Most technology events know exactly what they are. TecTonic Night Summit has always seemed less interested in distinctions.

Part technology conference, part founder gathering, part creative showcase and part community event (also, there’s a strong house party vibe). It draws together groups that would not ordinarily share the same room – without feeling like any one of those things wearing the clothes of another. It’s a messy vignette in the process of coalescing, shaped through iteration, experimentation and some clever accommodations. 

We’ve now attended – and thoroughly enjoyed – several iterations of the event and, when we last dropped in at its Year-End Exchange in December, described TecTonic as a “completely different animal” to Scotland’s more traditionally configured technology conferences.

Nine months later, it’s clear that the organisers have got comfortable in their skin and are probing the edges of the format to see where and what can be expanded and refined.

TecTonic returned to Barras Art and Design (BAaD) on September 10th as part of Glasgow Tech Week, immediately following Glasgow City Innovation District’s Fusion Fest. Its latest iteration was conceived for around 500 founders, investors, creatives, technologists, students, community organisations and business leaders, with more than 60 exhibitors across its Market Square and Creators’ Courtyard advertised in the run-up to the event.

Rather than keynote stages and an agenda dictating the evening, the proposition was deliberately looser: startup and scale-up showcases, makers and creative businesses, mentorship, interactive experiences, live performance, food, music and AI-assisted introductions occupying the same venue – as well as a magician and bubble-blowers (both of which deserve individual recognition).

Organisers have increasingly settled on “Scotland’s Innovation Market Square” as the description for what they are trying to create.

It is useful because TecTonic is not really attempting to improve upon the traditional technology conference. It is trying to fill the space around one.

As Director Nick Murray explains: “For me, the original thinking behind TecTonic was that there are lots of great large-scale, focused and industry-specific conferences in Scotland, as well as plenty of smaller community meetups, panels and events, but there was something missing in between: a genuinely celebratory evening that brings together business support, entrepreneurs, tech professionals and the creative industries in one place.

“The ambition was to create a kind of smorgasbord of what creativity and innovation looks like coming out of Scotland, but importantly, to give people from those different worlds a chance to actually interact. A big part of it is getting people out of their own echo chambers and silos and putting them in a room with people who might challenge, inspire or enhance what they’re working on. That’s why things like the mentorship sessions, our deliberately diverse mix of exhibitors and the different services represented at the event are important.”

That helps explain why TecTonic felt like a fitting continuation of the event that preceded it (not that the two are or need to be interlinked, neccessarily).

Fusion Fest spent much of its runtime grappling with the increasingly complicated relationship between technology and creativity, particularly as gen AI presses further into areas previously considered distinctly human.

TecTonic offered something less philosophical (and definitely less adversarial) but, in its own way, connected. Instead of asking how technology, creativity and enterprise coexist, it put their respective communities in physical proximity and allowed them to work it out for themselves. Face painting and beer often helps with that, in fairness.

The unusual, in other words, is not a reaction to the conference format. It is increasingly part of TecTonic’s design.

But claiming to create serendipity is considerably easier than actually creating it.

The useful encounter at an event like this is supposed to be the one that could not necessarily have been predicted beforehand: somebody there to speak with investors meeting an artist; an established technology professional encountering an early-stage founder; a student finding themselves talking to the person capable of opening a door that they did not know existed.

Ironically, an increasing amount of infrastructure is now required to make those accidental interactions possible.

TecTonic’s mentorship programme offered one-to-one conversations across areas including fundraising, product, AI, engineering, marketing, commercialisation, leadership and scaling. Barclays Eagle Labs and CodeBase were directly involved in supporting that programme, while its Generative Connections system attempted to put some machinery behind networking by using attendee information to recommend potentially useful introductions before the event (though it should be noted, this is a system that’s been used with great success in previous Tectonic iterations).

The event has already demonstrated that there is an appetite for the format. Beyond this, there’s clearly an appetite on the part of organisers to scale. The question is, how does an offering built around informality, curiosity and unexpected encounters meaningfully expand and how does it balance its big-hitter sponsors that keep the lights on with the more community-led partners who bring the flavour?

Who builds the Market Square?

One way of illustrating this is to look beyond who attended TecTonic and towards the organisations helping make it possible.

Barclays Eagle Labs and Techscaler by CodeBase are tied directly to startup development. Johnston Carmichael brings the professional and financial advisory layer. Dell provides the global enterprise technology presence. FORM Careers is concerned with talent; Flyte Cloud Services with workplace technology and digital transformation; Silmaril with AI adoption; Gigged.AI with technology skills and workforce models; and Infix Support represents the kind of Glasgow-born technology company the wider ecosystem is ostensibly attempting to produce.

Looked at collectively rather than logo-by-logo, much of the sponsor base maps quite neatly onto the practical requirements of building a company: advice, capital readiness, people, technology, digital capability and routes to scale.

That might initially appear like an unusually conventional commercial backbone for an event that revels in being difficult to categorise.

But sponsorship and participation are not quite the same thing at TecTonic.

Barclays representatives were also involved in startup mentorship. Forumm supplied the event technology. Generative Connections powered its AI-assisted introductions. The Events Hub supported the event’s delivery, while Yush was embedded to capture live attendee reaction and feed that information back into future iterations.

That matters.

At its best, the relationship is less about sponsors buying visibility around a community and more about organisations contributing some piece of the machinery that enables that community to function.

There is still a tension worth watching, however.

Any grassroots event that becomes successful enough to attract larger commercial partners eventually has to answer some version of the same question: at what point does the thing supporting the community start reshaping it?

TecTonic’s answer, at least for now, appears to sit partly in a second and considerably broader layer of support.

