Logan review highlights priority areas to grow Scottish tech ecosystem

In May 2020 Mark Logan former COO of Skyscanner was commissioned by the Scottish Government Cabinet Secretary for Finance, Kate Forbes MSP, to undertake a review of the Scottish technology ecosystem and how the sector can support the economic recovery from the COVID-19 recession.

The review is a detailed study of the state of the Scottish tech ecosystem, identifying its weaknesses relative to other clusters in the UK and around the world and making a series of targeted and practical recommendations to overcome those challenges and secure the benefits for the Scottish economy of a growing, well networked tech ecosystem.

While the  tech sector contributed £4.9 billion to the Scottish economy in 2018 and supported almost 100,000 jobs, according to a report last year from Skills Development Scotland. The Logan review describes Scotland’s tech sector as at a ‘pre-tipping’ point, a stage before the network effects of large clusters of tech firms can operate to strengthen the ecosystem.

Education and talent, infrastructure and funding were identified as key priority areas for pushing the development of the Scottish tech sector past this tipping point and allowing for accelerated growth not reliant on high levels of investment support from Government.

The review takes a deep dive into each of these the priorities, the current state of support for education and talent, infrastructure and funding in the tech sector across Scotland and offers recommendations to support the growth of the sector.

Some of these recommendations include:

• The creation of a Tech-Scaler National Backbone - a Scotland wide network of Tech-Scaler centres to support early stage companies to grow,
• treating Computing Science as an essential subject such as Maths or Physics at secondary school,
• establishing industry partnerships with schools to provide summer work experience and outside the classroom development opportunities,
• developing partnerships between Scottish VCs and Government support joint initiatives that address local challenges,
• adjusting university incentivisation to improve spin-out scale and quality, for example by assigning a KPIs to increase both the number and quality of spin-outs.

The detailed analysis presented by the Logan review builds on a growing body of literature on the key characteristics that help tech ecosystems to grow.

While the review addresses the specific challenges of the Scottish context the issues and themes it touches on will be viewed as shared experiences across the UK’s myriad of growing tech ecosystems.

For example, research by the UK Tech Cluster Group has highlighted similar themes, the importance of digital skills, physical space and colocation facilities and the need to attract investors and gear funding mechanisms to growing ecosystems across the UK outside of London.

As the Governments and local authorities across the UK begin to focus their efforts on the economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, utilising the insights of the Logan review and other studies will be vital to build targeted strategies to put tech at the heart of the wider economic recovery.

Achieving this will require detailed analysis and focused recommendations that support the needs of tech ecosystems. As well as developing collaborative partnerships between different levels of Government, the wider tech sector and tech companies and entrepreneurs operating within ecosystems.

techUK is currently running a UK wide campaign seeking to build partnerships and convene a dialogue within the UK’s tech ecosystems to understand barriers to growth and how tech ecosystems can play their part in the economic recovery.

The campaign, Building the future we need, has run dialogues in the North East of England, the West Midlands of England and Scotland and will continue throughout the Summer and Autumn with planned events in Yorkshire and the Humber, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The Scottish Government has said that it will include its response to the Logan review in the 2020/2021 Programme for Government. techUK looks forward to seeing how these recommendations are adopted to strengthen the Scottish tech sector.

The Logan review of the Scottish technology ecosystem can be read in full here.