25 Apr 2025
How do we seize the opportunity for Scotland to be an innovation-driven economy, creating new, high-quality jobs for our people?
That’s what we’ll be exploring at the Scotland: creating the jobs of tomorrow conference on 6 June, hosted by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown and organised by think-tank Our Scottish Future, in association with Glasgow Chamber of Commerce and the University of Glasgow.
Scotland has the ingredients for success, but success isn’t guaranteed. It won’t happen without the right policy and investment choices.
We have so much to build on. We’ve got clusters of brilliant and innovative companies in fields as diverse as space satellites, life sciences and precision engineering. Our universities are among the best in the world, increasingly working closely with industry to develop ideas and bring them to market. We have a highly-skilled workforce, both at graduate level and at the level of technical skills developed at college and in the workforce.
But somehow we are less than the sum of our parts. Innovation-led growth surges ahead in the ‘golden triangle’ of London, Oxford and Cambridge, and even more so in California and Massachusetts. Imagine what Scotland would be like if we achieved those levels of growth.
This conference will be exploring how Scotland can achieve that.
Let’s not focus on the obstacles. Business in Scotland has not always felt that government understands enterprise, and universities and colleges are under great funding pressures.
Let’s focus instead the opportunities and how to seize these. That’ll be very much the theme of the conference.
One of the biggest is from the global investment community. Even while governments are continually managing scarce public resources, there are vast quantities of private investment looking for a productive home. In volatile geopolitical times, Scotland in the UK looks like a highly investible proposition.
And government, at UK and Scottish levels, can be a catalyst for attracting private investment.
We have some major global investors speaking at the conference, all of whom are committed to making their investments build a better world. Dame Kate Bingham of SV Health Investors has unique experience of how government and enterprise can respond to an unprecedented challenge, as chair of the UK Covid Vaccine Task Force. Kasim Kutay leads the investment foundation of the world’s most valuable pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk. Saul Klein is one of the UK’s leading venture capital investors, and is also advising the UK Government on how to mobilise private investment - he’ll talk about how Scotland can be part of a NW Europe ‘super-cluster’ of innovative industries.
We will hear from UK Research and Innovation about how government can leverage private investment in innovation.
You’ll have the opportunity to hear from and meet these and other investors and innovators.
You can book the attend the conference here: Scotland: Creating the Jobs of Tomorrow Tickets, Fri, Jun 6, 2025 at 10:00 AM | Eventbrite.
