The Rt Hon Gordon Brown brought together experts from Scotland and around the world to chart a way forward.
Full speech transcript
It used to be sad that in the 1960’s we in Britain were managing decline. Then in the 70s we said we declined to manage. You think forward to the problems now that we’ve got. So much is being done on planning and housing, something on deregulation, quite a lot of work is being done on infrastructure and something on skills, but we think one of the elements that is vitally important to Scotland, but also to the rest of Europe, is a focus on innovation.
Now David Sainsbury is about to speak and his book, Windows of Opportunity, I do recommend to you. He has studied innovation in almost every country that has very successful innovation in the world. And his conclusion is investment will come if you have the innovative technologies in services and manufacturing, the export industries that can create wealth, that can pay for public services and pay for the eradication of poverty.
So David is going to speak on what he has found from his experience of both Britain and around the world. And he’s then going to be followed by Dan Turner, who’s done a specific study which is being issued today on Scotland and what has happened in Scotland. And what Dan has found, and I think he’ll explain in more detail, is there is this huge dichotomy.
We are very good, the universities, very good at creating new companies, startups, very good at these spinoffs from technology in the universities. We’re probably the best in the United Kingdom for doing that. We’ve got good angel investors that will invest up to five million, perhaps, in a startup.
But where we fall down is in the next stage, where we don’t seem to be able to create the scale-ups of the size necessary to create the jobs of the future. And Dan will explain that. And David and Dan will then answer some questions on their work.
Look around Scotland at the moment. Look at Aberdeen, the potential for renewables. Look at Glasgow, not just shipbuilding, of course, as the past, but also the present.
But precision medicine is one of the industries that is moving forward. Look at Edinburgh, fintech and precision medicine as well. Look at Dundee, that has got, obviously, the drug discovery unit and has got the video games industry.
And Chris van der Kuyl will speak about that later.
There are huge sources of innovation and inventiveness in Scotland, just as has been traditional in our history. The question is, can we turn that into scalable companies that stay in Scotland, invest in Scotland, create jobs in Scotland? And Dan’s study suggests we could create 300,000 jobs in the next 10 years. 300,000 well-paying jobs, 120,000 in the new industries. The spinoffs in terms of the service sector, another 180,000.
And that is a possibility if we invest in the infrastructure, the skills, the research and development that is necessary to achieve that.
