We move on to item 2. To create a round table atmosphere, I will, with the committee's agreement, invite the participants in this item to join us round the table. That will make the discussion less of a formal, them-and-us evidence-taking session. Are members agreed?
I welcome to the meeting Carol Craig, who is sitting between Mike Watson and Murdo Fraser and is the chief executive of the recently established Centre for Confidence and Well-being; Professor Sara Carter, who is from the Hunter centre for entrepreneurship at the University of Strathclyde; and Agnes Samuel, who is the chief executive of the Glasgow Opportunities enterprise trust. This open debate will focus on entrepreneurship, attitudes and confidence in Scotland to give us some of the bigger picture and background with regard to the promotion of business growth.
Does that also apply to members?
I am sure that it does not.
It might be an idea for Carol Craig to start things off by giving us some background about why the new Centre for Confidence and Well-being was thought to be necessary in Scotland and how it relates to entrepreneurship.
I had worked in training and development in Scotland for about 15 years and had become increasingly aware of how important the confidence agenda was for organisations. More people who felt confident and could take the initiative were needed in the workforce, and there needed to be more emphasis on entrepreneurship and so on. From working in Scotland, I was aware that there were cultural barriers to people putting their head above the parapet and pushing themselves forward. That is why I wrote my book, in which I brought together the evidence that was available. Some of that evidence was anecdotal, some was theoretical and some took a historical view, but the book very much chimed with people's experiences. Many people read it and said that they could identify Scotland from it. People from abroad read it and said that they, too, could identify Scotland from it, but could not see America or England in it. In that sense, the book has been validated.
I invite Sara Carter to tell us a bit about what the Hunter centre for entrepreneurship is doing.
The Hunter centre for entrepreneurship was started at the University of Strathclyde about seven or eight years ago. Its work was considerably enhanced by a very generous donation from Mr Tom Hunter, who gave the university £5 million to help us in our work of stimulating enterprise. He did not want us to do that just within the university curriculum and among students in the business faculty; he wanted us to spread the message of entrepreneurship, to investigate ways in which we could help the Scottish population to become more entrepreneurial and to develop world-class research and publications in entrepreneurship.
I ask Agnes Samuel to tell us about Glasgow Opportunities enterprise trust and her wider role in promoting enterprise among women.
I have not done much on promoting enterprise among women recently; Sara Carter has done more on that than I have.
I will kick off with a question that is predominantly for Carol Craig, although the other witnesses might want to answer it, too. Historically, Scotland was one of the most enterprising countries in the world. We exported entrepreneurs across the globe and, to a significant extent, the British empire was built on Scots in Canada and the far east. There was home-grown as well as overseas entrepreneurial activity. If we look back 100 years to the late 19th century, Scotland probably had the highest gross domestic product per capita in the world. What has gone wrong?
To some extent, I cover that in my book. There are two points in Scottish history at which there was some kind of turning point, the first of which was at the end of the 19th century. Scotland had been highly entrepreneurial and, in many ways, its economy was very successful. However, there were incredibly high levels of poverty—the levels in Scotland were much higher than those in England. That was partly because of the pattern of home ownership. People lived in tenement buildings in properties that they had not bought, and rents for what was inferior accommodation were quite high.
That is my thesis on the subject. Murdo Fraser is right: given Scotland's past, it is extraordinary that we find ourselves in the position today of having an indifferent business birth rate.
Before I call Christine May and then Susan Deacon, I remind members that I want to keep the discussion flowing as much as possible.
Okay. On the collective versus the individual, perhaps we should think about whether there is a way of turning our belief in the collective into a means of supporting individuals as part of the collective whole.
If I may, I will take the last point first. A number of economic specialists have given evidence to the committee, and I will not reprise their evidence. As we are talking about culture, I prefer to restrict my comments to that subject. Carol Craig alluded to the fact that we need to celebrate entrepreneurs more in Scotland. The points that she made about our collective view of entrepreneurs resonate with me.
If I may, I will return to Carol Craig's assessment of some of the key turning points in Scottish history. For what it is worth, what she said broadly resonates with my own view of the situation. The way in which she explored the issues in her book is helpful.
There is now far more scrutiny of the enterprise networks and they are far more accountable. That is both a good thing, because we should look after public money, and a bad thing, because we seem to have entered a period in which the enterprise networks are reluctant to take risks because they are audited constantly. I consider myself to be an entrepreneur in my business, but I find that the vocabulary of audit and compliance—that is a word that I hate—is taking over from a vocabulary that is about helping people to set up and grow businesses.
If we did not have a Parliament and someone like me came forward and said that there was an issue about attitudes and confidence, people would say, "That's a load of rubbish. All that we need is a Parliament. If we get X, Y and Z, all that will change." We have seen enough of devolved powers to know that the situation is a bit more complicated than that.
I echo Agnes Samuel's point: the main thing that would make a huge difference is for us to break out of the conformity culture, which is about standardisation and auditing. I have done a lot of work with schools and I am aware that the inspection regime is unhelpful in that it aims to standardise practices. People are at their most confident when they are being themselves. The more we try to get people to comply with other people's standards, the more we undermine confidence. Freeing up organisations is a major issue.
Sticking with the question about the impact that the creation of the Parliament has had, there is a huge question about the role that we politicians have in all this. Even at this early stage in the discussion, I share the views that have been expressed and absolutely agree with the analysis of the conformity culture. I have to say that it is extremely prevalent in the body politic in Scotland—I could give numerous examples of it in the way in which Parliament, the Executive and political parties work. The 129 people who have been elected to this institution should be thinking not only about what everyone else should be doing but about what we should be doing. Our witnesses might not want to leap in with both feet and talk about that at this point in the discussion, but I think that it is an issue that this committee has to be brave enough and bold enough to address head on.
Those are interesting points. I take Sara Carter's point about needing to improve the image of entrepreneurs—I think that a lot of people still think of Del Boy at a market stall when they hear that word, and we have to move on from that image.
We will take questions from some other members and then return to those points.
I was taken with a lot of the arguments that Carol Craig advanced in her book, some of which she has referred to today.
And he is absorbed straight back into the fold.
That is right. Basically, the messages are "Don't try to be different" and "You won't make that mistake again, will you?" That is the attitude, and it seems to me to predate Thatcherism and to underscore the idea that people should not be willing to go out on a limb, but that is what one has to do if one wants to become an entrepreneur.
So many questions—I will respond to the last one first.
