Mark Logan has said the national Techscaler scheme in Scotland is providing the ‘entrepreneurial stimulus’ to support Scottish tech firms in their desire to reach scale.
The former chief entrepreneurial adviser to the Scottish Government said the programme he envisaged five years in his landmark Scottish Technology Ecosystem Review has helped ‘fill the funnel’ with nearly 1,000 tech firms across the country.
The next stage, he says, is to ensure those start-ups have the support needed to become viable scale-up companies, with a “significant number” of them are now on that journey.
Logan, who stepped down from the role last year following criticism over his salary, made the comments following the publication of the latest annual review of the programme this week.
He said: “The Techscaler initiative was conceived to proceed in stages, and we’re seeing that play out. The first stage was to “fill the funnel” with credible start-ups and provide an exceptional learning environment for their founding teams such that we increase the success rate businesses moving to the next level of scale.
“This has gone very well, with approximately 1,000 start-ups registered with Techscaler, many of which wouldn’t have otherwise existed, and significant numbers of these now moving to scale. So, Techscaler is clearly providing the entrepreneurial stimulus and support that we hoped would happen at this stage.”
Logan, a former Skyscanner executive and now professor of computing at Glasgow university, left his post year having devised a potential new scheme to support an advanced manufacturing layer for tech companies, particularly those engaged in AI, robotics and other industries that require computing power aligned with manufacturing processes. As technologies evolve, Logan views this as increasingly necessary pivot from “pure software” companies.
He said: “Now we enter the second stage, which is about strengthening pathways to scale and doing so within a technology environment that is changing faster than ever before.
“I’m very pleased to see how the Techscaler team is orientating the platform to the requirements of this next stage; adjusting the education offering for the next level of scale, developing an environment tailored to provide a “deeptech scaling pathway” for AI start-ups, leveraging the concentration of start-ups within Techscaler as an efficient “one-stop” engagement method for external investors, and continuing the international outreach model, which brings our start-ups to major ecosystems and their investors around the world.
“As before, Techscaler is a multi-year endeavour that requires patience, support, and collaboration to deliver on its potential. In that regard, I’m heartened by the outstanding collaborations forming across the ecosystem to realise this potential.”