Entrepreneurship ‘must be normalised’
A former Skyscanner chief has argued that Scotland must normalise entrepreneurship in society and throughout the education system if the country is to achieve greater startup and scale-up success.
Mark Logan, former chief operating officer at the Edinburgh-founded flight and travel search business, was appointed by the Scottish Government as the country’s first chief entrepreneur this year.
Addressing the annual EIE22 tech investor conference, Logan said that while he believes entrepreneurial potential is “latent in us all”, a more “systems-based approach” is required. He believes the roll-out of Tech Scaler hubs in seven locations across Scotland is a key component of that approach.
On the subject of higher education, Logan argued that while Scotland’s universities are world-class in teaching and research, they need to do better at entrepreneurship to “complete the triangle”. He also expressed his belief that by co-locating industry sectors like life sciences and creative industries with interneteconomy technology companies, greater scale-up success will follow.
Logan and Scottish Enterprise’s chief executive Adrian Gillespie, who spoke later in the conference, concurred on the importance of securing more international investment into the Scottish start-up scene, something both admitted was high on the agenda at governmental level.
Entrepreneur and investor Ana Stewart, chair of the Women in Enterprise Review, repeated her belief that Scotland can bring about transformative change when it comes to moving the dial on gender imbalance.