I should plug the fact that the cross-party group in the Scottish Parliament on the Scottish economy is bringing "Dragons' Den" to the Parliament in September. That should be quite interesting.
I was interested in what Carol Craig said about her group—people who came from various backgrounds, got involved in the conference that she mentioned, but said that they would have been extremely restricted if they had done the work as part of their day jobs. It seems to me that Scotland lacks risk takers. Many Scottish institutions such as banks or insurance companies are not prepared to take risks. However, in America—although not on the continent—their counterparts are prepared to take risks.
May I put in a good word for the banks?
I should say that I used to be a banker, so in a way I am criticising myself.
That is all right. We have to remember that the banks are businesses, just like any other business. I have just come back from talking about the business angel network Local Investment Networking Company Scotland—LINC Scotland—in Kosovo. I found the situation terribly interesting, because the banks there do not lend—they do not have enough reserves to lend. In Scotland, we have worked hard at developing a sophisticated enterprise support network for people, because there are vast areas of market failure. We should ensure that we do not go backwards with the network and that we encourage as many businesses as possible, either at start-up or at growth level, to take advice and help, because it has been proved that if they do that, survival levels are much greater.
I have followed the discussion about risk with a huge amount of interest. Given that most artists take risks every day, that the best artists never conform, and that most artists are entrepreneurs by default, what input ought there to be from the arts and culture side into the business growth side of this committee's work?
Is that a question for Carol Craig?
It is, potentially.
I think that you are right. Part of the reason why the Centre for Confidence and Well-being is generating so much interest is that its agenda goes across the board. Much of what we do is about self-expression, so it is relevant to entrepreneurship and to the arts and culture. Many people say that successful economies with good levels of entrepreneurship also have heavy investment in the arts and good expression, because in many ways they feed one another. Our agenda is a general one.
How might we effect a change? The comments by Malcolm Gladwell, author of “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference", were relevant. He says that although we tend to think that the world is slow and unchanging and that people are immune to change, people change all the time. Just think about fashion: people change what they wear, their diet, their words and so on quite a lot, but they do not tend to be influenced in a top-down way. They do not tend to be told what to do by politicians and bosses. In fact, they resist that and are much more likely to do things as a result of their friends or family doing things.
And they turn that into an epidemic.
Absolutely. Some of the well-being and happiness statistics are quite challenging and some of the American positive psychologists are saying the same. If we are serious about this, why do we give young people careers information that says, "If you are a lawyer, you will earn X and this is the career progression." Why not tell them what the happiness quotient is for the various professions and that lawyers are miserable and commit suicide more often—that comes from American data; I do not know what the British data are—and that they are more likely to get divorced, or leave their profession? The legal profession is held up as being quite attractive but the people who do it do not feel very happy. Why do we not tell people that? Why do we not give our young people access to that information? People who run their own businesses are happier; that is a major reason for encouraging people to do it.
It is not all bad news if lawyers are committing suicide.
This is a stimulating and fascinating discussion. However, I wonder whether there is not also some confusion. It seems to me that there is too much equalisation of entrepreneurial behaviour with business. For me, entrepreneurial behaviour is to do with innovation, being different, and doing things differently; one can do that even working in public administration or in a bank, although it might be more difficult. However, I know people who have behaved in a highly entrepreneurial way in international organisations.
I might be about to take a more cynical approach to the debate about confidence. Is there clear and validated evidence that lack of confidence in Scotland and in Scots in particular compromises our business growth, which is what our inquiry is about?
There was one piece in the GEM study on fear of failure and making mistakes and how that inhibits people from setting up businesses. The rate was something like 10 per cent higher in Scotland than in other similar small nations. It seems that fear of failure is a bigger issue in Scotland than it is in other places.
I would like to add two things to that. Carol Craig made the point that leaving the country liberates you, in a way. We see the reverse effect happening for our immigrants, particularly English in-migrants. In-migrants to Scotland from other parts of the UK have much higher rates of entrepreneurship—perhaps they, too, have been liberated by moving away from their home regions and coming to set up in business here. They are far more entrepreneurial even than immigrants from other cultures, which is to do with confidence and liberation.
That is also one of my hobby-horses. We never seem to have a nice, quiet period when things that work are allowed to work. We are always being reformed in some way or other, usually by smart young men. It does not always work, because they do not seem to realise that for every one thing that you do—this is true of politicians—many other things come piling in behind it that you never thought of.
We will do so.
I want to return to people getting away from their roots to be successful. I have a question for Dr Michalski. From your experience, is there any evidence of people being more successful when they have removed themselves from the city, town or region of their birth and all their family ties in those places? I remember that when I went to London from Ireland, I no longer had to think about what my mother, brothers, sisters and friends thought because they would not know what I was doing. Moving away is challenging, but it is also liberating, so I am curious to know about any evidence on that.
I am not an expert on behavioural sciences and therefore cannot say whether people who leave the country are more successful than they would have been had they stayed. My experience is that the more dynamic people leave a country if it provides too many constraints.
When we talk about confidence, it is easy to think about self-esteem, but optimism is another aspect of confidence. Optimism probably crosses sectors in Scotland, and there is a good reason for its doing so. Like Ireland, Scotland has exported many people to other parts of the world. We tend to think of the Scottish clearances, but actually it was the most optimistic and adventurous who left. That was bound to have an impact on Scottish culture, which is probably more pessimistic as a result. Our most optimistic people were continually creamed off. A growing body of evidence shows that whether a person thinks optimistically has huge implications for their educational success, health and whether they will set up in business. We are sitting in a wealthy country that has some of the worst health outcomes in the western world, so perhaps we must start to think about whether our culture is unduly pessimistic, because things can be done about that. Apparently, people in Portugal are thinking about whether Portugal's culture is unduly pessimistic, because they believe that there are high levels of pessimism there; young people are being trained in schools to think more optimistically. Scotland might want to consider that, as we have extraordinary figures for depression and low life expectancy.
We should not think only about the clearances—emigration in the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th century must have drained Scotland of many dynamic people.
Yes. That to some extent takes us back to the question that Michael Matheson asked.
I want to pursue that point because I find your analysis very interesting. Throughout the late 19th century until the late 20th century, Scotland had a high level of immigration from Ireland. If we were exporting our most optimistic people, surely we were also importing optimistic people at the same time—not just from Ireland, but from Italy, Lithuania and elsewhere. Would the situation not balance itself out?
I am not an expert, but I think that the people who came from Ireland to Scotland were probably quite poor, whereas many of the Scots who left Scotland were quite highly skilled and were already existing at a much higher level than the Irish who came in.
