I will give Heather Jones a wee break by talking about innovation.
At Highlands and Islands Enterprise, we are very ambitious, alongside our businesses, about growth through innovation across the supply chain. We are looking upstream and downstream. Innovation is not only about capturing challenges; it is about creating high-value opportunities in the economy—particularly, for my role, the rural economy—and capturing as much value in Scotland as possible.
Innovation takes many forms. The Scottish Aquaculture Innovation Centre is focused on business-to-academic partnerships, but we also consider business-to-business collaborations not only to solve challenges in the here and now but to look further ahead into the future. We also support businesses individually.
One live example that is taking up quite a bit of my colleagues’ time is a project called aquaSENS, which is still at the conceptual stage. It takes the aquaculture industry as a whole. We are considering fin-fish and shellfish production in Shetland and working across three innovation centres—SAIC, the Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre and the Data Lab—to consider how we can use things that capture real-time data to inform real-time activity. That will enable people to view what is happening remotely and make well-informed decisions about what they do on their fin-fish or shellfish farm so that they can become much more predictive in their approach to the business over the medium to longer term. It will also provide a robust set of data over the longer term—a very hard evidence base that holistically captures as much information as possible about what happens in a region.
We are working with a range of stakeholders and being led by the industry. We are working with the Scottish centre of excellence in satellite applications—SOXSA—at the University of Strathclyde and the Satellite Applications Catapult to develop the project and we are submitting a bid to the industrial strategy challenge fund for a sizeable amount of money to help to bring that forward. That concerns some of our wider ambition on innovation.
Skills and training are key to innovation. We need people in our country with the right level of skills and knowledge, whether that is acquired through the academic or vocational pathway. A lot of work is going on across industry, the public sector partnership and stakeholders to empower people in Scotland to ensure that the aquaculture sector is a positive, progressive career destination and is accessible to all.
Work is under way and more is to be done not only on reaching school leavers, young people and the people who influence young people, but on making the industry accessible to more mature entrants. A good example of that is the Scottish vocational qualification level 4 in fish farm management, which allows people to learn, develop and make a positive contribution to the fish farm sector at a later stage in their life.
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