Techscaler Programme 2022-2024: early evaluation - main report

Appendix E: Techscaler Programme context and rationale

Introduction

This appendix sets the scene for the strategic context and rationale for the development of the Techscaler Programme, its fit within the wider ecosystem, and the programme’s continuing strategic rationale.

Strategic drivers

STER

The Techscaler Programme’s origins stem from the recommendations within the STER (August 2020) authored by Professor Mark Logan, former Chief Operating Officer at Skyscanner. Subsequently, Professor Mark Logan was appointed as Chief Entrepreneur to act as a senior adviser to the programme to deliver the remaining recommendations of STER. Professor Mark Logan left this role in 2024 and Ana Stewart was appointed the Scottish Government’s new Chief Entrepreneur in April 2025.

The purpose of the STER was to undertake an independent review of Scotland’s technology ecosystem and provide recommendations to stimulate and accelerate the maturity of Scotland’s ‘technology ecosystem’. Throughout the STER, the ‘technology ecosystem’ refers to the ecosystem in its widest sense, that supports and nurtures technology businesses in Scotland, from the early startup phase through to fully scaled maturity. The STER further asserts that the output of this ecosystem should be a stream of startups that reach sustained profitability, including a significant proportion that do so at scale.

To this end, the key output of the STER was 34 recommendations to help increase the rate of profitable, scaled tech businesses, and reduce the average time taken for viable individual startups to reach scale — the thinking is that building startups is teachable, and that being playbook-literate can help communicate and build ideas better, and faster.

STER further emphasised the importance of implementing the recommendations in their entirety — not least as the interventions identified are mutually reinforcing, and in order to evolve the ecosystem at pace and achieve transformational change.

The Scottish Government accepted all 34 of STER’s recommendations and subsequently announced a multi-million-pound national implementation programme overseen by Professor Mark Logan and supported by an Advisory Board composed of some of Scotland’s most successful technology entrepreneurs and co-chaired by the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and the Economy.

STER’s centrepiece recommendation was that Scotland should seek the Creation of a Tech-Scaler National Backbone “whose capabilities build upon and extend beyond traditional incubation programmes. Tech-Scalers combine best practice in incubation, intensive founder education in Internet Economy best practice, ecosystem social infrastructure, and integrated funding. Access to all services would be provided both physically and in a fully-virtualised form, enabling country-wide participation in Scotland’s high-technology economy.” STER recommended that these tech-scalers are initially created in six cities nationwide (for example, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee, Stirling, and Inverness).

Current state of the technology ecosystem

STER describes the ecosystem model as a funnel, see Figure E.1.

Source: STER, August 2020.

There is a relatively large number of potential founders considering starting a tech company, or in the very earliest stages of running a startup, then proceeding through various stages of scaling until companies reach ‘unicorn’ size or larger (that is, £1 billion valuation and hundreds or thousands of employees).

The recommendations in STER seek to optimise the rate at which large scaleup and unicorns are achieved, as well as to create other successful companies of scale along the way.

STER’s key observation was that technology ecosystems exist in either the ‘post-tipping point’ (the preferred state) or ‘pre-tipping point’ state.

While Scotland’s technology ecosystem is the strongest it has ever been, it remains in a pre-tipping point state. The ‘post-tipping point’ state is characterised by a critical mass of viable startups and scaleups which perpetuate several virtuous network effects and begin to spontaneously operate which makes the ecosystem anti-fragile, continually strengthening it without requirement for state intervention.

Some of these virtuous effects include:

• recycling of executive and technical talent from successful later stage companies into a critical mass of viable early-stage companies — significantly improving the experience level in those businesses and increasing the likelihood of them being successful. These businesses in turn recycle others into the ecosystem.
• external talent is attracted into the ecosystem — this leads to the creation of more startups and more successful businesses, and in turn attracts more talent and a virtuous cycle again establishes itself.
• investment firms start to pay greater attention to the ecosystem and spend more time within it — this brings more capital and expertise into the ecosystem, which leads to more and stronger businesses, again attracting more investors, entrepreneurs, and talent.

