Digitizing Scotland: Building a Scottish Digital Supercluster
Canada's 'Superclusters' offer a powerful model for Scotland to emulate to massively grow the Scottish tech sector.
The primary purpose and reference model for Digital Scotland is Canada’s “Digital Supercluster“.
Canada has made extensive use of Michael Porter’s cluster model to underpin their economic development strategies, a focus on building industry sector collaborations that pool resources and encourage shared innovation that grows the success for all the participating members.
Canada has built on and advanced this approach through the launch of a series of “Superclusters“, concentrating large scale funding into keynote growth industries such as AI, Ocean Technology and Next Generation Manufacturing.
Scottish Digital Nation
Headlined by DigitalNation.scot the goal of Digital Scotland is to repeat this approach for Scotland’s ambition to become a world leading digital nation, to grow our technology sector accordingly and furthermore grow adoption of technology by all organizations and sectors, so that there is a general accelerated growth of the economy produced from their success.
Although Canada’s Superclusters program are regional in focus, the Digital Supercluster actually offers an R&D agenda that is ideal for defining a Digital Economy strategy for the whole country, described in detail in their Capacity Building strategy.
The Digital Supercluster identifies an R&D framework ideal for chartering a network intended to develop Canada’s digital economy, including:
- Leverage work-integrated learning platforms;
- Develop diverse talent through relevant certification, work experience, education and training;
- Develop industry-relevant secondary, post-secondary and/or post-graduate expertise in digital innovation;
- Leverage access to Canada’s pool of scientific, technical, engineering expertise and capabilities;
- Encourage and enable senior-level digital and business development talent to work and develop skills in Canada;
- Support workforce transformation for industries facing digitization and automation, including re-skilling of Canadians;
- Use online or technology-based methods to reach potential talent, both to encourage them to pursue a career in tech and to train relevant skills; and,
- Develop best practices of diversity and inclusion that enable organizations to be more inclusive of participation by women and other under represented groups.
From Gaming to the Blockchain Scotland has a number of tech sub-sectors populated with very promising startups that offer global growth potential but aren’t yet working at the scale required to achieve that. These types of innovation programs offer the structure the government can employ to create a national platform for reaching that scale that the whole industry can benefit from.
