Edinburgh is, arguably, a better place to live than Boulder, Colorado. More moderate climate, much better art galleries, better transit times to more interesting cities, just as good outdoor exercise and sports activities .. etc. Yes, I'm biased. The mountains aren't so spectacular, but the castle and the fringe festivals compensate.

Edinburgh skyline - the Castle on the distant left

To make it still better, Edinburgh needs an accelerator.

There was a short burst of activity on the Global Scot LinkedIn group a couple of weeks ago, sparked by a talk from the Turing Festival in Edinburgh. Per my comment on the GlobalScot group, Edinburgh has a lot of the ingredients required to upgrade its capabilities to support startups, so as to be competitive with Boulder.
There are two things most conspicuously missing - a leader with international standing and local knowledge like David Cohen, who can apply the TechStars principles (which TechStars make available) to Edinburgh companies; and a VC firm with a public image, long term perspective, and portfolio approach like Foundry Group. The most important ingredient is the leader, and the team which builds around that person - if need be the funds can (and will) come from outside the city.

Having an entrepreneurial team running an annual startup accelerator program, and pulling together the experienced mentors who support it, with help from world class support companies, would improve the potential outcomes for Scottish technology startups.

Ian Stevenson wrote up a longer post from the perspective of someone who is an active participant in existing Edinburgh startups. http://blog.salientpoint.co.uk/2012/09/21/opinion-is-lean-scotland-a-fir...

Brad Feld recently published 'Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City' which is well worth reading. Chapter 4, describing the different roles necessary to establish and maintain a startup community, is particularly relevant - Edinburgh has several different groups who want to think of themselves as leaders, but are really feeders. "Leaders of a startup community must be the entrepreneurs". They must be inclusive, actively involved, put the long term health of the community ahead of their own short term interests .. with "give before you get" as a guiding principal.

I'd be happy to help establish such an accelerator - part of my motivation for mentoring for the last TechStars Cloud program and for the Alchemist accelerator was to learn from experience what does and does not work.

18 October 2012 - edited to add - http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2012/10/16/subsidizing-startups-does-not-pr...

"There is a role for grants from both government and private agencies but there is a real risk is that the startup team loses focus on revenue from paying customers and instead invests in getting better at competing for grants." Having seen this happening in Scotland, Sean Murphy is right. Not the effect intended by the government agency - they aren't even feeding, at this point, they are inhibiting failure (or pivots) which should happen.

If you have comments, email info@cunningsystems.com.