Challenge 7.3: How can technology help people self-organise and build meaningful connections as the beating heart of Scotland’s global business community?

Key information for applicants

Please note: you must apply for this Challenge via Public Contracts Scotland

Launch date
Tuesday 31 May 2022

Questions may be submitted until
16:00, Tuesday 21 June 2022

Closing date
Midday, Tuesday 28 June 2022

Exploration Stage interviews
Monday 25 July 2022

Exploration Stage
15 August to 2 September 2022

Accelerator interviews
Tuesday 06 September 2022

Accelerator Stage
3 October 2021 to 27 January 2023

Maximum contract value
£650,000

What does this mean?

Q&A session

A live Q&A session was held with the Challenge Sponsor team on Friday 10 June 2022 at 11:00. A recording of the session can be viewed here:

Why does this Challenge need to be solved?

We know that connecting people in a deep and meaningful way that builds trust and allows them to ask for and receive help is the most valuable thing we do. The issue is that right now it is very manual. It relies on someone in our organisation knowing both parties, understanding where a connection can be made and then effecting it. This is not scalable in an affordable or effective way.

Today’s world moves so fast that by the time traditional education has documented and prepared to teach the latest techniques and methods they are already out of date. The only way to keep pace is through real time peer-to-peer and peer-to-near-peer learning. Scotland has an enormous bank of highly skilled senior individuals in many industry sectors based all over the world. If we could recycle those skills and knowledge built up over many years back into the Scottish economy we could give our leaders a competitive advantage on the global stage.

Despite our hyper connected world, business is still as much about who you know. As a small nation, we have a distinct advantage in that we are small enough to reach the people you need but big enough that we have a strong market. Scotland should be using its size to its advantage and in order to do that, we need an effective, scalable way to build meaningful connections between people here as well as the Scottish diaspora abroad.

By developing a system that can allow people who want to help connect with those they can best help we can unlock the knowledge and value of our most experienced people to help those growing the organisations of tomorrow. In doing so, we will unlock many hundreds of millions of pounds of quality and security of employment as well as economic wealth for the Scottish economy.

Our Vision: We look to INSPIRE and DEVELOP the PEOPLE of Scotland to build the most entrepreneurial Society in the world. The highlighted words are key. We won’t make the difference, the people we change will make the difference. Our job is to create the transformational leaders that will deliver for not just their organisations but for Scotland as well. They will create the jobs and prosperity that will allow Scottish society to progress and flourish. The style of leadership we believe that will deliver the change needed is an entrepreneurial one. That doesn’t mean people starting businesses, it means people leading at every level in every organisation with the skills and attributes of an entrepreneur. To do this, we need to effect a cultural shift in Scotland to one where people feel they can see themselves as entrepreneurial, even when they haven’t started a business.

To do this we have to do two things:

1. Build exemplars of what these leaders look like so people know what the benchmark is and what they should aim to be. If they can’t see it, they can’t be it.

2. Build a movement around these leaders of people on the journey to be one, or those that want to support them on the road. A movement of people who want to help and be helped and who all believe that by being better leaders they are playing a part in building a better Scotland.

What we do: We address the two things above as follows:

1. Build leaders: We run leadership development programmes for early leaders (graduates), rising stars (those beginning to lead) and senior leaders (those running organisations or divisions). We also run an internship programme designed to find the best entrepreneurially minded students in Scottish universities and unlock their potential with challenging summer projects.  

2. Build a movement: We run events, webinars, interactions and arrange introductions that bring our alumni together with Ambassadors (highly successful leaders) in Scottish organisations as well as Scottish Ambassadorial expats who wish to give back. These connections not only help develop the attributes these leaders need (confidence, ambition, passion, validation) but provide them with up to the minute insight on how to react to the world around them. Right now we have 2,000 alumni in our community and a further 3,000 supporters. We want to turn the community into a movement by giving them purpose and realistic ways to be a part of what we are doing.

How will we know the Challenge has been solved?

When we use the word ‘community’, we mean that people are able to create a deep and meaningful connection that builds real trust and facilitates their desire to build relationships, help each other and collaborate.

It also means that a record of the volume of interactions happening between people are able to be known, so that those interactions allow us to understand the impact of the connections being made on the entire community.

In doing so, the people that form part of this community will be able to effectively communicate the common purpose that brings the community together and reinforce that for those that choose to participate.

