What effect would separation have on entrepreneurship and innovation in Scotland?
- Paul Tracey
They are the “vital six per cent”: high growth firms, both new entrepreneurial ventures and established companies, which play a critical role in successful economies. These are the firms that drive gains in productivity, national competitiveness, and ultimately living standards.
But Scotland just doesn’t have enough of them. The country has a long history of innovation and a proud tradition of making and building things – it was at the forefront of science, engineering and commerce during the Industrial Revolution after all – but in recent years, Scotland’s innovation performance has been less distinguished.
Not enough of its companies are truly global in scale and its “business base” – the number of firms per head of population – is relatively small. Moreover, survey data indicate that Scottish entrepreneurs tend to be less internationally oriented, and their ambitions for growth are markedly below the average of entrepreneurs in the UK as a whole. The upshot, as noted in a recent report by MIT’s Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program, is that Scotland “is not meeting its potential in delivering high-growth businesses“.
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Image: Scottish autumn light
Credit: byronv2 via flickr
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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