A culture of enterprise and more businesses of scale
We need to focus on raising entrepreneurial aspirations and capacity to encourage more firms to grow, both for new starts and existing firms. Encouraging existing businesses to expand their horizons will in some instances imply a change in culture but the benefits can be substantial. We will focus on a range of programmes to embed enthusiasm for starting or running businesses across the Highlands and Islands, as well as targeting young people leaving secondary, further and higher education.
Priorities for action
- Stimulating a wide range of new businesses, as well as assisting business starts on a targeted basis, so that the area has a pool of new firms, working in the fields of creative industries, science and technology and knowledge industries, which offer significant opportunities for growth.
- Challenging owners/managers to be ambitious in their aspirations to grow their businesses, as well as improving their leadership and management skills.
Increased innovation and commercialisation of research
The region's low employment in high-tech industries, low levels of patent applications, low levels of graduate employment in the private sector and low productivity can all be linked to the absence of a strong, research-based university in the Highlands and Islands. The long-term, catalytic role UHI will play in stimulating research, inspiring commercialisation and acting as a focus for innovation in people, process and technology cannot be overestimated.
Priorities for action
- Supporting the UHI research strategy in economically significant areas, such as healthcare, environmental science and agronomy.
- Pursuing other significant areas of research opportunity, in areas such as ICT and renewable energy.
- Linking with other universities and research institutes, particularly in the short-term, to develop mutually-beneficial research and commercialisation.
- Encouraging a comprehensive programme of knowledge transfer activities.
- Enabling businesses to undertake their own research and development activity - the key to success will be to develop a critical mass of 'clever people doing clever things' in fields relevant to the area.
Success in key sectors
The Highlands and Islands' various industry sectors make radically different contributions and demand tailored strategies for competitiveness, wealth creation and sustainability. Some, in science and technology, offer huge wealth-creation potential through intellectual property development. Tourism will remain one of the most important sectors of the economy in the long-term and its further development around sustainable development principles is a clear opportunity for the area. Primary industries underpin rural populations and added-value manufacturing, while services and engineering distribute income across our area.
Priorities for action
- Building knowledge-intensive business sectors, including marine bio-tech, creative industries, renewables, healthcare and nuclear decommissioning, which require research, knowledge transfer and commercialisation activities.
- Achieving enhanced sustainability in the primary activities of agriculture, aquaculture, forestry and fishing through market adaptation, diversification and production efficiencies.
- Fostering the competitiveness of the major food and drink, timber and tourism industries, where the needs for product excellence and market focus fit well with sustainable development aims.
- Engaging private sector leadership in planning and implementation and forging strong public-sector strategic partnerships.
Use of e-business to create business advantage
With the enabling technologies for e-business - computers and broadband - now becoming widely available throughout the region, the challenge is to help businesses use these technologies to improve productivity, grow existing markets and expand into new international markets.
Priorities for action
- Enabling ambitious businesses to transform themselves through new business processes and investment in innovative technologies, skilled graduate staff and quality initiatives, bringing significant productivity gains.
- Stimulating businesses to develop new, often international, markets.
- Encouraging investment in e-business systems, to aid development of new plant and machinery, innovative technologies and new ways of working.
- Offering high-quality specialist advisory services, new business improvement tools and flexible and innovative ways of transferring knowledge from the higher and further education sectors.
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