Ana Stewart is getting to work. Since being appointed as Scotland’s chief entrepreneurial advisor in April, the EY investor and Pathways report co-author has gotten down to business strengthening and standardising Scotland’s approach to bolstering its strength as an entrepreneurial nation. 

Early on in her tenure, Stewart helped secure the new round of the Entrepreneurial Education Fund with £1.2 million to support courses and projects to inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs from an early age. 

Her time as chief entrepreneur has also seen the Scottish EDGE awards secure £3.6 million in Scottish government funding over the next three years, which will continue to support early stage businesses establishing their operations here and abroad. 

The Scottish Government also issued a grant of £1.1m to fund under-represented entrepreneurs across the nation through the Pathways Pre-Start Fund to help women and minority groups break into entrepreneurship. 

Besides funding and education, Stewart has helped to oversee the creation of a Scottish Ecosystem Platform allowing for better transparency around entrepreneurship data, allowing founders and investors to better gauge and engage with the Scottish business ecosystem. 

Despite these lauded achievements, Scotland continues to face a digital skills crisis, only exacerbated by the rise of AI, as well as an entrepreneurial education gap. 

Investment opportunities have improved, but are dwarfed by London – while Edinburgh and Glasgow show progress with foreign direct investment attraction, this does not show the full picture of Scotland, a nation of regional disparity when it comes to industry, investment, and digital inclusion. 

Seven months into her role, Stewart has turned her attention to scaleups, a “no brainer” next step for her as she tries to help the government build up “Scotland HQ” as an “resilient, robust, and attractive” hub for international investment, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. 

Her remit as the Chief Entrepreneur is massive – from helping Scotland attract ever-elusive foreign investment, to supporting diverse business owners and startup founders, to bolstering entrepreneurial skills and spirits through education reform. 

But scaleups do seem like the logical culmination of all these efforts – a vibrant startup ecosystem is one thing, but sustaining this into a thriving scaleup nation is another. 

Her vision brings Scotland largely back to basics – strengthening and aligning private and public sectors towards a common goal, understanding the needs of scaleups through surveys, and creating measurements and transparency to track progress and understand what works, and what doesn’t. 

“We’ve got an impressive start up rate in Scotland,” Stewart assured. 

“We’re outperforming the UK from a poor position just five years ago, which is really impressive. But we’re not delivering high performance or good stats around scaleups.” 

Scaleups take more funding, sustained growth, different skills sets, strong leadership, and often, international pull. Scaling a business requires access to capital, talent, and a larger market to sustain this growth, all hurdles even the most successful or promising startup can find insurmountable. 

“Three years of consecutive growth is about what qualifies as a proper scaleup, and we’re only just scratching the surface, as there isn’t a clear strategy.”

Stewart wants to formalise this strategy, but that first means listening to scaleup founders. 

Understanding Where We Are and Where We Want to Be

While the Scottish Government has numerous intermediaries with specific remits to bolster businesses and allocate funding, from Scottish Enterprise to the Scottish National Investment Bank and Scottish EDGE, Stewart explained that “the Scottish Government are so detached from the end beneficiaries, the founders and scale up companies, that they don’t know for sure what the mood is, or how effective these founders or services are.”  

The national survey of founders proposed by Stewart is meant to “just have a finger on the pulse of our founders and our scaleups to actually hear what the challenges of the day are.

“To have a centralised version of it doesn’t seem a difficult thing to do,” Stewart said. 

The survey and focus on hearing from founders does not necessarily mean that the Scottish Government’s initiatives have been flying blind – Stewart noted the success of the university spin out ecosystem, the burgeoning life sciences, renewables, and tech ecosystems in the Scottish entrepreneurial ecosystem. 

But, just like data on the success of Glasgow and Edinburgh in attracting foreign direct investment, or the rise of Scotland’s fintech sector, or even the burgeoning startup system, these pockets of success do not show us the full picture of Scotland’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. 

Hearing from other scaleups and their success stories, can help bolster Scotland further along in their scaleup journeys. 

Metrics

This also goes into needing to understand what the Scottish scaleup system looks like. 

Stewart noted that the Scottish entrepreneurial ecosystem – be in the government or fellow founders – often seemed unaware of its success stories, leaving a void in desperate need of attention, understanding, and celebration. 

Stewart’s vision is simple –  “it’s not reinventing the wheel” – but it uses already existing tools to pool together and analyse the cold hard data on what Scotland’s top scaleups are, the amount of founders in the nation, how much funding they bring in, and their survival rates. 