Could not a distinction be drawn between what we might call voluntary and involuntary emigration? Much emigration from Ireland to Scotland was involuntary and people were pushed out by poverty, whereas a lot of the emigration from Scotland might have been opportunity driven—especially in the 20th century, when people could get £10 passages to Australia. I wish that I had taken one of those.
Some of the stuff that Sara Carter has in her global entrepreneurship monitor knocks that on the head. The point is made that levels of entrepreneurship in relatively poor countries are quite high, partly because of desperation. We generalise at our peril.
Chris Ballance has a question, after which I will need to wind up the discussion.
I want to get back to something that Carol Craig touched on a couple of times. You have talked here and elsewhere about the need to develop happiness measurements—for want of a better term—rather than using GDP as an indicator of success. How do you see such measurements developing in Scotland?
There is a worldwide interest in that idea and it is happening among a variety of people around the world. There was one opportunity when Scotland could have been used as the test country for developing a national index, and I talked to some of the people who were interested in doing that.
Do you think that there is an opportunity for the committee, in this inquiry, to pursue that?
Yes.
Another point that has come up elsewhere in our inquiry, which came out of the evidence that we received from Professor Donald MacRae, is the relative size of the public sector in Scotland. As we know, it is substantially greater than the relative size of the public sector in the UK as a whole. If many more people here than elsewhere work in the public sector, that might reduce the potential pool of entrepreneurs. To what extent do you think that that is a factor?
I am sure that it is a factor. As will be the case in most matters, there will not just one or two, but a range of factors, so there might be something in what you suggest. If people have quite comfortable lives, they might want just to work in the public sector and not risk setting up businesses.
Certain recommendations or proposals may come out of the inquiry. I hesitate to ask what your top three recommendations would be, because that would be restrictive, and we acknowledge what you state in your written evidence, for which we are grateful. However, what would be the biggies, in terms of what the Scottish Parliament or the Scottish Executive could do to start to improve things?
What I will say goes against everything that the cultural analysts have said about Scottish culture being quite weak. I think that Scottish culture and Scottish institutions are very strong and that it is difficult for people not to be sucked into them. For example, the probationer's programme in education should be a huge success; however, I have spent quite a lot of time with probationers and what they say—particularly those who work in the secondary school sector—is that it is difficult not to get sucked into pretty traditional ways of doing things. We find that time and again.
As Susan Deacon said, we perhaps need to start with the grip that the party hierarchies hold over Parliament. The situation here is similar to that which you described in the education sector. The situation here is even worse than in Westminster.
In conjunction with Parliament—I would love to think that committee members will also participate—the Centre for Confidence and Well-being is running a big programme called the vanguard programme to consider how we can create a more positive, confident and optimistic culture of well-being in Scotland. The programme will be international, but with a big Scottish focus and it will promote leading-edge thinking. Many parliamentarians need to participate in the programme, because it will provide Scotland with a huge opportunity to be at the leading edge of the debate. I doubt that any other country will put together a similar programme comprising leading-edge thinkers and positive psychologists such as Richard Layard. Such an event is right for Scotland, given the big developments that are currently taking place here. Things are happening especially in the social sciences, which were first created in the streets around here many centuries ago.
I would love the committee to find a way to do something about the audit and compliance culture in the networks. However, I do not know whether that will be possible, given that the same culture exists in big business and everywhere else. That kind of culture instils a lack of risk taking in people who help entrepreneurs and small businesses, and it turns small businesses off.
I would like the committee to pursue three issues. First, in all the written submissions to the inquiry that I downloaded from the internet, I saw not one reference to gender, despite the fact that we know from the GEM report that countries with high business start-up rates also have high rates of women starting up in business. I would hate that population to be overlooked.
Excellent. I thank all three witnesses for their helpful contributions. They are welcome to stay to listen to our next set of witnesses.
Meeting suspended.
On resuming—
I welcome the students from Berwickshire High School, who will give us a presentation. We will then ask them questions. That will be followed by a similar presentation from All Saints school in Glasgow. Is Cameron MacAllister the chairman of the company?
No.
Who is the chairman or the managing director? They are not at the table. Who is the lead person at the table?
We are a democracy, so we are all doing the presentation.
Excellent. Lead off, please.
Good afternoon. I am the sales director. We are thingamybob incorporated. This is our programme.
Hi, I am the secretary. As you can see from the slides, our company has a flat structure, as that allows easy communication among all the members. People were appointed to positions that took advantage of their skills so that we could maximise the potential of the company.
Hi, I am the finance director. The first thing that our company had to do was to think of a name. We wanted it to reflect what our company was about and cover all the products that we would sell. We decided on thingamybob incorporated, or THinc for short. We next had to decide what to sell. As the name suggests, we have sold a wide range of thingamybobs. Our mission statement is to provide excellent-quality original products and to provide the best customer service possible.
Hi, I am the operations director. We decided to handmake our products, as we thought that that would give us more flexibility and would be cheaper. Our most successful products were the hats and the tea lights. Most of the products were made by particular members of the group to make use of their skills. However, when it came to Christmas, the cards were very popular so the whole group had to mass produce them.
In order to generate as much cash as possible, we diversified into offering rugby and football strips. We offered more than 200 rugby and football strips, as well as balls, kicking tees and other merchandise. We had a wide range of prices, which allowed us to target the largest market possible. We also offered a name and numbering service for the strips if requested.
Our target market was the parents, teachers and pupils of our high school. We think that we did not do enough research when we decided what products to sell. That is an area that we think we could have improved on. For publicity purposes, we took out advertisements in the school magazine. If we had had more time, we would have distributed a brochure that showed all the rugby and football strips that were on sale. Our sales events were parent consultation evenings and the Christmas concert.
Like every company, we came across problems. Our first major problem was that it took us a long time to set up our bank account, which lost us buying opportunities to make new products. We also lacked confidence when we were selling, but we had gained confidence by the end of the project. People came unprepared to the parents evenings, due to a lack of awareness of the company, so we offered a buy now, pay later option, which was deemed very successful.
As Cosmo Blake said, banking was a problem. Initially, we set up the wrong account, due to a communication error. However, as soon as we realised that that had happened we told the bank, which sorted out the problem quickly. We made sales of about £290, which resulted in a profit of around £90. I think that our company was a success, because everyone in the company had fun, we made a profit and we were able to give our shareholders a return of about 75 per cent.
