Dr. Poonam Malik of Scottish Enterprise, Royal Society of Edinburgh, Skills Development Scotland and Microplate Dx discusses with experts from academia and industry to consider how to take forward lessons from the day to create a ‘Scottish Enlightenment 2.0’ of ideas, innovation and jobs creation.
Full speech transcript
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, and try again. Who was that? Robert DeBruce, our very own Scot, who started that to say that, inspired by watching a spider.
Now that’s not just folklore, that’s a story of boldness, ambition, inspiration, and reckless pursuit of a vision, no matter how daunting the odds are. So since morning, when we’ve listened to, we are thinking there are, it’s like a mountain of challenges, opportunities in relation to world and big economies, where are we standing and how can we control that? So as we sit for this panel, thinking about how can policy, government, and parliament enable everything that we have heard, innovation-driven economies, and crowding in growth capital for Scotland so that the UK economy can grow. I implore you to think for the next 45-50 minutes about that, channelling that spirit, because just yesterday it was the 302nd anniversary of Adam Smith, father of economics.
Next year, we will be celebrating 250th anniversary of the Wealth of Nations. So what can we learn from that? Like Robert DeBruce, we can pursue and be relentless. We had the Scottish enlightenment here, which showed us that how a nation can be transformed by ideas.
Now with data, technology, and human level AI on the horizon, we ought to ponder with all that information available to us, the skills and the information and the talent we have, how can Scotland position itself? What should we do more of? And rather importantly, what should we do less of? What should we stop doing? Where are we wasting our resources? Where are we not putting our behind? So I think if we pause and reflect, maybe it is time for Scottish enlightenment version two. We need to gather together, put our brains, everything that has been synthesised, Gordon, has brought people together for this wonderful day, and both Jim and Alastair have worked hard for this conference. Now we need to put that into action.
From my own personal lens, I’m Dr Poonam Malik, entrepreneur, investor, board member of Scottish Enterprise, vice president business for Royal Society of Edinburgh. I think I have seen in life what works, but moreover I have observed and experienced what doesn’t work. So in that case, the purpose today is to be bold, to raise our ambition, and I think a lot of you will be thinking from the morning that we are listening to what people have done greatly and how we can get behind that.
So we need growth, but not just for the sake of growth, a growth that creates high-quality jobs for us, and it does so by fuelling the industries of tomorrow, because that’s where the jobs of tomorrow will come. But we need to do that today, because for that we need people who would have been trained by then, and embedding innovation across every region of Scotland. And for that, we need to analyse what are our strengths, and we’ve heard a lot about what we need to do there and reach there, and what I’m going to say is nothing new, because each speaker has summarised one part of the other of it.
99.8% significantly are SMEs in Scotland. These are less than 250 employing companies, but they represent 44.4% of the employment in the UK, and the larger 1% of that is left. So to do that, that’s our strength and asset.
Universities, commercialisation, we’ve been hearing about, but it’s the transition gap from early stage to scale up, and clusters and innovation district, which we heard in the first session. We have some examples of that here, GRID, AMIT, GCID, BioQuarter, Dundee Health Innovation, but the growth capital which is coming with that, so why is there a gap? Culture and chemistry, what do we need of that in our DNA? Do we have it? And do we really need a policy that enables us? Is there something that’s stifling us? And that’s where this session will think about, because I have with me my colleagues who are focussing on different aspects of it, so we’ve got an excellent panel, but we need collectively a resolve that we want to make it happen, and I think that’s where this session is there. We need that ambition that dares and not just to catch up, but to lead, because we do have the ingredients that could do that.
And in that spirit, I invite all of you to reimagine what is possible within our realm, where policy meets the purpose that we are driving towards. Capital meets courage, criteria of culture, chemistry, and ambition meets action. Let’s build an innovation nation, region by region, with boldness, patience, and collective will, because we would need patience both within ourselves and in our capital, and from our investors, not drip feeding.