Of course, Stewart wants to take this data further: “We need to get under the bonnet on why there are less scaleups so we can better understand where our failure points are so we can remedy those.”

Stewart also wants better tracking on the performance of initiatives that already exist – “It shouldn’t be that difficult, in any normal business in the private sector, you would be tracking these.”

A lack of metrics not only stops us from seeing what might not be working, but also means we have no way of tracking what is working. 

“Until we get that first bit of data, we’re kind of going a bit blind,” Stewart noted. 

And a lack of understanding as to what is driving the success of Scotland’s scaleups arguably keeps these success stories from being replicated across the nation.

“You can’t be what you can’t see,” Stewart said, taking a lesson from her Pathways research into female entrepreneurship. 

Ideally, Stewart wants to see a top 100 scaleups list for Scotland, so that the government can understand what is working, how to help other scaleups on their journeys, and champion these success stories so other founders know it’s possible. 

“We just need to speak to them and actually understand what they’re doing so we know what, as an ecosystem, we can do to support them.” 

“But in order to do that, we need to understand who they are.”

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Private and Public Collaboration 

Metrics and surveys all collide under industry best practice when trying to roll out initiatives and test their success – as Stewart said, they seem like “no-brainers” especially to someone coming from a private sector background. 

Private and public sector collaboration is also part of Stewart’s plans to build and support Scotland’s scaleups, but what does this look like? 

Part of the issue is private sector attraction – scaleups need private sector involvement, not just in terms of investment, but also in experience and strategy. 

Scaling a business takes a different set of skills than starting one, and Stewart notes that there’s “a big senior executive leadership gap in Scotland,” as well as “a lack of good, solid boards,” in Scotland’s wider ecosystem. 

What can attract these is not only metrics and measurements of where we are at, but long-term strategies that private sector organisations can feel more secure in investing in. 

Transforming the Scottish EDGE programme strategy to be for three years rather than one year is an example of a transition toward a long-term growth mindset. 

“I believe that strengthens its position to be able to go to broader investors because investors will buy into something that’s got a longer term stability in a three-year programme versus a year,” Stewart said. 

It’s not just about tying private and public sectors, but aligning the mindset so that data, priorities, and strategies can be more easily transferable to promote seamless collaboration between the two sectors. 

Challenges and the Future of Scaleups 

While Stewart says that investment is not the only thing holding scaleups in Scotland back, it certainly is a hurdle. 

But key to gaining this investment is ensuring that Scotland is seen. Visibility is key, but this needs to be a team effort. 

“We need to get investors, c-suite, future CEOs, to want to come to Scotland, not just come to a company.”

But how does that work? 

Stewart listed a number of incentives to work around, from improving business tax rates to better compete with England, to creating a physical hub that investors and businesses can centre their Scottish outfits from. 

But this also ties into some key challenges scaleups face.

“I do think Scotland’s got great entrepreneurial pedigree. I do and we’re really innovative.

So I don’t have any doubts about our talent to build businesses. I just don’t think the environment’s quite what it needs to be,” Stewart said. 

And this plays into why Scotland may be a burgeoning startup nation, but has yet to master scaleups. 

A talent gap in senior executives and in board members can be a major barrier to growth – leaders who are great at starting a business may not have the necessary skillset to scale. 

But this skills gap at the highest level is only compounded by a skillset at the entry level – Scotland is only beginning to make progress in instilling entrepreneurship into its curriculum, let alone the digital skills gap being exacerbated by AI. 

“These are skills gaps, and that’s why we want to be able to bring skills into Scotland, while building them from within. They’re not mutually exclusive – we need both of those things to happen.”

Part of this is the educational programmes Stewart is promoting in her new role with £1.1m in funding from the Scottish government going towards entrepreneurial education towards early education. 

But it also ties together the overlying theme of Stewart’s scaleup strategy – by understanding where we are in measurements and metrics and surveys, we can then bolster our position as a nation to strengthen industry ties and attract more talented people and investment to a sustainable ecosystem. 

“Growth is a team effort,” Stewart said. Part of the reason for pulling together all this data, hearing from founders struggling while highlighting success stories, is to improve collaboration across the sector. 

“We need everybody to do their bit to try and fuel knowledge and insight,” Stewart said. 

“We need to use what’s out there, and the intelligence comes from collaborative and creative thinking in how to put these moving pieces together to deliver a scale-up Scotland. We’re at the beginning of that.”