This may sound like a political question, but it is not intended to be. It’s meant to trigger the debate about how a small country like Scotland can best utilise its technological skill base for the future by becoming a thriving virtual City Region.

Scotland has a total population of 5 million people with a collection of small cities, universities and technology centres that are expected to experience very low growth in the next 50 years.

78 cities in the world have greater than five million people. 10 cities already have populations of over 20 million people, and we expect urbanisation to continue. It is not unrealistic to predict this number to grow to 40 cities with over 20 million people by 2070, when the world population is expected to peak.

Should Scotland be worried about this phenomenon?

On the surface, it looks like it should. The highest economic growth belongs to the ‘growth cities’ of the world. Manufacturing-scale advantages and cross fertilisation of technologies have led to much bigger units of production and greater pools of skilled labour. Hence, there is a need for much bigger cities to satisfy that demand.

Most of the massive wealth created in these growth cities has been due to a shift from rural, poorer, agricultural economies to wealthier ones based on urban-based activities. Scotland went through that shift in a different era and during a period when industrialisation required a much smaller scale than today. It is already far too small to play that competitive game any more. It has no chance of competing with those massive new manufacturing bases in India, Mexico, China and Brazil, where the mega-cities are growing. Silicon Glen was a painful example of that failed approach.

Can Scotland compete at all as a tech hub of the future and if so, how?

This is the more important question now. Is Scotland too small even to compete in the tech arena? It has universities that are small by any global standard and about to get relatively smaller. It has airports that are best described as regional rather than truly international. It has university medical hospitals that have slipped from being in the top three in the world at the time of World War I and now closer to ranking 20th.

How, then, can Scotland respond – if at all?

Clearly Silicon Valley is already well out of reach. The San Francisco Bay Area has a population approaching 8 million, full of financiers, entrepreneurs, engineers and supportive government agencies. Stanford University has an income stream four times that of Edinburgh with half the students and 40 times the size of its endowment fund. This, combined with the two State Universities of Berkeley, and San Jose in the Bay Area, each of similar size to Edinburgh University, is the powerhouse of Silicon Valley . The other US tech hubs such as Boston (population: 4 million), Seattle (population: 3.4 million) and Austin (population: 2 million) are perhaps a bit closer to Scotland’s scale, but are singular cities.

The big snag with Scotland is that its technology skill base is scattered throughout the country in very small cities. It is therefore not able to have the power of a single, integrated tech centre like Boston, which is collected around the powerful campus of Harvard University. Its talent is spread out with tech pockets next to the universities of Glasgow, Strathclyde, Edinburgh, Napier, Heriot Watt, St Andrews, Dundee and Aberdeen, and in places like Livingston’s technology park. Each has their own small fundraising and business development efforts. Even Sweden and Finland have a much more consolidated structure as a starting point.

So what is the solution?

The fatalists would suggest giving up even trying to be a decent technology centre altogether; that we should accept that Scotland will never be a stand-alone centre of excellence, but simply a marginal supplier of talent to the rest of the world. That’s where we are headed, decade by decade.

We do not accept that. We believe there is another, albeit radical, way.

Firstly, we should avoid abandoning the past and migrating to a single, physical world-scale tech centre in the middle of the central belt of Scotland, perhaps Falkirk. This can be rejected for multiple reasons including wasted migration costs for physical assets, the loss of history and tradition, loss of branding and further brain drains.

Is it equally too late to fantasise that Scotland can be run as a decentralised set of small-scale tech centres, devolved to local communities. Such a return to a cottage industry structure would be more akin to the scale seen in the early part of the twentieth century. The consolidation of financial investment and the preference amongst young people for more urban action has made that an anachronism and a backward step.

No, it is too late for such ideas of physical consolidation. Instead, virtual assets are a much better way to think.

The only way we can see Scotland competing as a technology centre in this era of tech-giant cities is to recognise Scotland’s fragmentation and to start thinking and acting much more as a virtual City Region of 5 million people, like a super-charged Singapore (population: 5.7 million). There would perhaps be one big virtual university structure that coordinates the old Glasgow, Strathclyde, Heriot Watt, Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen universities, agreeing on each of their specialisations, with little competition for funding between them. This virtual City Region of Scotland would be built on the back of virtual communication, online education and virtual reality. All of Scotland could then compete as a joined-up entity with the ‘golden triangle’ of Oxford, Cambridge and London, and the tech centres of Europe, for funds and future talent.

You may say this plan is a bit radical or utopian; perhaps a stretch too far. But we had better wake up to the challenge of our times. Scotland is the size of a small to medium-sized city. Not any bigger. Its university and tech centres feel even smaller. It’s time to reconsider. A virtual scale-up, with the creation of a new, virtual City Region, may have to be the new reality.

Featured image credit: Hillary Sillitto