Chris Boyland I love this question you posed and that you are welcoming thoughts from ecosystem. As an emerging technology strategist with experience working with governments, here are my thoughts, I hope you find them to be useful:
Strategy:
As you mentioned funding is limited, so it needs to be judiciously spent in the right places for maximum impact. To do so the spending and investments (financial & social capital) should be directed towards the government's priorities and where the government wants to best support its economy. I would classify these into three categories:
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Basic Government Infrastructure: Just like water, roads, and public infrastructure this new industrial revolution needs to have digital/AI related infrastructure. The Indian government invested in creating the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) to support instant fund transfers and is a foundational part of their digital economy. The reason it is valuable is because entrepreneurs can build on top of it without heavy costs or fees/gatekeeping which is what will happen if a corporate entity builds these digital railways. Another example is a the government creating a consolidated data library. In the digital/AI economy data is critical. The government sits on massive amounts of data that could be leveraged by industry to provide better services/products etc.
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Boosting Economic Activity that Scotland is primed for: Scotland has several industries that it excels in such as Space, Gaming, and increasingly more so HealthTech. (there are others like Scotland's powerhouse renewable energy industry but I'll use these examples). Space is increasingly more critical to the economy and now that the costs have been reduced, it is no longer exclusive to governments. From in-space manufacturing, to space solar energy (UKRI had a recent talk about this), to facilitating lunar data centers, some thought could be given to the digital/data/infrastructure needs of this economy that the government can support. Scotland has a pretty serious gaming development community, expertise and capability. This industry (like others) is going through changes and for gaming there is a huge opportunity to reimagine what it could be and how AI is leveraged within it. Reaching out to Scottish gaming companies as well as Scottish universities with gaming programs would help you understand what the tech needs are for this industry's competitive future. As for HealthTech, Scotland is strong (and understated, more work needs to be done to amplify this but that is a different story). The strong "Triple Helix" collaboration of government (NHS Scotland), industry and academia is making Scotland a very desirable place for industry to come and test and generate evidence for their innovations. This is also an incredible opportunity for the Scottish government to learn and innovate with informed policies and regulations. The UK government has their AI as a medical device regulatory sandbox called Airlock. The Scottish government could do something similar and gain valuable insights for what innovators are doing and what they need. This can inform where to place investments.
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Anticipatory Investment: There are obvious investments (#1), complementary investments (#2) but then there are anticipatory investments that need to be made where vision and risk taking on bests is necessary. This is what forward leaning countries like Singapore and the UAE are doing. Every country's bets will be placed on their positioning, values, vision and foresight. If I had to make anticipator investment bets for Scotland I would be sensitive to climate change and how it impacts global supply chains affecting critical needs of Scotland. I'd double down on the basics: water security, food security and health. Scotland is geographically blessed with water, which is a critical natural resource that will become increasingly contested in the coming years. In recent years even Scotland has been affected by water changes. Government digital and physical infrastructure upgrades to the water infrastructure will be a valuable investment. For agriculture, from a data/AI/infrastructure perspective, it would look like understanding how to support AI in IoT to support smart farms that will have increasing AI and cloud needs. In addition to all other industries as they go through the next wave of digital modernization from "smart" internet connected to AI, autonomous, agentic. There will be important overlapping digital needs with the cloud to identify. ALL of these are national targets for adversaries (both nation state and cybercriminals - the later is only growing), so investments in robust, innovative cybersecurity and redundancy measures would be top of mind for how I would design investments and the government's AI/data/infrastructure plans.
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Visionary Future informs "Technology Statecraft":
Ultimately, I think these investments need to be done with a confident vision for what Scotland future is. The Arab Gulf countries have excelled at creating bold visions and getting industry/society to work towards those bold futures. The value of a bold & well communicated vision shouldn't be underestimated. The Scottish government not only has the power to create one but to also engage across the Scottish government to realize it (ex: schools, universities, industry etc). This bold vision can help give direction towards investment prioritization.
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Strategic Partnerships:
There is a lot to learn from other countries like Singapore, Dubai government, Abu Dhabi Government, Saudi Arabia etc. I have seen first hand in the Gulf how they are going about it and having technology related engagements at the government level would be very helpful to exchange ideas, perspectives and approaches to investment. (even when budgets are different).
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I'll stop here, I hope this helps!
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