We learned a lot from our time with the company. Communication was strong throughout the year, because we held weekly meetings. Product quality was also important and we always endeavoured to produce goods of as high a quality as possible. Customer relations are important for any company and we were no different. At one point, we had to absorb the profits from our rugby strip after it took longer to arrive than expected and we always tried to keep our customers as happy as possible. Teamwork became stronger as the year went on, as we got to know one another better and learned one another's strengths and weaknesses.
Thank you very much for a very professional presentation. I will kick off by asking each of you whether, before you started the exercise, you had planned to become an entrepreneur on leaving school. Have any of you decided during the exercise that you might like to set up your own business one day?
I think that I will go into the business world—I am doing accountancy and economics at university—but I do not think that I will start up my own business.
Why not?
I am not brave enough. That might change, but I doubt that I will set up a business.
As a result of the Young Enterprise Scotland project, I have become much more interested in the business world. I might go into business, but I have not made a decision about that.
I do not think that I will start my own business. A lot of hard work is involved and setting up a company is quite stressful. I do not think that I could deal with the stress.
I do not think that I will start a business, either, but I learned a lot about how businesses work and what people who run them have to do. I am more interested in the sciences than I am in businesses.
The project was good fun, but I do not think that I will set up my own business.
Do you want to do something riskier and become an MSP?
There is great job satisfaction.
Anna Peers said that she was interested in the sciences. I do not know whether the other witnesses are interested in science and I would be interested in hearing from the two young people who have not spoken. I recently visited a company that was set up by someone who left university with a PhD and then in their mid-40s produced a television that is the size of a thumbnail. They were able to do that because they studied sciences, but fewer and fewer people study sciences at university. I would be interested in hearing why someone who thinks that they will study science does not think that that might lead her into one of the new types of industry—for example, in information technology, physics or chemistry.
I am mostly interested in biology and biochemistry and I think that it would be difficult to set up a business in those fields. I would like to carry out research into diseases.
First of all, congratulations on your excellent results. I wish that my shares had the return that your shares have had. Even if none of you wants to be an entrepreneur as a result of your experience, would you say that you are at least a bit more sympathetic now towards what people in business have to go through?
Definitely.
I would like to ask each of you in turn to tell us about the most important thing that you learned. One of your slides detailed what you learned, but I am interested in what you found most beneficial individually.
I learned how to work as part a team. We were a strong unit together and all our skills worked amazingly because we are all so different. I have learned how to appreciate the importance of individuals.
I do not know the most important thing that I have learned—a lot of small things make up one big thing. I have learned lots, but I cannot really explain it in a word. As Christine Trotter said, everyone has worked together and we had to learn how everyone else works and incorporate that into a business.
I would say the same. Team work is a big part of the experience; I would say that that is probably the biggest thing.
I would say something similar. Basically, we had to learn to deal with other people. At times, you have to be very tactful—everyone is different, so you have to learn how to treat other people differently but still keep everyone happy.
Working as a team was quite a big thing, but so was communication. I found that it was important to keep regular communication between people in the company. That is why we had a flat structure, so that information could be passed through easily and quickly.
Did you have a choice about who was in the group, or was it just a matter of six or eight people being selected and told, "Right, get on with it"? Are you the original members of the group or did the membership change?
I am not an original member. I joined the school in August, so I joined on at the end. The rest are original members, I think.
At the start of our school year, everyone could apply for Young Enterprise Scotland by filling in a form and giving it to the school. Then we all got put into a company. Whoever wanted to do that could do it, but some people left because they left the school and one person left because, when we voted on who was to be managing director, he was not chosen for the big job.
Did you find that initial blending of personalities difficult when you were getting used to one another?
Yes. Most of us were friends already, so we were used to how everyone else thinks, but it was slightly more difficult because we were interacting in a way that was to do not simply with friendship, but with a purpose and with wanting to do well. That made the experience a bit more strained or stressful.
I have a factual question first of all—I apologise if I have blinked and missed this, but what year are you all in?
Sixth year.
How long have you been doing the project?
Since June or July last year, but we started properly only in August.
One reason for my asking that is that I recently attended a presentation in my constituency by your equivalents at Portobello High School, where a similar exercise to yours has done rather well in various competitions across Scotland. Some of the practical points that those pupils made to me were about the time element involved and particularly about marrying that with the stage that you are at with your core academic studies. Would you like to comment on that? There is obviously a big time commitment involved in the project. Would you do it again if you had your time over, or has it been a much bigger commitment than you expected it to be? Do you think that your age and stage in life was the optimal time to do such a project, or might it have been better to do it a couple of years earlier, when your academic workload was less but your life experience would also have been less? Could you give us a feel for your views on those issues?
Sixth year is probably a good year for this sort of exercise. If we had been any younger, we would probably have ended up arguing with one another and we would not have got anything done. By sixth year, we have matured enough to be able to communicate happily with one another and to get things done.
Our company was quite lucky, because we started to wind down after Christmas. As a result, when our prelims and exams came up, we had finished most of the work. It did not pose any difficulties for our revision and schoolwork. If I had the chance to do it again, I definitely would.
Was the time commitment what you expected it to be?
No. It was a lot heavier.
A bit like being an MSP, then.
It took Anna Peers three hours to knit every hat that we sold, and cutting out tiny bits of paper took for ever. We all had to pull together to make the project work.
I was interested by your response to Alex Neil's question whether any of you planned to be entrepreneurs or to set up a business when you left school. Even though none of you intends to set up your own business, do you think that you could still be entrepreneurial, no matter what area of work you entered? Do you make any distinction between being an entrepreneur and running a business?
The exercise has taught me skills that I will definitely use. I am a lot more confident now and am willing to take ideas to people and to try out things that I possibly would not have tried out before. I do not know about becoming an entrepreneur, but I would certainly use aspects of that activity.
Some of the skills that you mentioned are associated with entrepreneurs, regardless of their area of work. I simply wondered whether there is a distinction between running a business and being an entrepreneur.
There are probably two key words to our inquiry: risk and confidence. I am surprised to see that, in the slide headed "Problems", you have highlighted "Lack of confidence". None of you sounds as if you lack confidence. Cosmo, at what stage of the exercise was there a lack of confidence? Did certain individuals lack confidence or was there a collective lack of confidence, so that you all thought, "Oh, we'll never get this done; we'll never make this work"?
When we first started, we were not very confident, especially when we worked with people or when we sold things. We did not interact that well and we were quite stressed when we were making things to deadlines. However, we gained more confidence when we started to sell a lot of products, work with lots of people and meet a lot of deadlines. I think that everyone has benefited from the enterprise and is more confident than they were at the beginning.