Nick Murray, Director, Tectonic

Its community network stretches across more than 70 organisations. The current roster ranges from Creative Entrepreneurs Club, Creative Glasgow, the Scottish Creative Network and Wasps Studios through to The Data Lab, FinTech Scotland, Scottish EDGE, Scottish Games Network, Startup Grind Scotland, Strathclyde Inspire, Glasgow City Innovation District, City of Glasgow College and a host of smaller communities and networks.

That breadth is arguably doing as much to define the identity of TecTonic as its programme.

Murray says: “If nothing else, I also see TecTonic as a platform to celebrate the people and organisations doing the hard work of building and supporting these communities. We’ve now got more than 70 community partners involved, all doing different but brilliant things for their own communities month on month. Having them buy into the event and bring their people with them makes a huge difference to the diversity of the room, and ultimately that’s what makes the event work.”

There is a fairly important distinction in there.

A diverse event is not necessarily one that books a few representatives from different industries and puts their logos alongside one another. TecTonic is effectively asking dozens of existing communities to bring parts of themselves into a shared space.

That changes the composition of the room.

A games organisation, a fintech cluster, a creative network, an accelerator and a college all arrive with different constituencies and different reasons for being there. If it works, the resulting overlap is closer to TecTonic’s “market square” analogy than any particular installation, exhibitor or piece of branding.

There is also a possible failure mode.

As TecTonic attracts more commercial backing, there is a version of the event in which enterprise provides the substance while creativity becomes atmosphere: artists, performers and makers adding colour around what has ultimately become another technology-industry gathering.

The model that we saw in this latest iteration appears consciously constructed to resist that. The Creators’ Courtyard gave makers, artists, designers, food and drink producers and other creative businesses their own route into the event, while organisations including Creative Entrepreneurs Club, Creative Glasgow, Scottish Creative Network, Scottish Games Network and Wasps sit within the wider partner network rather than simply the entertainment programme.

But it is the sort of balance that becomes harder, rather than easier, to maintain with scale.

However, there is another measure of success that becomes more relevant at this stage too.

Attendance can demonstrate demand. Selling out demonstrates scarcity. A busy venue can demonstrate energy.

But beyond, there’s plenty that’s come about because of Tectonic that can demonstrate impact.

If the central proposition is that useful things happen when Scotland’s fragmented communities collide, the strongest evidence for TecTonic ultimately exists outside BAaD: the customer gained, company built, job found, collaboration started or idea changed because two people happened to meet there.

“We’ve seen people meet through TecTonic and go on to build things together,” Murray said. “One attendee met a mentor who later became their fractional CTO and helped them build their MVP. Revive Skincare sold more than a month’s worth of product in a single night in the Courtyard. And one of our volunteers gained the confidence to start their own business after leaving university, then came back this year representing that startup and accessed mentorship through the event.”

Those outcomes are harder to quantify than ticket sales or attendance figures, but they give TecTonic something more substantial than its fourth, fifth or tenth busy room.

Also, it’s somewhat portentous as to what the event might become.

Recommended reading

• Fusion Fest Brings Tech and Creativity Into the Same Room
• Comment | AI in Marketing: Is it Time to Run for the Creative Hills?
• How Worried Are Brits About AI-Fuelled Phishing?
  

Murray does not see Glasgow as its natural boundary.

“Looking ahead, I think there’s a much bigger opportunity to take the model beyond Glasgow. There are good examples of this working elsewhere, particularly Slush in Helsinki and the Night Summit that sits alongside Web Summit in Lisbon. The aspiration is to attach TecTonic to more tech weeks and ecosystem moments where there is a need for a focal-point evening event after the daytime conference = something relaxed and genuinely enjoyable, but which still creates real business value and, importantly, a very human connection between people.”

The Slush comparison becomes particularly interesting when Murray explains that he is looking not only at how the Finnish event convenes people, but at who gets to build it.

“There’s also a personal motivation for me in all of this. Having been around the Scottish ecosystem for quite a long time, I think it’s important that we create opportunities for younger people to come into the space and get experience of doing something genuinely ambitious at scale. It’s a bit of a lift-as-you-climb mentality: if we’re going to future-proof the ecosystem, we need to give the next generation opportunities to lead, not just invite them to attend.

“That’s something I really admire about Slush too, particularly the way they put young people and students at the heart of the organisation, rotate the leadership regularly, and create genuine opportunities for them to contribute to the wider ecosystem.”

It is not an abstract comparison. Slush remains organised by students and recent graduates, with its main Helsinki event supported by more than 1,000 volunteers and explicitly positioning involvement in the organisation as an entry point into the startup ecosystem.

You can see a philosophy emerging in what is to be extrapolated and emulated.

Growth does not necessarily have to mean putting ever more people into BAaD.

It could mean reproducing the format elsewhere. It could mean widening the communities represented inside it. It could mean creating opportunities for younger people to take ownership of increasingly significant parts of the organisation. And, eventually, perhaps it means TecTonic functioning less as a single Glasgow event and more as an adaptable evening layer around other innovation gatherings.

That feels more interesting than simply chasing a bigger attendance number.

For now, TecTonic continues to occupy an unusual place in Scotland’s increasingly busy technology-event calendar: close enough to the established ecosystem to attract backing from some of its biggest institutions, but sufficiently porous that artists, students, startups, professional advisers, makers and technologists can plausibly regard the same event as partly their own.

“Scotland’s Innovation Market Square” is inevitably a piece of branding.

After the most recent of these, though, it is becoming a reasonably useful description of the model too.

The difficult part now is not convincing more people to enter the market square.

It is making sure that, as it gets bigger, the interesting people do not retreat back into their own corners.