Foreword

Global crises require global cooperation

Scotland played host to COP26 in Glasgow in November 2021. We had already been one of the first countries in the world to declare a climate emergency in 2019. The threat from climate change is affecting us all in different ways, be that extreme flooding, heatwaves, rising sea levels, or biodiversity loss.

Global crises require global cooperation. Along with our co-chairing of the Under2 Coalition, I was delighted to see Scotland take the lead on this ground-breaking programme pioneering a new approach to collaboration. Action by the public sector, private sector and academia in tackling the climate emergency through innovative technologies is part of the global solution.

I had the pleasure of welcoming the global cohort at the start of the Scale-Up-Safari, opening the first day of presentations at COP26 and hosting our international guests in the Great Hall in Edinburgh Castle. Throughout, the energy and passion from the companies and programme teams in finding ways to address the climate crisis was palpable. I got a sense of the huge effort that went in to delivering this collaborative cross-border programme.

I am pleased to see a sense of those efforts, motivations and methods captured through this insightful report. My thanks to the Technical University of Denmark for their considerable diligence in producing this publication. I look forward to following the journeys of the companies and the programme teams as they play their part in addressing climate change.

With best wishes from Scotland,

Ivan McKee MSP Minister for Business, Trade, Tourism and Enterprise Scottish Government

Ivan McKee MSP Minister for Business, Trade, Tourism and Enterprise Scottish Government

Our vision for intergovernmental collaboration

The Global Scale-Up Programme was a journey of shared challenges and challenging uncertainty, global friendships and shredded nerves, whilst in our own small way helping the planet.

How many times have we sat in meetings with all sorts of good intentions expressed? And how many of those good intentions have been translated into action? And never more so around the existential threat we all face with the climate crisis.

Our CivTech Alliance members felt the urge to leverage their know-how and expertise to move beyond being simply a knowledge network to a collective capability.

Together, our collective of 12 programme partners from ten countries wanted to demonstrate our vision for intergovernmental collaboration - driven by a grassroots mission and compulsion to act. Using the glue of innovation, we brought stakeholders together across borders that wouldn’t otherwise have met - building relationships between governments and

Alexander Holt, Founder of the CivTech Alliance

“We felt the urgency to move beyond a knowledge network to one of a collective capability."

Alexander Holt, Founder of CivTech Alliance

creating opportunities for climate scale-ups. This was innovation diplomacy in action.

Our journey was not without pain or challenges! With just months to go before COP26, how could we develop a value proposition that appealed to both scale-ups and policy makers? What were the legal frameworks by which we could operate across jurisdictions? How could we balance 7 timezones with a difference of 17 hrs over a period of 8 months? We all know how hard it is to schedule events within our own organisations - add in external agencies, industry partners, academia, and investors, and the logistics start to get complicated - then multiply that by 10 countries with different cultures! And more fundamentally, how could we maintain motivation across the 12 programme teams all of whom had day jobs and for whom there was no ministerial mandate to participate?

We did all this and more. And that is because we took a leap of faith and trusted each other. And along the way, we met some amazing companies with ground breaking technologies all of which contribute a piece to the collective puzzle of addressing the climate crisis.

Thanks to companies, the programme teams and the support from the Scottish Government and our strategic partners UNDP, Michelin Scotland Innovation Parc, World Resources Institute, South of Scotland Enterprise Agency and the Connected Places Catapult. Most of all, my sincerest thanks to the core programme team − Catherine Gibson-Poole, Rob Driver, Roger Jones, Lokman Fong, Chloe Purves and Alexander Bouch. None of this would have been possible without you.

Huge thanks to Mie Weile, Jan Madsen, Bjarne Erick, Anne-Sofie Saabye Møller, Josefine Steinfurth and Mads Weile for their enormous efforts putting this report together – one that offers a window into our vision of cross-border collaboration.