The STER asserted that Scotland has not yet passed the ‘pre-tipping point’ and is not yet benefiting from these virtuous effects. The review also suggested that the following types of interventions would be critical and could help boost Scotland to overcome this inertia and become internationally competitive.

The STER recommendations further comprised a mix of interventions that focus on:

• education — across all stages of the education system from school education onwards, including startup founder-team education in the Silicon Valley playbook, and interventions to increase the size of the overall talent pool accessing pathways into technology.
• social infrastructure/international market square — interventions to strengthen the social infrastructure, including those aimed at facilitating startup education, the learning and sharing of best practice, networking, peer-support and hiring.
• integrated ecosystem grant funding — interventions to better align public grant funding support to the specific needs of technology startups and those of the ecosystem as a whole.
• investment funding — interventions to address problem areas for Scottish startups looking to access venture funding, including a partnership approach between government and Scotland’s venture capital community to better support the flow of investment funding to worthy startups.

Techscaler has been largely, but not only, concerned with delivering certain aspects along the education system and creating the tech ecosystem infrastructure.

Education

The education funnel, as depicted in Figure E.2, begins with (1) nurturing foundational software skills at school level, followed by (2) significantly enhanced raw engineering skills and rudimentary business and leadership skills at university. After this are the educational needs of (3) early-stage and then (4) later stage startups, and beyond.

Source: STER, August 2020.

At these stages of the education funnel, STER noted that it is key to grow the base of people with skills in Internet Economy business operations, people leadership, technical leadership, and technology strategy development. It is at these stages, particularly Stage 3 and to a lesser extent Stage 4 where Techscaler has been designed to fill the gap and to provide the educational services needed to support the startup ecosystem where the STER concluded that there was a general lack of skills needed to scaleup companies at pace.

In addition to providing long-term, affordable, high-quality incubation space, STER recommended that the network of tech-scalers should provide free, high-quality foundational startup education in the following areas:

• Silicon Valley business models — for example, network effects, platforms, growth models and techniques, compounding growth mechanisms, and commercial models and techniques.
• Internet-Economy working practices — for example, lean startup techniques, speed of iteration, experimentation, and bottleneck constraint analysis.
• fundamentals of team and people management — for example, staff development, communications, performance management, and conflict management.
• fundamentals of funding models — for example, explanation of investment stages and terms, building relationships with venture capitalists, pitching skills, and alternatives to venture.
• basic operating hygiene, including legal compliance, Intellectual Property (IP) management and Human Resource (HR) sufficiency.

STER also recommended that targeted coaching and mentorship should be integrated into the overall programme design.

Infrastructure

The infrastructure requirements to support the technology ecosystem are depicted in Figure E.3.

Source: STER, August 2020.

STER recommended that these infrastructure elements should be available across all five stages of the ecosystem funnel.

Co-location and the market square elements were considered key to developing the desirable attributes of:

• a strong sense of identity and confidence — startups believe that they can be successful in their chosen location and that there is a peer-support network around them.
• a well-known place where ecosystem participants can meet, attend talks, share ideas, be efficiently introduced to prospective companies and future employees, and feel part of a thriving community.
• a place where investors can access multiple businesses easily — having a single meeting point where investors can assess several interesting candidates in one visit can be helpful.

The STER recommended that there was a strong case for the network of tech-scalers to deliver both physical and virtual infrastructure to support a development of a well functional technology ecosystem and support Scotland to reach the ‘tipping point’.

Post-COVID this recommendation may not be as clear cut.

Funding

The STER concluded that helping Scottish startups secure investment remains critically important, including at all stages of the company journey. From early-stage funding such as proof of concept, seed funding, and angel investment, to Series A, B, and C funding rounds that typically follow seed funding and angel investing (this provides investors the opportunity to invest cash in a growing company in exchange for equity or partial ownership).

