Networks are the glue that holds Scotland's businesses together

Hardly a month seems to pass without one of these schemes being unveiled for business startups or scaleups in Scotland, or the winners of various business awards for scaling or “accelerating” being announced.

In April, consultancy Deloitte issued a call for Scotland’s “most innovative and rapidly growing technology scale-ups” to apply for the firm’s UK Technology Fast 50 annual ranking.

A month earlier, the University of Edinburgh held an annual “AI Accelerator showcase” at which AI scaleups pitched to get on a six-month business development programme, including free working space at the Bayes Centre, the university’s innovation hub for AI and data science.

And last month another consultancy, KPMG, announced the winner of its annual Tech Innovator award for the UK. Step forward Zelim, an Edinburgh-based business that builds AI-enabled maritime safety systems to save lives when people fall overboard at sea.

This got me thinking. What are all these accelerators, awards and programmes for? Do they result in anything beyond the halo effect of winning and some brand-burnishing for the sponsoring organisation?

I decided to, er, accelerate my understanding by asking around.

Ewen Wardman is co-founder and chief executive of a fascinating Scottish agritech scaleup called iLivestock. The business got its inspiration from a moment in 2012 when he was in China installing digital tracing systems for livestock farmers on behalf of his agritech employer. As he toured the farms, Wardman spotted that the farmers were taking photos on their smartphones of their animals’ ear tags, printing off the images and attaching these to paper records. This prompted the idea of developing a digital platform that captured all the data needed to monitor cattle and sheep quickly – like weight and feed measurements – and managed it all on a single hand-held device. A year later, iLivestock was born.

The company was the Scotland region winner of KPMG’s Tech Innovator award in 2025. Wardman told me that he was initially less than enthusiastic about these accelerator schemes. “My general view of these sorts of things was, I don’t have time. I can’t figure out why anyone would want to do them. They all seem to be full of spin outs from universities just looking for things to say,” he said.

But he changed his mind pretty quickly once involved. It all started when he was contacted out of the blue on workplace platform LinkedIn by Amy Burnett, head of KPMG’s UK Private Enterprise Access programme, which coaches scaleups in how to raise funds from investors.

Wardman discovered that the Tech Accelerator is not just a showcase for innovation but is also a platform for improvement. While the competition involves businesses making pitches in a bid to win, participants also receive guidance and feedback from KPMG mentors, advisors and judges throughout the competition, helping them refine their pitches.

“If you’re a first-time entrepreneur, you’ve generally got no idea how to pitch to a venture capital house or private equity firm unless you’ve done it already. Everyone and their dog will ask for £1,000 for an hour to tell you how to write a pitch,” Wardman explained. “So, it was just nice to have someone in a big firm that was genuinely trying to help.”

KPMG will sometimes also introduce businesses to experts within the firm as part of the process. As a result, iLivestock now uses KPMG’s tax experts in Argentina, a market that it entered in November last year.

“It’s been really valuable to provide a platform for companies to give them that exposure, the mentorship, and support for their growth through benefiting from our network and connections,” Burnett says.

Ultimately, it’s the word “network” that reveals the secret sauce behind these initiatives. There’s also a point to be made here about why Scotland has a particularly strong angel investing ecosystem made up of startups and scaleups, investors and government support, spurred by strong networks. It’s what professor Niall MacKenzie of the University of Strathclyde Business School described in a recent report on the economic impact of angel investing as the “Scottish Model”.

I put all this to Beppe Soda, professor of organisation theory and network analysis at Bocconi University in Italy. “These programmes can look, at first glance, like reputational showcases for the host organisations. But their real value may lie elsewhere: in the access they provide to networks that young firms would otherwise struggle to enter,” Soda explained.

This appears to have been a key benefit for Zelim. Andy Tipping, the company’s chief strategy officer, says the award not only prompted interest from new investors. He has also stayed in touch with two of the other companies in the competition “and we are sharing notes on specific challenges we are facing”.

It works the other way around, too, with investors gaining access to founders they might otherwise not have encountered. Heriot-Watt University’s Edinburgh Business School (EBS) has since 2018 run a 12-month incubator programme for entrepreneurs that the university says provides “access to invaluable global networks”.

It’s also a door-opener for investors. “It’s not just the [business] idea that investors are looking for, it’s the team as well,” says Angus Laing, executive dean of EBS.

If all this has whetted your appetite for networks, you’re in luck. Tonight, an organisation called Venture Café Edinburgh is holding an event for innovators on education and AI at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. The purpose? Networking.