I have another question, but would any of the other witnesses like to comment on the confidence angle and particularly on whether you are more confident at the end of the exercise than you were at the start?
Giving presentations, particularly the final presentation and the one that we have given this afternoon, and talking to people have helped to make us more confident about how well our company did.
That links with my second question. Risk is partly about having an idea and thinking that you might be able to take it forward, but not wanting to fall flat on your face. I am generalising, but we are finding that that is something of a Scottish trait. Christine Trotter said that she did not think that she could run her own business because she would find it too stressful. Cannot stress be a motivator as well? Can it motivate people to see through to conclusion something that they might otherwise find difficult? Was that one of the lessons of the exercise?
Yes. When we were doing a presentation, I talked to an entrepreneur who said that he got four hours' sleep a night. I would not be able to live on four hours' sleep. The exercise was great for building up our confidence and enabling us to do entrepreneurial activities. I might go into business later on in life, but not now, because life is stressful now and I need a lot of beauty sleep.
I find that answer encouraging. We would not expect you suddenly to leave school and start a business. You might go through college or university and gain other experiences and, at some stage, feel that you could start a business—not necessarily on your own but as part of a group. I hope that your experience of the project leads you to believe that that is more possible than you had imagined before.
Even if you have decided at this stage that you would not set up your own business, on the basis of your experience would you be more inclined to pursue your future career in the private sector or the public sector and what are the primary reasons for your choice? I would like a response from each of you in turn and I hope that my question is not too indiscreet.
I would say the private sector. Each sector has its advantages and disadvantages. The private sector would probably be better, because in that sector people have a lot more control over their companies and all the profits go to the companies.
So on balance you would choose the private sector.
Yes.
Overall, I would probably choose the private sector too. For one thing, the money tends to be better, which would appeal to me. Also, people in the private sector often have more freedom and, as Cosmo Blake said, a bit more control over how they do things, which would probably suit me.
I do not have a clue; I have not thought about it.
You are obviously going into the public sector then.
I have not thought about the question in much detail. I would say the public sector, because the private sector seems to be geared more towards making money. If I were running my own business, it would have something to do with biology. I would be more interested in learning how things work than making money out of them.
I go along with what Anna Peers said. The public sector is the best one to go into. There is a lot of work involved in it, but I think that it is better than the private sector.
That is just about the right proportion.
Neil Henry said that one of the reasons why he would find it difficult to set up in business is that it needs a lot of bravery. On the other hand, Anna Peers said that it was great fun. Why does a person need to be brave to start a business, of whatever size?
I ask Susan Deacon to ask her question now so that the witnesses can answer the questions together.
My question is a bit unfair, so the witnesses should feel free not to answer it. I make the stunning observation that there are two girls and three boys in the team—or, to be more accurate, two young women and three young men. Given that you are such a representative sample of the nation as a whole, do you have any observations or experience to share with us about whether males and females within the group behaved differently?
When we decided what products to make, there were big differences. The rugby and football strip ideas came predominantly from the males and the craft ideas came predominantly from the females.
But the boss, the managing director, is a female.
That is true.
What about Chris Ballance's question?
A person setting up a business has to be brave, because there is a threat of failure. There is a good chance that the business will fail, and a person has to be brave to face that. However, I saw the whole thing as fun—if we failed, we failed, but it was fun.
I congratulate you on your presentation and the way in which you answered the questions, which was much appreciated.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I am the managing director of GlassCo.
I am the operations director.
I am the marketing director.
Beside me is Charlene Carrick, who is our information and communications technology director.
Why GlassCo? Guess what? Our main products were made of glass. Our range included vases, mirrors and shot glasses.
We set up with 13 directors, but some were less than committed to their tasks and three members were asked to resign.
Our main aims were high customer satisfaction and to be different from other YES companies. We wanted to give our best and to increase our personal skills. We hoped to achieve goods of high quality, reasonable profits and a sizeable donation to our charity.
We launched our company by having a staff coffee morning at which we displayed our products and sold shares. So keen were the staff to invest in our company that our share flotation was oversubscribed.
L is for learning. After an enthusiastic start, the group became less motivated, but deadlines had to be met and most of us rallied. Effective communication across the departments ensured that correct products and quantities were produced on time. We also built up excellent relationships with customers, shareholders and suppliers. We learned about costs, selling prices and profits. We learned how to set short-term goals and work within timescales. We learned to keep focused after a disastrous shopping trip that resulted in a bag of unsellable rubbish.
A is for action. We identified our customer base: pupils, parents, staff and external links. We considered the four Ps of marketing: product, price, place and promotion. We prepared a questionnaire to help us to identify customer needs. We took on board the responses and considered our products with regard to price, design and packaging.
The production of our unique products involved a process that we called the magnificent seven. It involved masking, drawing, cutting, sand-blasting, unmasking, cleaning and delivering.
Nominating a charity was simple. A representative from the Scottish Motor Neurone Disease Association kindled our interest and the flame still burns. By selling SMNDA Christmas cards, we also raised awareness of the disease.
SS is for sales and successes. Our mirrors and vases were available in a variety of sizes and each bore our innovative designs. We supplemented our range to attract younger customers. Unfortunately, though, we did not consider breakages, which contributed to a disappointing 14 per cent profit.
At that point we were upset, but selling St Valentine's day products restored our smiles. We used our suppliers to get the best deals and offered 12 different products, each with our distinctive GlassCo packaging. In one hour, we delivered 160 items throughout the school and made an impressive £300 profit.
For Christmas we produced de luxe toiletry baskets and colourful baskets of sweets, which were snapped up.
C is for challenges. In September we faced our first challenge: to develop and sell an aeroplane at the Young Enterprise Scotland master-class. We also developed our business acumen, communication skills, initiative and creative talents.
Our main challenge was the trade fair. Our group started two months late and spent a long time achieving a professional look for our stall. Due to a lack of staff commitment we did not meet production deadlines, so we had insufficient stock to meet demand. However, we overcame our time and staffing problems to achieve excellent sales.
We faced other difficulties too, and we learned from them. Here are GlassCo's top three tips. First, check invoices carefully. We negotiated a reduction of £130 from one supplier. Secondly, seize opportunities. We were given a chance to work in partnership with Authentic Stained Glass Ltd to produce our unique products. Thirdly, research all costs before pricing products. We learned too late the main features of glass: it scratches and it smashes.