Techscaler has sought to connect founders with fundraising opportunities, and specific initiatives such as the one-off Funding Accelerator (in partnership with Focused for Business), have been designed to help Scottish startups access early-stage funding. During year two delivery, Techscaler, in line with STER recommendations, introduced other joint initiatives to provide grant funding opportunities for tech startups and scaleups based in Scotland. This includes:

• Techscaler Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Small R&D Grant, offered in collaboration with Scottish Enterprise and South of Scotland Enterprise, was launched in September 2024. This grant scheme provided awards of between £5,000 and £50,000^[35] for tech startups and scaleups who have been mentored through Techscaler and has helped them introduce new products, processes, or services.
• Techscaler Kickstart grant scheme, offered in partnership with Highlands and Islands Enterprise — the grant scheme ran from September 2024 to March 2025, and offered grants of £5,000 to £10,000 to help tech founders and entrepreneurs develop their ideas for business applications.

STER: Towards the Tipping Point

Two years on from the publication of STER, the STER: Towards the Tipping Point (Scottish Government, November 2022) provided a brief examination of the technology ecosystem as Scotland and the rest of the world emerged from the COVID-19 global pandemic.

While the updated report highlighted some areas of progress made since 2020, it reasserted that Scotland is still in the “pre-tipping point” stage.

The report concluded that most of the progress made against STER objectives and recommendations (at that time) were within the education domain with a series of key interventions primarily focused on equipping secondary and to a lesser extent primary school teachers with the skills and training they needed to deliver high quality computer science education and providing the funding for the procurement of hardware, software, and teaching tools across Scotland’s school.

Underpinned by the Scottish Government's global capital investment plan (March 2021), STER’s investment recommendations targeted two particular investment challenges faced by Scotland’s tech startups.

These challenges relate to raising growth capital specifically at the early seed fund and Series A funding stages. Progress has included: the establishment of a new Series A fund, supported by the Scottish Government through the Scottish National Investment Bank (SNIB); work to develop a new £150 million fund for Scottish businesses in partnership with the British Business Bank (BBB); a new fund for female-founded companies in Scotland; and a strategic review of funding available to Scottish businesses.

While Techscaler had not yet officially launched at this time, the STER: Towards the Tipping Point report intimated that Techscaler would become the cornerstone of the technology ecosystem’s infrastructure and reaffirmed its importance in supporting the overall technology ecosystem past the tipping point.

Specifically, this report made the distinction between two elements of this infrastructure including physical and social elements and how Techscaler should drive these areas — and that physical infrastructure would be underpinned by the regional technology hubs which would offer colocation, collaboration, and educational space for tech startups across Scotland.

The report asserted that Scotland’s tech startups were generally lacking in startup skills, known as ‘the Silicon Valley playbook’ and that developing this capacity would be a key part of Techscaler programme (access to cutting edge education on the key principles of successfully scaling up internet economy businesses to any and all tech startups in Scotland that want it). In tandem with the physical infrastructure, it noted that Techscaler would actively support the development of the social infrastructure or the ecosystem’s ‘market square’ — meaning physical, in-person or online spaces in which communities, founders and entrepreneurs can come together, to learn from each other while enjoying meet-ups, events, and other activities.

Continuing context for Techscaler Programme delivery

The continuing context for Techscaler has been more recently distilled through:

• the Scottish Government Scotland’s National Strategy for Economic Transformation (NSET) (March 2022).
• the Scottish Government, National Innovation Strategy 2023 to 2033 (June 2023).
• the Scottish Government annual Programme for Government documents.
• The Pathways Report: A New Approach for Women in Entrepreneurship (February 2023) — an Independent Review Commissioned by the Scottish Government and undertaken by Ana Stewart and Professor Mark Logan, and in the Scottish Government response to The Pathways Report (June 2023).

