Building a New World At Scale: Innovation, Knowledge, and Skills

Building a New World At Scale: Innovation, Knowledge, and Skills

Re-building from the ground-up … we need root-and-branch reform of our digital world in order to build the future

Scotland is a great country. Full of smart people, and great cities. It is one of the most beautiful countries in the world. But it is struggling to truly transform itself into a world-leading digital economy. It might say that it leads in areas such as cybersecurity, but its struggles to show that it has the infrastructure to showcase truly innovative companies, and which could scale to become world-leaders. While London has over 216 companies involved in blockchain, for example, Scotland was recently identified as having just five (Wallet Services, Appii, Maidsafe, Kippitech, and Spiritus). Scotland’s innovation infrastructure just hopes that the next great thing will come along, and there’s not much building around areas of high innovation. To bring companies together as a general cluster is not the same as bringing some truly smart people together to work on a vision, and define how best to solve the problems.

People with great ideas from around the world must be supported to come to Scotland, as they will be surrounded by the ideas and knowledge that they need. Zug Valley is a perfect example of creating an environment for targeted innovation, and in creating the right environment for ever part of the economy to come together with a shared vision.

And while governments might push cybersecurity as a great thing, they often don’t understand what it is. For them it is catching the ‘bad guys’, but they miss the opportunities that it brings for building new economies and in improving the lives of their citizens. There are endless statistics on the bad side of cybersecurity, but little in how it can drive our economy.

Its public sector, generally, shows virtually no signs of matching itself to a 21st Century world, and where the citizen has virtually no meaningful integration with government and the public sector (apart from taxes and parking tickets, of course). And so a report commissioned by Shepherd and Wedderburn now pin-points some of the weaknesses [here], and the one thing that jumps out as me is … “political short-termism”.

The core recommendations are:

• Infrastructure, both physical and digital, that is fit for the future. Our transformation must be at scale, and it must go to the core of our public services and government. Things need to move to being properly digital … and I repeat again … something like the Estonia X-Road. Cybersecurity must be put at the top of the agenda, and the citizen needs to be put at the heart of this. We should stop giving public contracts to companies who have no interest in innovation. I’ve seen contracts where innovation is given a score of just 5%.
• An economy that harnesses and trades on knowledge. This must be the core of the focus, as knowledge will be at the fore. But, you have to create the knowledge, you have to lead, you have to create new innovations, you have to change your ways of doing things, you have to take risks, you have to take on new ideas. This is not an “investment in more education”, this should be an investment in patents, IP, world-leading science, world-leading innovation, and so on. It is often high-risk, and has people willing to take those risks. It promotes visionaries, and thought leaders, and let’s them paint a picture for others to colour. It does not involve boundary spanners, and who try to build collaborations between domains, it involves large scale building of knowledge, and where traditional boundaries do not exist.
• An ecosystem that nurtures and retains businesses of scale.
• An appropriately skilled workforce led by effective management/leadership teams. Do we really know what we are building? Do our kids see the potential of a tokenized economy at school? Are we showing them the future of coding? Do we get them to analyse data on deprivation in Scotland using the latest machine learning models? No. We give them a boring Computer Science subject, and which generally switches kids off with the potential of building new digital worlds. At N5 level, in 2017–2018, Computer Science was the 13th most popular subject, and it showed one of the largest falls in pupil numbers. This is not building a future skilled workforce that see data science, cybersecurity, and coding as part of their natural toolkit.
• Greater collaboration between academia and industry to commercialise innovation. Yes. Academia needs to listen to industry, and collaborate with them. In Cybersecurity, for example, there is a distinct lack of integration between academic and industry for innovation. Why not set-out with a grant X-Road plan, and which integrates industry and academia, rather than just finding the odd bit of innovation here and there. Get ‘ethical hackers’ to work together for the benefit of building a next generation infrastructure.
• A national strategy focusing resource and investment on activities with growth potential. Yes! Yes! Yes!
• A more joined-up, collaborative approach to entering new markets policy (at local, national and UK level) that is longer term in its objectives. Yes! Yes! Yes!

Scotland, perhaps, has no grand digital (and ambitious) plan for the future. It might point to the SWAN network in making digital things faster, and for the internal public sector to work a little more closer, but there’s no real grand plan of what a modern digital society will look like. The example of council staff sitting with two PCs on their desk, and one to log into one system and another to log into another one, is something that I will never understand.

I see no Estonian “X-Road” or in matching to Finland in building new models of governance. It just “hopes” that a steer in the right direction with some nice words around innovation and “being digital” will actually lead us to a world-leading economy. It doesn’t really want to take too many risks with innovation, and build at scale.

It is, short-term, and no great pointers to large-scale transformation. No national digital ID system for companies to register, an to enable in a purely digital way and thus create new digital services. No citizen ID method to bring rights to their citizens for data ownership and enable new models of innovation. No large-scale innovation around the NHS that citizens would ever come near. The country just hopes that a little bit of transformation and innovation within its public sector will seep into its foundation, and bring change, but little does change. Without a long-term vision, and some real PKI’s, we will never get there, and end up with a 20th Century infrastructure.

Scotland is a great country, and has great people and beautiful surrounds, but it now needs to match itself with the 21st Century and change its ways. It needs to put innovation, knowledge, and skills at the fore, and make bold plans for these. This is not a 3–5 year vision, but a 10 year rebuild. A break-down, and build-up. A new and vibrant economy needs to be created, and it needs to be built at scale. I always remember the phrase that “the NHS has a seven-year vision”, as every seven years, it was found that the previous grand plan hadn’t worked, and we needed another one. This type of thinking needs to go and needs to be replaced by a plan which shows a vision on where we should be going, and get everyone switched onto it. It is monitored and assessed — and not audited at the end — it is refined, and innovation is put at its core.

In conclusion, the report says:

“Despite the challenges it identifies, this research shows that there is much to be optimistic about. Scotland has a proud tradition of innovation and entrepreneurialism which, if properly harnessed, will see us seize the considerable opportunities ahead.”

… let’s have a grand vision … eg Estonian X-Road … and kick-start large-scale innovation around service provision, and let’s stop just tinkering around the edges. Our universities need to work closer with industry, and build things that provide drivers for our economy, as a health economy leads to health people. Unfortunately our universities are often too busy bothering about publishing papers for REF score than actually rebuilding our digital world.

We need grand visions of problems to solve. We need to bring together people with drive and vision, and who are willing to take risks. We need to break down barriers and get industry and academia to work closer.

Building innovation is a long-term game. It is getting the right people in place, and on making sure you are able to build new knowledge areas at scale. It is taking risks and believing in people, and then supporting them.

Can we have investment to take ideas from labs and grow into amazing companies, and ways to put innovation at the top of our agenda?