The creation of Entrepreneurial Scotland could have a significant impact on Scotland’s video games and interactive industry.
This new organisation is the result of two bodies joining forces to help make Scotland’s business landscape better, stronger and catalyse new entrepreneurial growth.
Entrepreneurial Exchange and the Saltire Foundation are ‘coming together’ to create Entrepreneurial Scotland which will represent businesses with over 150,000 employees and over £17 billion in turnover.
The goal of the new combined group is to ‘join the dots’, building an environment in which the next generation of business leaders and businesses can flourish. Entrepreneurial Scotland will be a non-profit, non-partisan organisation with the Saltire Foundation as a charitable subsidiary.
The chair designate of Entrepreneurial Scotland, Chris van der Kuyl, said:
By combining our strengths, we build strategic linkage between the talent Saltire enables and the expertise our businesses need. Not only that, by building on Saltire’s global connectivity we will extend out the great work of GlobalScot in delivering strategic linkages for Scottish business.
Peter Lederer, the chairman of the Saltire Foundation added:
As a small nation Scotland needs to drive maximum efficiency from its resources to maximise economic return. Creating Entrepreneurial Scotland does just that.
Equally, to be clear, this new entity will seek to enable further partnership across the entrepreneurial sector to deliver on that principle.
Fames Scottish entrepreneur Sir Tom Hunter, outlined the value of the new organisation:
This move will enable an accelerated drive to build Scotland’s entrepreneurial community in a strategic, well thought out move that is for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs, an ethos that serves Scotland well.
Entrepreneurial Scotland will launch at the end of June 2014.
What does this mean for the games and interactive sector? It means there is a unified and expert body in Scotland, which has been specifically created to help new businesses. The fact that the current designated chair of the body is a business leader who started in the video games industry means that games are not starting at a disadvantage, or seen as an insular, irrelevant and inherently uninvestable…
It’s up to interactive community to engage with the investment community and prove that we are actually businesses.
One of the problems that small, young businesses have in Scotland, is that they can’t see past the language of entrepreneurship ideologies. An organisation like ES, needs to be really open about what is meant by phrases like ‘driving research that informs policy to support a more entrepreneurial Scotland’. and what it means in real terms for small businesses who have perhaps never considered angel investment.
Very true, Ed. Though I’d argue that small businesses have a responsibility to learn about the environment they’re in and figure out how they’re going to run as an actual business, so phrases like ‘exit strategy’ and ‘entrepreneurial’ aren’t treated with disdain or contempt…