Scotland now has a Chief Entrepreneur. As former COO of Skyscanner, you can’t deny that Mark Logan has the entrepreneurial credentials. The question is: can he make a meaningful difference?

To some extent, he’s already had an impact. His appointment came following his 2020 review of the Scottish technology ecosystem. In it, among other things, he called for the creation of a network of “tech scalers”, which claim to be “best practice in incubation, intensive founder education in Internet Economy best practice, ecosystem social infrastructure, and integrated funding.”

As this illuminating interview in the New Statesman shows, Logan is ambitious for Scotland (in a way that only someone who has built a billion dollar company and not worked in the public sector can be). But he is already struggling with plans to get computing science taught from the 1st year of secondary school with the same emphasis that is put on maths and physics: “We’re getting some stuff done in education, but it’s way too slow. It shouldn’t be this hard. I’m not seeing enough people throwing themselves onto the barbed wire of that task alongside me.”

From the same interview: “I have spent the last two years in this space, and it’s very hard to get things done because there’s no one owner. Let’s say I want to do something on the front line with teachers – there’s Education Scotland, there’s the SQA, there’s local authorities, the unions, the headteachers, and all of those groups together have to basically agree on doing something. Now that has frankly become the big excuse – ‘we’d love to do that, but we have to get those other people convinced’. Education has been, relatively speaking, a more difficult area in which to make progress.”

In The Times, Alex Massie picks up on his challenges and isn’t optimistic about his chances: “I fear that he is in the business of pushing water uphill on behalf of bosses who do not much care if he makes it to the top.” For Massie: “The problem is large because it is, at heart, one of culture. In general, this is not a dynamic country; it is certainly not one in which business success is esteemed.”

So can Logan, or anyone, impact culture, making Scotland more entrepreneurial?

Culture obviously changes. Even the language of “startups”, “scaleups” and “ecosystems” is relatively new. Ultimately, the success of Silicon Valley has allowed it to export its culture to the rest of the world, with each place giving it their own local twist.

Things have moved on, but I wonder if there’s a new way we could impact culture. For example, Ned Donavan and Anton Howes made the case for establishing a new order of chivalry, specifically designed to encourage invention and raise the status of being an innovator in the eyes of the public. Separately, Anton has also called for the creation of a new Great Exhibition. Any other ideas (genuine question)?

Another way of looking at the problem is through the institutions of government. Logan mentions Estonia as a “tiny country that’s producing a lot of unicorns”, who “have done exactly what I’m prescribing.” I’ve written before about what Whitehall can learn from Estonia, but the most fundamental lesson from Estonia is that a flourishing entrepreneurial ecosystem can be built from scratch.

In a way, starting from scratch, after the wreckage of Soviet occupation, was to Estonia’s advantage. As Logan’s diagnosis of Scotland’s sclerotic education system shows, a long-standing bureaucracy makes reform hard-going (to put it mildly). The same is true for England, which our numerous reports are testament to.

As an aside, one reason ARIA has such potential is because it’s specifically designed to be at a distance from bureaucracy. It’s also why we think (like Dominic Cummings, but don’t let that put you off) that it should fund Focused Research Organisations (FROs), which are low on bureaucracy because they are fully funded with a time-limited mandate.