward investment, actually quite successfully, though none of it quite stuck. If I’m honest, over then it’s a slightly political point over the last decade, not 20 years or so, it’s not been clear to me that we have a coherent, persuasive economic development narrative, and actually maybe we should try and do it slightly differently and do it place by place. Not all of them will work, but we can learn from the one that works or the two that work. I’m hopeful,

2:02:03
if I can, I just just reinforce some of that. I think that something that is shaping policy thinking at the moment is that how we give greater, how we empower the regions of Scotland to take ownership of and do more to enable economic development that suits them. Now we tend to characterize that. You asked about successful places, we tend to characterize that in the big urban centers. And there are good examples in Glasgow City region of innovation, districts of the like, but it it’s as it’s as valuable and as vital a process in rural areas. We talked about creative industries. Well, if you look at the economy of the Highlands and Islands, dominated by many creative industries, if you look at where the opportunities of net zero might come and where the opportunities developing a supply chain, those may well be in the rural areas of Scotland, for natural regions. So there are different solutions for different parts of the country, and part of the policy objective is to try and enable that these things are not necessarily contradictory. We’ve got to build clusters. We’ve got to let industry and academics work together to develop them. We’ve got to build successful places, and we’ve also got to maintain capabilities. Because sometimes, however clever you are from a policy point of view, or however clever you are in trying to predict what the sectors of the future are. The next unicorn will probably come from a completely different sector. Because no we know. We didn’t see, we didn’t see Skyscanner. I suspect if you look at some of the most scaling companies in Scotland, they’re not necessarily in the sectors that we think they’re going to be. So we’ve always got to be open to that possibility and make sure that the systems are in place to allow for that kind of thing to happen.

2:03:46
So a statement, rather than any really answering a question. But one of the things that’s always made me smile is that if you go to San Diego, San Diego would recognize Aberdeen as a center for drug discovery, particularly biologics drug discovery, Aberdeen still has about 60% of Scotland’s late stage assets, and San Diego hasn’t a clue that Aberdeen is a center of oil and gas or the transition that’s going on. Interestingly, if you speak to people in Aberdeen, they haven’t a clue that Aberdeen is a center of excellence in drug discovery. And I we try very hard to break down those barriers, but they really, they really don’t know somebody mentioned Singapore. One of the things they do in Singapore is they educate their taxi drivers. So as you’re driving in from the airport, the taxi drivers tell you everything you need to know about the expertise and centers of excellence that are in Singapore. Maybe we should try and do that a bit more in Aberdeen, but I don’t know if we can do.

2:05:00
Yeah, thank you. I think that’s true, because when I was in Australia, they were trying to taxi drivers were trying to say that we’ve got the best sunlight and we’ve got the best weather. You should come and settle here. So that certainly is a mood. But I suppose from the point of view of economic development, one thing, and it’s not to be political, is that the best economic development policy is long term and it’s not written in electoral cycles. So the answer to any time when a government changes is to create a new organization or try to restructure is probably what creates the challenges. Because, as we have discussed, innovation is long term and impact is even longer term, which is 10 to 15 years. So if we haven’t got the patience to see the impact of something that is working, we will never see that it became successful or not. And for any organizations that are creating these, and the as Tom Hunter, if I quote him here, he says, The Best Social Policy ever written is a good, well paid job. So if we do need to create those in a longer term, which was the idea? Then, I suppose that is where the Civil Services comes, the politicians and the parties may come and change the politic. The cycle should be written for innovation, development and investment for a long term, and especially for sectors like life sciences, is a lot of investment over longer term policy. There any final question before we close. Okay, no, okay, sorry, we can talk it after that, I think we’ve been given the signal and say kick out of the sea of the panel. So on behalf of Simon and I, I would just say, Yep.

2:06:35
Thank you very much everybody for a very interesting and good interaction this evening. Thank you. Applause.

2:06:46
Okay, thank you. You’ve been great audience.