Entrepreneurship transforming our economy | ONE

Entrepreneurs starting, growing and scaling-innovation driven businesses provide solutions that can transform industries and position the region as a leading hub for technology and product innovation across all the region’s growth sectors of green energy, digital tech, food, drink and agriculture and life sciences.

Entrepreneurship also drives cultural change. As more people see the successes of local entrepreneurs, more explore entrepreneurship as a career path, creating a ripple effect.

This is why Opportunity North East (ONE) leads action and investment in the entrepreneurial ecosystem in north east Scotland to diversify the economy, focusing on the founders of innovation-led businesses in digital tech, food manufacturing and production, life sciences and tourism.

Our unique private-public collaborative model is making an impact. Since 2016, ONE has secured £150 million in investment in growth sectors on a co-investment basis and continues to develop as the regional entrepreneurial ecosystem builder, combining economic development with entrepreneurship and innovation.

People in this region have an extraordinary, enterprising spirit. We make the most of it by challenging, inspiring, and supporting ambition and equipping founders with the insights, education knowledge, skills, tools, and peer-to-peer support necessary to create and scale innovation-led businesses. If you want to be an entrepreneur, this is an excellent place to fulfil that ambition.

ONE has developed a powerful combination of supportive infrastructure and deep sector expertise. ONE Tech Hub and ONE BioHub are the physical places where the digital tech and life sciences communities come together to share, learn and grow. They are home to each sector community and broader ecosystem activity, as well as the sector expertise provided by ONE and partners, and they offer vital commercial facilities for scaling businesses. ONE SeedPod, opening next year, will fulfil the same purpose for food and drink and includes food-safe manufacturing units to enable companies to scale production. In tourism, more than £3 million of investment in low-carbon adventure tourism projects creates more opportunities for sustainable outdoor activities that attract high-value visitors.

Our work with the business community and partners, including Scottish Enterprise, the University of Aberdeen, Robert Gordon University, ETZ, NZTC, Aberdeen City Council, and Aberdeenshire Council, continues to strengthen and build the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Entrepreneurship is a craft that can be learned. ONE leads work with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston to adopt its world-class 24-step disciplined entrepreneurship process to achieve a consistent regional approach to entrepreneurial education. Disciplined entrepreneurship has helped make MIT a world-leading university and source of startups. Over ten years, its MIT delta v educational accelerator for student entrepreneurs saw $1 billion of funding raised, and 69% of companies were still active or acquired after five years.

ONE has also piloted and is expanding the use of the MIT Venture Mentoring Service team mentoring framework to match founder teams with mentor teams to support them. This empowers the participating ventures and enables experienced business leaders to give back to the community.

Momentum is building. Fifty-five founders, entrepreneurial amplifiers, and educators have completed the intensive entrepreneurial development programme (EDP) at MIT and are applying their learnings within their own businesses and organisations. A fourth cohort will go to MIT in January, and many more people are benefitting from in-region programmes delivered by ONE and its partners. We will also double the number of ventures supported through mentoring in the year ahead.

ONE is about doing, taking a hands-on approach, and applying knowledge and skills. Our programmes, sector teams, and venture mentoring all support founders in understanding their customers, innovating, securing investment, accelerating, and scaling.

More than 70 founders and teams completed a four-day enterprise sales training programme at ONE Tech Hub earlier this month delivered by Kent Summers, a serial US tech entrepreneur and lead instructor of the B2B Sales for Startups course at MIT. Developing sales skills is critical to the success of the founders ONE works with. This programme brought best-in-class expertise to the region to boost their performance, taking at least ten businesses to £10 million in sales in five years.

The impact of our focus on entrepreneurship is significant and growing. The digital tech cluster has doubled to 300 companies in five years. It is forecast to outpace all other sectors of the economy over the next ten years. Our food and drink industry is the fastest growing in Scotland. We have a cluster of life sciences businesses taking novel research from the lab bench to market. Our visitor economy is worth more than £1 billion, and we have established an international profile for our adventure tourism sector.

We hosted Paul Cheek, one of the world’s foremost entrepreneurial educators who co-delivers the EDP programme at MIT, at ONE BioHub last week. He praised Aberdeen’s entrepreneurial spirit: "The strength of its community and its dedication to innovation makes it a powerful hub for driving impactful change across industries and fostering the next generation of innovation-driven entrepreneurs to advance its economic future.”

Looking ahead, our commitment is to work with partners to secure the resources and investment to enable more delivery and cultivate an environment where entrepreneurs thrive. Our vision is clear. We aim to double the number of high-value life sciences companies, grow the digital tech cluster to 800 firms, grow the food and drink sector through automation, product and process innovation and premiumisation, and expand the visitor economy with a focus on sustainable adventure tourism.

ONE is excited to continue building the entrepreneurial ecosystem and working with founders, mentors, funding and delivery partners, and investors to amplify our impact. Together, we are ensuring that entrepreneurship transforms our economy.