The Business School are delighted to announce their involvement, success and winning proposal as part of the recent open call to Scottish Universities to run a three Scale-Up Teaching Programme initiative in collaboration with The Scottish Funding Council.
In 2017, The Scottish Funding Council launched an initiative to replace and improve a summer school entrepreneurship project carried out in Scotland by MIT. This initiative challenged all Scottish universities to work together. The University of Aberdeen Business School formed part of the working group from the start, joining in regular trips to the central belt.
When Professor MacGregor and Canales suggested forming a governing board with over 15 Scottish Universities this was met with much praise and a Managing & Operational Director was appointed which enabled an open call to run a three Scale-Up Teaching Programme in Scotland.
The SFC, in partnership with Scottish Enterprise and Highlands and Islands Enterprise, invited through a call for proposals, Scotland’s universities to bring forward plans for the development and delivery of pilot entrepreneurial education programmes aimed at inspirational practitioner-led teaching to Scotland’s ambitious scale-up entrepreneurs.
In November 2019, the Business School started work to bid for one of these three programmes to which it was recently announced the school had won one of the programmes as part of the Think. Act. Scale. Pathfinder Programmes initiative.
Professor Ignacio Canales commented on the success "As the new head of the Business School Professor Martin Meyer as well as the SVP Professor Karl Leydecker supported every effort. It was no easy task and required considerable resources from across the school. However, with the help of Liz Rattray and Jenna McArthur from Research and Innovation, myself, Professor Norman Hutchison as well as Lucia Giuntoli from Business Engagement and the invaluable help from Professor Gary McEwan who leads ElevatorUK we formed a winning team.
We sought and achieved an ad-hoc partnership with RGU and UHI, attended all preparation workshops, developed an application where Gary McEwan’s help and expertise were instrumental and submitted a joint application. Out of the 15 applicants, 6 were called for interview and we were one of them, after a week it was announced we had won one of the three Think. Act. Scale. Pathfinder Programmes.
We were over the moon, as you can imagine, but this happened just two weeks before lockdown and the practicalities of running an experiential programme online and the new needs of the country in the midst of a major recession put all the programme on hold. However, we look forward to kick-starting the programme once normality has resumed and we have the capabilities to be on-campus".
If you are an ambitious scaleup business and would like register your interest for Think.Act.Scale please contact Lucia Giuntoli, lucia.giuntoli@abdn.ac.uk