REVIEW: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
http://www.insider.co.uk March 2020 INSIDER 35
and Universities Scotland recently
setting out a vision of how to establish
and harness the benefits of closer
partnerships.
Dr Siobhán Jordan, director of
Scottish-based agency Interface which
matches businesses to academic expertise,
says the value of de-risking early stage
concepts through links with universities
is important in providing confidence for
both businesses and investors.
“In sectors such as life and chemical
sciences, we have seen a growing number
of collaborations and these have secured
higher value funding in recent years,
thanks to initiatives such as Knowledge
Transfer Partnerships (KTP) where
graduates are embedded in businesses.
There is a strong link between skills and
research and development, and KTPs are
one way of allowing R&D to flourish and
ensure that the outcomes are embedded
into industry quickly,” she says.
Recent examples of business and
academia working together to unlock
commercial success have include a
partnership between Glasgow-based
Vanilla Blush, a medical lingerie business,
and the University of the Highlands
and Islands (UHI) for a study to
explore people’s experiences of support
garments following bowel surgery. The
collaboration led the company to develop
a hernia support belt now listed for
prescribing in England and Wales.
Although Scotland continues to
develop scientific innovations which
offer significant benefits to the world,
life sciences veteran Jim Reid says the
nation still fails to reap the full benefits
of its bright ideas. Reid, who is involved
in a raft of early stage companies and is
chairman and CEO of Glasgow-based
biotech Sistemic, believes the life sciences
sector is “generally in a good place”.
“But we still struggle to get
indigenous life sciences businesses to be
headquartered in Scotland rather than
taking the exit route and that is still a big
challenge,” he says.
Reid, who has been a key player in
the formation of numerous life sciences
companies, was involved in the sale
of University of Aberdeen spin-out
Haptogen to Wyeth one of the largest-
ever deals in the sector in Scotland. And
he believes funding hurdles continue to
hold back the potential for the sector to
build businesses of scale.
“We have good early stage funding
in Scotland with the angel community
very strong and the Scottish Investment
Bank a positive addition, but we still
struggle when you start looking at
raising £5m-£10m or more,” says Reid,
who is currently raising money for three
companies. “When you move up to that
level you need to go to London to access
funding and I don’t see a dramatic change
to that. A US biotech company is typically
dealing with 10 times the funding a
company here is, even though what we
do is very good. There are companies
in the sector here which are constantly
undercapitalised.”
But when Scots firms do look further
afield for funding, they find it. Paul
Scullion, a senior associate at law firm
Burness Paull says that the market for
VC and equity investment in growing
technology companies in Scotland has
been buoyant in the past year.
“Edinburgh alone attracted $200m
worth of new venture capital investment
in 2019, and LINC reports that its
members completed over 100 investment
deals in that time, the overwhelming
majority of which were in the tech sector.
We are seeing an increasing trend inLondon-based and international VCs
look north of the border for investment
opportunities, and in overseas tech
businesses looking to set up in Scotland,
recognising the talent and opportunity
which lies within the Scottish tech sector.”
Claudia Cavalluzzo, who heads
Converge – the company creation
programme for staff, students and
graduates of Scottish universities and
research institutes – says that Scotland
has often been left behind when it comes
to realising the benefits of its ground-COMMENT
Callum Sinclair
Partner and Head
of Technology,
Burness PaullW: burnesspaull.comThe currency of trust
New decade, new mantras (clichés?) in tech.
In the 2010s, it was “data is the new oil” – not
sure that one’s eco-friendly enough now...
In the 2020s, never mind crypto, “trust is the
new currency”. You may already have heard
this on repeat – possibly even from me.
In a similar column in this very publication
last year (which kicked off with a Black Mirror
reference, a personal favourite!), I talked
about the fundamental societal issues arising
from the widening chasm between the
capabilities of emerging technologies and
our ability, as a species, to regulate them
effectively.
So what has happened in the past year
since? Amongst other things:
t#"BOE.BSSJPUUDZCFSCSFBDIFTSFTVMUJOH
in largest proposed data regulatory fines in
history;
tOFXQSJWBDZ"*CBUUMFHSPVOETPQFOJOHVQ
around adoption of face recognition systems,
including by various UK police forces;
tJOUFSOBUJPOBMEJQMPNBUJDJODJEFOUTSFMBUJOH
to deployment of Huawei technologies in
our 5G infrastructure;
tTPDJBMNFEJBHJBOUTDPNJOHVOEFS
pressure to adopt controls to ensure
user transparency and regulate potential
social harms their technology may be
unintentionally creating.
What are we to take from this? Well,
while I suspect few would disagree with
the proposition that we now live in a trust
economy, it is clear that there is a big
difference between chanting the mantras
and actually living them.
Many businesses, from emerging tech
minnows to hyperscale “unicorns”, are still
failing to grasp the existential importance
of embedding trust and ethics by design in
every facet of their organisation. Those who
can do this will be the giants of the coming
decade.
This is a topic we will explore further
in our upcoming Burness Paull Tech & IP
Conference on 6 May 2020 in Edinburgh. If
you want to learn more and are interested
in coming along to share your views, please
contact [email protected].COP26 is a real opportunity
to support collaboration and
drive innovation in areas
where there are perhaps
gaps at the moment
Paul Winstanley, CENSIS