NSET

First, NSET sets out Scottish Government’s vision to 2032 and actions to develop:

“A Wellbeing Economy: Thriving across economic, social and environmental dimensions” — that is, a focus on boosting economic performance (for example, productivity, innovation) and tackling structural economic inequalities.” Source: NSET, 2022

The NSET vision is set within the context of three ambitions — a fairer, wealthier, and greener Scotland, and five policy programmes, as summarised below:

• Entrepreneurial people and culture – Establish Scotland as a world-class entrepreneurial nation founded on a culture that encourages, promotes, and celebrates entrepreneurial activity in every sector of our economy.
• New market opportunities – Strengthen Scotland’s position in new markets and industries, generating new, well-paid jobs from a just transition to net zero.
• Productive businesses and regions – Make Scotland’s businesses, industries, regions, communities, and public services more productive and innovative.
• Skilled workforce – Ensure that people have the skills they need at every stage of life to have rewarding careers and meet the demands of an ever-changing economy and society, and that employers invest in the skilled employees they need to grow their businesses.
• A fairer and more equal society – Reorient our economy towards wellbeing and fair work, to deliver higher rates of employment and wage growth, to significantly reduce structural poverty, particularly child poverty, and improve health, cultural and social outcomes for disadvantaged families and communities.

NSET recognises the important role that high growth startups and scaleups play in creating skilled jobs, paying higher wages, and driving increased productivity and innovation across the economy. Entrepreneurial thinking and mindset are seen as critical in this regard to improve services, increase efficiency, as well as to develop new products and services that can be exported internationally.

“Perhaps more than any other domain of the economy, it is in the creation of new companies, and the scaling up of successful companies, where data shows the greatest gap between current performance and Scotland’s potential….Scotland currently lags most OECD countries in indicators of entrepreneurial dynamism, with a total rate of early-stage Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) of 7.3% in 2019, compared with 10.5% in England, and 12.4% in Ireland. Scotland would need another 60,000 businesses to match the equivalent rate for England. Scotland like other countries also suffers from a gender gap with regards to business startup rates with the TEA for women, at 5.3%, consistently below that of men, which was 9.3% in 2020. The TEA for ethnic minorities, at 12.3%, is significantly higher than that of the general population, showing the value of diversity to the Scottish economy.” Source: NSET, 2022

NSET sets out actions across several fronts to support its ambition that entrepreneurship is encouraged, supported, and celebrated, and where Scotland is recognised as one of the best countries in the world to start and grow a business. This spans continued efforts to:

• dramatically increase the total number of new businesses created in Scotland — of all sizes and across all sectors.
• achieve a step change in the percentage of Scottish startups and existing mid-sized businesses that grow to scale.
• build entrepreneurial mindsets right across the economy — in startups, scaleups, SMEs, large corporates, and government.

“Scotland has taken the first steps towards the creation of a network of tech-scalers, as recommended in the STER. These tech-scalers will form a national network of institutions dedicated to the intensive schooling of tech entrepreneurs in the best available leadership, commercial and scaling techniques and will, for the first time, provide our best tech startups with a truly world-class developmental environment.” Source: NSET, 2022

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) is an Annual Population Survey (APS) undertaken in several participant countries globally. Headline results from the Scotland 2023-2024 report indicate that:

• the Total early-stage Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) Rate returned a small increase from 8.8% in 2022 to 9.1% in 2023 — overall, TEA rates in Scotland remain broadly similar in the last three years since COVID-19.
• major developments in 2023 are that minority ethnic (Non-White) TEA reached a new high at 24.1% while female TEA also hit a significant new record level of 8.6% in 2023, from 7.2% in 2022.
• female TEA in Scotland appears to have all but closed the gap with male TEA which has itself been steadily declining since 2021 from 11.4% to 10.5% in 2022, to 9.8% in 2023. Effectively, in 2023, the difference between male TEA and female TEA is not statistically significant, suggesting that statistical parity between male and female TEA was attained in Scotland in 2023 — a landmark moment of significant consequence for female entrepreneurship discourse and policy in this country.
• regional differences and other contextual issues remain key concerns in female entrepreneurship in Scotland. While Southern Scotland returns a female TEA at 8% is higher than male TEA (6.5%), with the Highlands and Islands, West Central, and Eastern Scotland returning relative gender parity in TEA, male TEA in Northern Eastern Scotland at 18.6% was virtually double the female TEA of 9.6%.
• a panel of entrepreneurship experts judged the context for entrepreneurship in Scotland to be generally ‘mediocre’, with the level of support for women’s entrepreneurship worryingly evaluated as less than satisfactory, scoring under three out of ten.