O is for outcomes. To ensure that we achieved our number 1 aim, we undertook a customer satisfaction survey. More than 90 per cent of customers were happy with our service and believed that our products were good value, of good quality and attractive.
The number crunchers inform us of a staggering 50 per cent gross profit on St Valentine's day products. Our overall net profit was £470, which allowed us to declare a 10 per cent interim dividend and donate £350 to the SMNDA.
Our trade fair stall, our products and our launch were all unique to GlassCo. We learned a lot together, with one goal. We are now skilled designers and can package 10 roses in two minutes. I thank our shareholders, customers and everyone who supported us, and I thank you for listening to us today.
Thank you. That was much appreciated.
Why did you want to become involved in the project? Your other classmates must have had the opportunity, but why did you come forward and get involved rather than doing something else? What motivated you?
Our school was successful in Young Enterprise Scotland in previous years and we had always been aware of that. We all thought that it would be great fun to get involved and experience some of the success that previous pupils had.
A lot of our friends were in last year's group and they had massive success. They stormed the Glasgow awards, so we wanted to be a part of it.
We also wanted to find out about the responsibilities and workload of running a business.
You learned some hard lessons. You have been honest enough to outline some mistakes that you made, but you learned from them. Do any of you think that you might carry your experience in the project into your later life and feel confident enough—not the day after leaving school, but later—to become involved in running a business?
The experience has definitely opened our eyes to the world of business. It was scary, but most of us realise what a great reward it has been and want to carry that on.
I have a short follow-up question. You said that your predecessors stormed the awards. How important to your participation was the fact that you were in a competition?
I am not sure about other people, but I can be quite competitive. That was a big aspect. We were representing our school on quite a lot of matters, which is a big thing in our school.
Thank you for coming to give evidence. What are the most important lessons that you learned from your project about business and what is needed to go into business?
People need to go in with their eyes open. We did not do that—we thought that the project would be fun and games. In our school, one period of 50 minutes a week was timetabled for the project. We thought that we would work on it just in period 3 on Mondays and at Friday lunch times, but it was not like that. We had many late nights and we were not really prepared for that.
We were at the school later than the head teacher—we were there until 9 pm most nights.
Did you meet any entrepreneurs while doing the project? Did you receive any particularly good advice from anybody that helped to make the project a success?
We had an adviser—Andy Kelly—who has many businesses and is a real entrepreneur. He was a great help and we would not have had half our success without him. He offered great advice throughout the year.
Has meeting him encouraged you to think about becoming entrepreneurs?
Yes.
When we met obstacles, we would sit and think, "What will we do?", but Andy Kelly was always there—he was the light at the end of the tunnel.
Did the way in which he helped you make you think that business was something that you could do in future, because he was encouraging?
Yes.
I thought of my next question after the previous panel left. I wish that I had asked that group the question, but I will ask you it. Does any of you have family experience of running a business? For example, do your parents run their own businesses?
No.
No.
No.
No.
I will ask a question that I asked the previous panel. What was the single most important thing that each of you took from the project?
More patience. I had to learn that everybody is different and that I could not expect everybody to work in the way that I work. We had to make our products ourselves, so we had to rely on everybody's individual skills and talents. The process had seven parts and everyone was assigned to a different part, rather than having mass production in which everybody undertook the first step then the second step and so on, which would never have worked.
Overall, I gained time management and organisation skills. I am not the most organised of people, but I realise that those skills are essential to running a business.
Teamwork was most important. To do everything that needs to be done, the team is needed to help. To finish our glasswork, we needed the whole team.
Like Claire, I learned time management and teamwork skills.
Claire Shanks said that she found the experience scary. Was it all scarier than you thought that it would be? Has finding it scary put you off going back into business in future? Was it scarier for you because you were the boss, or was it just as bad for everybody else?
I cannot speak for anybody else, but I felt that everybody looked to me for guidance, which scared me. However, the experience has definitely not put me off.
Do any others want to say something about how scary the project was, or did you just shelter behind your dynamic managing director?
There are no comments.
The issue of gender was raised with the previous group. Were any boys involved in your company, or were they the members who were forced to resign?
John Leese, who is sitting behind us, was the only boy who was involved.
We started with 13 girls and one boy.
Was there any particular reason for that?
Those were just the people who volunteered.
You mentioned some of the difficulties that you experienced in running the company. Before setting it up, did you get enough advice on the dos and don'ts of running a business and the difficulties that there can be with products?
Mrs Collins, who is our link teacher, has been running enterprise in school for about five years now. She has come across a large number of problems running enterprise companies in those five years and was quite knowledgeable about the issues, but we also learned from our mistakes, which was part of the process.
At the beginning, you were a group of 12 or 14—I cannot remember how many you said—although some left. How did you decide on the company's name and that it would sell glass products, rather than do what the other group did? Who decided? Was it a joint decision or did only certain people have input into it?
Our initial idea was that we would sell women's handbags—probably because the majority of the group were ladies—but, on the September weekend, we went on a shopping trip and got the stuff that I have with me. We came back with no bags at all, which was due to a lack of organisation. We were unfocused, disorganised and did not have a clue what we were going for; we just went out and started buying things.
How important was the internet to you? Did you use it a lot?
We used it a lot in the initial stages of finding a product.
As there are no other questions, I thank you for a good presentation and wish you all the best.
I welcome Bill Fleming, who is on the agenda as chair of Glasgow Opportunities enterprise trust, but has many other interests: he has been a successful entrepreneur for a number of years and is, I think, still a member of the board of the Entrepreneurial Exchange.
Yes, I am.
I invite you to kick off, after which we will ask you questions.
I have been asked to speak about innovation and risk taking. If there is time, I will speak to a number of different topics, which all involve innovation and risk taking in different ways. I will talk first about the innovation counselling and advisory service Scotland—ICASS—and then talk briefly about the business gateway, how we deliver it and how we ought to deliver it. I will talk about business growth and I will tell you about the greatest potential for business growth in Scotland, which we steadfastly ignore. If anyone is still awake after all that, I will say a few words about reform of the bankruptcy laws and, finally, local enterprise investment funds, which are innovative and slightly risky.
That brings me to the low-hanging fruit, or the best opportunity for business growth in Scotland: businesses that already exist. The committee discussed a number of matters before I arrived here, so I do not know what members spoke about. There is a great deal of assistance available for business start-ups. There could be more, and it could be better, but it does exist. We know that there is a policy to focus on potentially high-growth businesses. I am a venture capitalist—in a small way—and I know many other venture capitalists. Members should bear in mind the fact that we invest our own money, not taxpayers' money. Our success rate is one in 10, and we think that that is pretty good. How anyone who is not involved in venture capital thinks they can choose potential high-growth businesses is quite beyond me, because we cannot do it.
