The Scottish Government, and importantly, Scottish Enterprise, are stuffed with people who simply don’t understand business and have no desire to do so, argues medical technology industry Ivor Campbell

When something that happens in Scotland leads the news globally it tends to stick in the mind, and so anyone who is old enough will remember the day Dolly the Sheep hit the world’s headlines.

In the annals of Scottish innovation, producing the first-ever cloned animal remains an iconic moment in human history. A testament to the nation’s scientific brilliance, Dolly symbolised a future where Scotland would be a global leader in life sciences – a hub of discovery, commercial acumen, and high-skilled employment. A quarter of a century on, that future feels like a distant, faded dream. The vibrant scientific and commercial ecosystem that promised so much has atrophied, not through a lack of talent or ambition in our universities and start-ups, but because of a systemic, catastrophic failure of the bodies designed to nurture it.

The prognosis is bleak. Scotland’s life sciences and MedTech sectors are being failed, comprehensively, by a Scottish Government disinterested in private enterprise, and a business support infrastructure that has become, not just ineffective but actively detrimental.

This is not a temporary downturn; it is the result of a long-term, precipitous decline in competence and ambition, that has left Scotland languishing while competitor nations surge ahead.

Bookending Dolly, like a pair of inglorious monuments to political hubris and commercial impotence, are the semiconductor and renewables industries. Remember Silicon Glen, when we were invited to believe that Scotland would be a global leader in producing the building blocks of the digital age?

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Then there was the promise of a renewables revolution, when Scotland’s abundant natural resources of wind and wave power were heralded as a new dawn in........

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