National Innovation Strategy

The National Innovation Strategy 2023 to 2033 sets out the following vision for Scotland.

“Our vision is for Scotland to rank alongside Denmark, Norway, and Finland in being recognised as one of the most innovative small countries in the world.“ Source: National Innovation Strategy 2023 to 2033

Four broad innovation themes are identified as areas of focus — this includes supporting more SMEs to innovate to increase their productivity — increasing in the number of businesses who are ‘innovation-active’. The strategy also recognises the important role that the ecosystem of businesses, organisations, universities, and talent (people) play in innovation and as key drivers of economic growth and success.

Programme for Government

The first reference to Techscaler was in the Scottish Government Programme for Government 2022-2023 — as part of government efforts to transform the economy by helping build a more productive, internationally competitive economy, growing prosperity for all of Scotland’s people and places.

“This work will include boosting entrepreneurship by opening six tech-scalers across the country within the next 12 months, to provide ground-breaking support for tech founders to scale up their businesses and create new jobs across the country.”

Within the Programme for Government 2023-2024 Techscaler was identified as one of several critical activities to continue to help transform and grow Scotland’s economy in support of government’s ambitions around entrepreneurship and innovation, and to create and scale more successful and internationally competitive businesses.

“Increase our backing for the development of Scotland’s universities as entrepreneurial campuses and ensure that the new Techscaler network offers high quality education programmes to entrepreneurs.”

Techscaler contributed to the Scottish Government Growing the Economy priority within the Programme for Government 2024-2025. This document acknowledged that private and third-sector businesses, large and small alike, laid the foundations for future economic success and growth in Scotland — they helped to sustain communities, provide employment, and innovators and entrepreneurs could also help to deliver the solutions to transform productivity and tackle the climate emergency. In line with NSET, the 2024-2025 Programme for Government also highlighted the crucial role of entrepreneurs and innovators in ensuring Scotland’s economic future — both in terms of supporting Scotland’s ambition to become a startup nation and cementing Scotland’s international reputation for home grown innovation.

“This year we will maximise the impact of our £42 million Techscaler programme, Scotland’s national network of startup support — extending access for Scottish entrepreneurs to some of the world’s best start‑up development programmes. We will integrate the Techscaler’s with other centres of innovation, creating opportunities for Scottish companies to raise capital, learn from world leading peers, and access new markets.”

Pathways Review

As reflected in NSET, the under-representation of women in entrepreneurship was identified as the main driver of the Pathways Report.

“Despite more than half of Scotland’s population being female, currently one in five of Scotland’s entrepreneurs are women, while startups founded by women in Scotland receive only 2% of overall investment capital. This is despite copious evidence that the entrepreneurial and related capabilities of women are equal to those of men. This state of affairs represents both an enormous loss of talent from Scotland’s startup economy and a denial of opportunity on, literally, an industrial scale. At the same time, it also presents a compelling case for Scotland to leverage this untapped pool of talent to drive and grow the entrepreneurial economy.”

The Pathways Review identified five major root causes of female under-participation in entrepreneurship, namely that:

• relative to men, women were often more logistically constrained, making participation in entrepreneurship difficult — society commonly assigns the primary carer role and the home-manager role to women and then does not provide sufficient balancing support.
• women frequently have a sense of “not belonging” in entrepreneurship, which affects their confidence and self-belief — the lack of women founders in entrepreneurship establishes a vicious circle leading others to think that entrepreneurship is not for them.
• formally-defined pathways into entrepreneurship were unclear, while informal pathways and networks underserve women — developing an understanding of how to become involved in entrepreneurship and how to successfully move through its various stages largely relied on informal networks which were heavily orientated towards men.
• general education and normalisation of entrepreneurship as a valid career path was largely not present in the education system — this affected all demographics, but its impact was greater for women.
• women received far less investment than men at all stages of the entrepreneurial journey from venture capital firms and related sources — for example, of the companies that received external investment in 2022, 12% were female-led and 73% were male-led, and as noted above, over the past five years only 2% of institutional investment went to female-led businesses.