The bits of the legislation that relate to personal insolvency became law on 1 April 2004. Great: that was a terrific result. However, it became law in England and Wales but not in Scotland. Between October 1998 and April 2004, we got a Scottish Parliament, which decided—for whatever reason—that reform of bankruptcy laws was not important enough to be put on the agenda, so we had a campaign that started in Scotland and which has been successful everywhere but Scotland. I say to members that I know the matter is now on the agenda, but I ask you to do whatever you can to speed up the process to reform bankruptcy laws.
Thank you very much indeed; you have given us a lot of food for thought. I would appreciate your sending us the paper, which we will circulate to the committee. It is clear that access to funds is a major issue for future business growth.
I will make that distinction in the future.
Before I invite questions from members, I will pursue two issues, the first of which is patents and the service that is provided through ICASS. In a typical year, 17 per cent of all patents that are registered in the United Kingdom are from Scotland, but only 5 per cent are developed in Scotland. What do we need to do to close that gap, assuming that it is important that we do so?
That suggestion goes further than what I would propose, but I am all in favour of it because I am a great admirer of the PSYBT and how it does things. As well as encouraging people to set up in business, it holds their hands and looks after them after they have done that, which we often fail to do. Not just the anecdotal evidence, but the statistical evidence shows that the PSYBT's success rate is much higher than anyone else's success rate and is much higher in Scotland than elsewhere in the UK. I endorse that model.
I very much enjoyed your opening comments. I want to draw on your experience at the coalface of providing advice to businesses to explore further what you think are the major barriers to business growth. You mentioned that businesses' attitude to risk was cause for concern. I am thinking of other aspects, such as the cost base of doing business, red tape, infrastructure and the availability of skilled labour. Which of those are the major factors that contribute to the lack of business growth?
They all contribute, but I do not think that any of them is a major factor. If a business wants to succeed and grow, it will overcome those obstacles, which are common to every business. A business operator in this country faces the same red tape as all their competitors; the same obstacles and barriers lie in everyone's path. As someone who has recent experience of a business in France, I think that we are a damned sight better off than most of our cousins in Europe are, as far as business infrastructure, bureaucracy and red tape are concerned. I am not too bothered about those factors.
You said that it is "down to us", rather than the Government, to change the culture. Given that the committee considers public policy, what role is there for Government in helping to change the culture?
I could have expressed myself better. Everybody, even the business community, has a habit of passing the buck and asking, "What can I do?" The point that I try to keep making to the business community is that we can do a hell of a lot and it does not take many of us to make changes. The Government and politicians who are not in Government can make important changes by acknowledging the importance of a healthy economy and by doing what they can to promote a change in the culture of Scotland. However, I do not know precisely how they would go about doing that—I hope that the committee does.
That is what we are trying to find out.
I enjoyed Mr Fleming's contribution very much. It was very engaging; you talked about business in a way that was very different from the dull and dry approach of many people who traditionally discuss the subject. Your contribution was certainly not dull and dry. In answer to Murdo Fraser, you said that people will overcome the barriers to growth, whatever those barriers are. How do you reconcile that with your comment—which we have heard others make—that most businesses fail? If people are determined to overcome the barriers, why do so many businesses fail? The problem is not just to do with business start-up; it is to do with the long life of businesses, too.
The business failure rate in Scotland is no different—give or take a few percentage points—from the rate anywhere else in the world; indeed, our failure rate is a bit better than that of some countries. Members have probably heard this many times before, but we can draw a parallel with the United States of America, which has just as high a rate of business failure as Scotland has, but has more businesses per head of population. We wonder how those two facts can square with each other. If our failure rate is 95 per cent and the USA's failure rate is also 95 per cent, how come the USA has more businesses per 100,000 people than we do? The answer is that having more failures means that there are more successes. That comes down to the fact that the bankruptcy laws in the US bankruptcy code are designed to protect businesses, whereas our bankruptcy laws are designed to protect creditors. There is an entirely different mindset. I say in passing that our bankruptcy laws completely fail to protect creditors. The only people whom our bankruptcy laws protect—I am sorry for going on about bankruptcy—are the insolvency practitioners.
Do not worry—so have I. However, I have another question, which relates to the submission from Glasgow Opportunities. Paragraph 2.4 is on growing the stock of medium-sized businesses, which is one of the issues that we will examine. It states:
May I call upon Agnes Samuel? She is our chief executive.
I am happy for her to return to the table to comment.
Agnes Samuel can come back to the table.
As I am the person who wrote the submission, it is only fair that I should take the heat.
Yes. In a sense, it answers the question. At the end of the paragraph, you ask:
Yes, I think so. At the delivery end of this business, we frequently have to put new strategies into operation. This strategy profoundly worries my team who deal with businesses on the ground, because our experience is that we can have a tremendous impact when we work with the sort of ordinary businesses that most people do not think are terribly exciting.
Is there not a more fundamental issue, which is related to the track record of any public sector or private sector organisation that tries to pick winners? As Bill Fleming said, a typical success rate for venture capitalists is 10 per cent. If public sector agencies have a similar success rate, 90 per cent will not be winners in any case. I suspect that Tom Farmer would not have been identified as a winner if he had gone to some agencies.
Not the first time—that is the key.
Exactly. Is that the fundamental problem?
It is. As always, I agree with what the chairman of Glasgow Opportunities said. One cannot pick winners, but it is not the public sector's role to pick winners and it is not particularly good at doing so.
We have other agenda items to deal with and I am conscious of the time, but Christine May has a question.
I should probably remind members that I am a board member of Community Enterprise in Strathclyde, which helps small businesses and microbusinesses—I apologise for not doing so earlier.
We must start with education if we want to encourage an entrepreneurial spirit. Given that we are talking about a fairly long-term objective, we can also encourage existing businesses to change their mindset, as we have said, and to be more ambitious, which would have a trickle-down effect. Very large corporations often encourage their divisions to be entrepreneurial in their thinking and to regard divisions, or the components of the global conglomerate, as businesses on their own. They have discovered that when people are given their head in that way and have the appropriate resources and support, they can achieve remarkable results.
