Investment in Scotland's R&D has evolved over the past few years. The challenges and opportunities for R&D in Scotland, and the future of R&D are reviewed.
Scotland’s spend on research and development has increased in the past decade but its total spend on R&D lags behind the UK and other leading OECD countries. However, within the UK, London, and surrounding areas significantly skew the UK average and Scotland actually performs fairly well out of the 12 regions.
There are opportunities for Scotland to grow its R&D activity through additional funding and tax relief but to address questions surrounding how to incentivise R&D, it is important to acknowledge the limitations of the data available.
There are some limitations of the BERD data such as the under-coverage of small businesses and businesses in some industries such as finance. However, by looking at Scotland’s growth sector database we were able to analyse R&D activity in Scotland’s financial services sector. This sector, along with Scotland’s other growth sectors account for a large share of Scotland’s R&D and there are a lot of opportunities for growing Scotland’s research and development within these industries.
Continued growth in these sectors will require significant investment and policies that incentivise R&D activity must be in place. However, as this article has highlighted, decisions must not be based solely on data that has as many caveats as the GERD data.