While the independent review was specifically commissioned to consider the under-participation of women in entrepreneurship, its recommendations to increase the participation level of women in the entrepreneurial economy to help increase Scotland’s entrepreneurial capacity and improve its economic performance, have much wider applicability. This is largely because the root-cause issues which affect the participation of women in entrepreneurship affect other under-represented groups (that, intersectionality — inequalities shape one another and are inseparable).

The Pathways Review presented 31 specific and directly actionable recommendations, under the themes of:

• bringing startup incubation, education, and support to where primary carers are.
• supporting under-represented founders through the Concept and Journey Funds.
• encouraging better representation during ‘selection events’ within the entrepreneurial journey.
• integrating entrepreneurial education within Scotland’s education system.
• establishing Scotland as a leading nation in Femtech.
• addressing the underlying sexism at the heart of under-participation.
• clarifying access pathways into entrepreneurship.
• establishing a comprehensive database for tracking progress towards full representation in entrepreneurship.

The Scottish Government, in its response to the Pathways Report, accepted the independent review findings, and efforts continue to implement its key recommendations to support greater diversity amongst entrepreneurs in Scotland. The 2024-2025 Programme for Government outlined the government’s commitment to investing £50 million over the lifetime of this Parliament to support more women into entrepreneurship.

CodeBase, via the Techscaler Programme, is one of several organisations who has signed up to the Pathways Pledge (a light touch, collaborative initiative where organisations implement their own actions, using the Pathways Report as the ‘manifesto’ for change). These actions are shared with other Pledgers and are tracked and reported over a 12-month period to help organisations consolidate their efforts to drive change through collective ownership.

Pledge 1: CodeBase committed to raising the participation rates of women founders in Techscaler, who have an early stage product in market and are looking to grow their business. To undertake this work, CodeBase appointed an internal lead to coordinate and prioritise this area of work across teams. Among other positive results, Techscaler reported that the programme has increased the number of women founders in Techscaler 2.6 fold from 184 to 475 members over the past year, representing 34.7% of total membership.

Pledge 2: CodeBase also committed to actively increasing the percentage of women mentors and facilitators in its network. They prioritised the onboarding of 28 women and non-binary mentors which increased the percentage from 23% to 31% in 2024. Techscaler also achieved an average of 50% women facilitators for their Techscaler education programmes in 2024. Source: CodeBase — Pathways Forward

The Tech Nation Report 2025: Unlocking the UK’s Growth Potential

Tech Nation is a UK network for tech entrepreneurs, and its 2025 report provides information regarding the status of the UK tech sector, barrier to growth and how to overcome these barriers to unlock the sector’s growth potential. Key messages include that:

• the UK tech sector has reached a combined market valuation of $1.2 trillion in 2025, cementing its place as the number one tech ecosystem in Europe.
• UK tech startups have raised more than $7 billion in venture capital investment in H1 2025, including the biggest first quarter fundraise of the past three years.
• UK founders said that access to capital, the tax environment, and availability of top talent are their biggest barriers to growth in the UK.
• to overcome these barriers, founders call for government intervention in funding markets, enhanced R&D tax credits to hire the best talent, digital infrastructure funding, and regulatory sandboxes to test new technologies.

Investing in Ambition — Scotland Risk Capital Market: Benchmark Analysis 2024

Scottish Enterprise has published a risk capital market report annually since 2003. The 2024 report highlights announced and unannounced equity investment rounds into high growth, private UK companies of any size, between 2014 and 2024.