I want to follow up on a specific matter. I advise the Government of a major European Union country on the reform of research and innovation policy. During my work for that Government, I have come across literature that explains why the initial innovator—the inventor—is the man who is least capable of growing the business. The thesis is that such men need coaching for perhaps two years and then a different qualification is required that will bring into the business the capacity to industrialise and commercialise and the capacity to finance more than only the start-up. After another three to five years, the question is whether a very different capacity is needed to take the enterprise from being a very small to a medium-sized enterprise. What is your experience in Scotland in that regard? You have said that you assist and accompany enterprises here.
Again, the fact that someone can make widgets does not mean that they are qualified to run a business that makes widgets. I return to what is said anecdotally, which is that inventors or innovators are obsessed—no, "obsessed" is too strong a word; they are conscious of the fact that they have invented something. As a result, they attribute a very high value to whatever it is they have invented, whether or not that value is justified.
Do you agree with the statement that 80 per cent of the start-ups that fail do so for personal reasons? Do they fail because the inventor is afraid of losing his baby, or because he cannot understand that having 100 per cent of nothing is worse than having a smaller percentage—let us say 3 per cent—of something? I am thinking of Bill Gates, who owns 3 per cent of Microsoft and yet is the richest man in the world.
You sound like me. Yes, I agree completely.
I have two questions. First, if you were in a Scottish Government that had money to spend on promoting business and money to give to enterprise companies, would you focus on large, medium or small-sized businesses? Would you distribute the money through enterprise companies or use it in different ways, such as on business training or by marrying up inventors and entrepreneurs? What would your priorities be?
By and large, large companies can look after themselves. I understand the thinking that says, "Large companies employ large numbers of people and we should attract them to Scotland and help them. We should ensure that the infrastructure is in place so that the Scottish economic environment is attractive to them." That is a separate argument, however. Such support is something that only a Government can and ought to do.
I realise that I should have declared an interest as a partner in a small business at the start of my questioning. I now put that interest on the record.
Creditors should look after themselves. There are far too many circumstances—not so much in business, but in relation to personal sequestrations—in which people have, for example, bought fitted kitchens, double glazing or carpets and been persuaded to sign credit agreements that they are unable to honour, and as a consequence they suffer bankruptcy. The lenders in those circumstances should be taught a lesson. They should lend only to people who are able to repay loans, and bankruptcy should not be a weapon in their armoury.
What about the case that we talked about at lunch time of a businessperson who is made bankrupt purely because other businesses that they have supplied in good faith themselves go bankrupt?
I was born and brought up in Hamilton, where Rolls-Royce employed possibly thousands of people in a big factory. Probably another 5,000 people in and around Hamilton were employed by subcontractors who supplied that factory. Rolls-Royce went bust in 1973—I am not sure exactly when. It was bailed out by the Government, and the current incarnation of Rolls-Royce was funded by taxpayers' money to protect all its jobs, but nobody protected the jobs in all the subcontractor companies, many of which went bankrupt and many of which never recovered and got back into business.
My question is a supplementary to Wolfgang Michalski's question. Some time ago, I was speaking to a venture capitalist who was enthusiastic about intermediary technology institutes. He said that there is no shortage of academic research, innovation or invention in Scotland that can go to the marketplace, but the issue is having the skills to get them there. He said that venture capitalists can play a role in linking people with those skills to the ideas, but he was having problems with attracting people with those skills from outside Scotland to base themselves here and take forward ideas and research and make successful companies out of them. Have you encountered that problem? How could we solve it?
It is a problem, but I do not see it as an issue that we have to do anything in particular about. When venture capitalists invest in business they tend to want to look after their money and to ensure that the management team has all the skills that are needed to make the business successful.
That completes the questioning. It was a very interesting session. Thank you. I look forward to seeing you during the passage of any bill on bankruptcy, when we will take evidence from you.
If my understanding is correct, the idea is to visit some places that are comparable with Scotland either in an holistic sense or in terms of an issue, and to compare those places so that we can learn from them and benchmark policies for Scotland.
Thank you. Because of the time, I will boil that down to the choices that we have. In our previous discussion, we talked about comparing Scotland with regions that are more successful than the wider state, which have similar powers to Scotland and which are of a similar size. I think that Wolfgang Michalski is saying that, in Europe, Piedmont and Lombardy in Italy and Catalonia in Spain are the three possibilities. If we want to consider policy, we can probably learn most from Finland. For example, we could consider the way in which its shipbuilding industry was turned around. If we want to pick a fight with the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body, we could include Monterrey and Phoenix in our list of options.
Will we ask Wolfgang Michalski to suggest city regions?
Yes.
I know that Bremen and Hamburg were mentioned earlier. Bremen is similar to Glasgow in size, standard of living and local gross domestic product. There might be benefit in considering Bremen; equally, there might be other examples to choose from.
It might be helpful to take a step back just for a second at some point after today, once we have had time to reflect on and digest what we have discussed in this lengthy meeting. It would be helpful to keep revisiting the question of what we are trying to achieve in our inquiry, given that it could still go in many different directions. Obviously, our choice of visits should be linked back to what we want to achieve.
That is why we need a paper to provide us with a basis for discussion, so that we can be clear about what we are trying to get out of the comparator study visits. We will visit places from which we can learn rather than just go on a visit for the sake of it. As Wolfgang Michalski said, our visits will be a learning journey.
I will not be available for about 10 days from next Friday.
That is okay. We have enough material from our earlier discussion with you to be able to prepare a paper, although we may need some additional suggestions from you on the city regions.
I look forward to seeing a paper that is based on the principles that Wolfgang Michalski outlined. The major strands are quite disparate, but I welcome that.
Having worked on a written paper for the committee for the past four weeks, I believe that it will be an advantage not to have the visits too early, so that we can properly identify the issues and questions that we want to discuss. We are still in a process of advancing our thinking on what the bottlenecks or barriers are to economic dynamism and success in Scotland.
Also, there remains the question of the difficult political choice that I mentioned at lunch: whether you should spread your resources thinly across Scotland, or opt for a strategy of building clusters with spillover effects. Under such a strategy, more money would be put into specific regions, such as the whole Glasgow-Edinburgh area, and the benefits of redynamising those regions would spill over to other parts of the country. I think that you have to have some more discussion about that.
Do we agree to prepare a paper, with input from Wolfgang Michalski, along the lines suggested?
I should mention that Wolfgang thinks that Scotland should have an oil fund, but we will not put that in the paper.
I wonder where he got that idea from.
Previous
Subordinate LegislationNext
Broadcasting Reviews