“While much of the observed trends in Scotland in 2024 are encouraging and illustrate the attractiveness of Scottish investment opportunities, the market, in common with the rest of the UK, is not without challenges. Changes in investor risk-appetite have perpetuated the drift towards later stage opportunities, with early-stage below £10 million and new to equity investment being the most challenging areas. A further area of concern is the representation of women and other under-represented groups amongst investors, entrepreneurs, and founders.” Source: Scotland Risk Capital Market: Benchmark Analysis, 2024

Scottish Enterprise reported that in 2024 a total of £17.16 billion was raised across 5,359 deals across the UK, a reduction of 14% and 22% respectively in 2023. This was largely attributed to reduced market sentiment due to high interest rate, high inflation, lower valuations, and a sluggish exit market.

The position in Scotland was said to be more promising with £704 million raised in 2024, an increase of 19% from 2023. The total number of deals, however fell by 13% to 318. Strengths in the Scottish market were identified as:

• high quality research outputs from Scottish universities with £176 million raised from 52 spin-outs.
• an increase in investment value from all investor types in 2024, with venture capital and private equity the top investors.
• business angels and angel network are a strong feature of Scotland risk capital market, with Scotland ranking only behind London for these types of deals.

Techscaler’s fit within the wider ecosystem

The Scottish entrepreneurial ecosystem is complex and multifaceted, with a wide range of support programmes and organisations across public, private, and third sectors. The Scottish entrepreneurial ecosystem consists of:

• 13 coworking and lab spaces — physical workspaces that offer room for businesses.
• 51 entrepreneur support and networking organisations — connecting businesses with essential resources, opportunities, platforms, and networks.
• 27 entrepreneurial support programmes — supporting founders and founding teams in early-stage companies, nurturing entrepreneurial talent, and offering a dynamic and supportive environment to grow.
• 32 financial support organisations — offering growth investment to startups and early-stage companies.
• 23 incubators and accelerators — providing environments for entrepreneurs to cultivate ideas, connect and collaborate, and learn techniques for starting and scaling a sustainable company.
• 21 innovation centres — connecting businesses with academic knowledge, support, and resources.

Techscaler is one of the 27 entrepreneurial support programmes listed in the Scottish Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Guide — produced and updated by the High Growth Entrepreneurship team at Scottish Enterprise. The guide provides a snapshot of the breadth of organisations in Scotland that are there to support businesses.

The sheer number of organisations and programmes within the Scotland ecosystem would suggest there is a clutter landscape as well as the potential for duplication of effort and support.

Indeed, The Pathways Report (2023) found that the early-stage startup space is a cluttered environment, consisting of many organisations making it ‘confusing and often intimidating for entrepreneurs’ to navigate easily.

The Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Guide is presented at a high level which makes it more difficult to show the nuances between different forms of support based on the definitions used. In addition, some of the programmes could be considered ‘catch all’ to cover a broad base of companies and not positioned or targeted to address and alleviate some of the specific challenges facing Scotland’s tech companies.

There is also a perception that the Scottish entrepreneurial ecosystem is heavily focused on early-stage startups. For example, according to Scaling Up Scotland (March 2023):

“Early-stage investments are available from a broad range of sources both public and private. However, at the mid to later stages of a business’s growth, particularly where greater levels of investment are required, there are fewer options for accessing growth capital.”

Summary

At a high level STER was well positioned and considered the full breath of the ecosystem, with many valuable and interesting insights. However, the STER is now five years old and in the intervening period there have been changes to policy and external environment in which Techscaler is delivered. These changes need to be considered to help shape programme delivery over the remaining three years of the current contract.

The entrepreneurial ecosystem landscape in Scotland is crowded. However, Techscaler has sought to distinguish itself from other entrepreneurial support programmes — it has been designed to help founders/companies that have established a foundation and are looking to scale their operations and achieve significant growth. In the first two years of delivery Techscaler has sought to do this through implementation of a nationwide programme offering Scottish Government-funded support, access to world-class education, a peer-led community, and flexible workspaces, while also not taking any equity from its members.