We need to be able to:

1. Build a profile of the people in our movement, to understand their needs and how we can best help. Also, to understand how they can best help others.

2. Categorise them, we work with people at every stage of the journey, some are young students that need to understand their potential right up to billionaires who are just looking to repay the person who mentored them by being that for someone else. We need to be able to understand what level each person is at and group them. We operate on the principle that the best person to help you climb the ladder is the person on the rung above you, not the one ten rungs above. Based on this, we encourage people to mentor and support people one level below them and seek support from those one level above.

3. Connect people in a way that allows them to help others or be helped. That help can be having a question answered, getting advice on an issue or being mentored. Our main aim is to establish a connection and give enough purpose to the interaction that both parties can establish if there is a relationship to be build. We believe in serendipity, we don’t need to connect people with a specific outcome in mind, just to connect people that have the most likely chance of achieving one of several possible outcomes (support, friendship, validation, mentorship, non-executive directorship, investment, introductions).

4. Record the interaction happening and record the impact of those interactions. Right now we connect people and only hear by chance the outcome of that connection. We can’t report on the number of connections made, the outcomes of those connections or quantify in any way the impact of those outcomes for Scotland.

5. Encourage them to continue to connect, build a desire in those at all levels to do more. Reward them for the interactions in a way that makes them want to do more.

6. Elevate and empower the best of those in the movement. Identify, then recognise and then elevate those that best represent the values of the movement. Then empower and facilitate those that want to commit time and resource to building the movement. Gamification of interaction is a key factor.

7. Report back to each individual the impact of the interactions they have engaged with. Help those most involved in our movement understand the difference they are making, inspire them to continue to drive the movement forward.

Who are the end users of the solution likely to be?

End users will be current and future Scottish based leaders of private , third sector and public sector organisations. As a leadership organisation we are looking to grow leaders with a particular entrepreneurial style of leadership. The best way to do that is to connect them to those we recognise as having that same style of leadership.

End users will thus be:

1. Selected students in their final year of university

2. Selected graduates in the early years of their careers

3. Selected managers in all types of organisations in all types of sectors who have been marked as rising stars

4. Selected Senior leaders of both large and small growing businesses as well as third and public sector organisations

5. Selected Ambassadors (very Senior leaders who are looking to give back their time and experience)

We envisage a cascading giveback model. The best person to help you reach the next rung of the ladder is the person already standing on it. to that end, we want to limit mentoring and support interactions to those who are near peers. Not having a senior ambassador mentoring a student for example.

We see the ambassadors time as being available only to the senior leaders, but to unlock that support, they in turn must be available to support the rising stars. The rising stars must then be available to mentor the graduates to unlock the senior support and so on.

There would need to be flexibility for people to move between the rankings and the occasional interaction of more senior and junior members.

Has the Challenge Sponsor attempted to solve this problem before?

Yes, we have looked at  several other mentoring platforms available in the market however these existing products in our view do not provide the benefits and the “beating heart of a community.”

We need something that encourage and facilitate the community interacting with itself. We want to be able to shape and encourage these interactions without having to get in the middle of them ourselves.

Will a solution need to integrate with any existing systems or equipment?

Likely to have to interact with either Salesforce or Hubspot as a CRM to capture the outcomes.

Is this part of an existing service?

Part of our Mentoring Service within our Community Network: https://www.entrepreneurialscotland.com/network-membership

Any technologies or features the Challenge Sponsor wishes to explore or avoid?

Emotion is the key to everything we do. We rely on people believing in the change we want to see and wanting to be part of the movement that effects that change. In order to make it happen, we have to be utterly focused on the human drivers and human barriers in the way of that. With that in mind, it would be incredible to have a system that understood the basic drivers of human behaviour. Namely, that people are not driven by logic but by emotion. To help encourage and reward people to engage in the activity that we know will make a difference we need to emotionally reward them. These rewards can come in the form of recognition within the movement or within wider society. Gamification is a theme that resonates with us. Look to TripAdvisor or Reddit for inspiration on how they reward their community for interacting and helping others. Tags, badges and recognition by peers are significant human drivers of behaviour. They are also rewards and value that we can provide to those that seek it.

Examples of features that we wish to explore:

• Recognise the level of contribution and interaction of users, for example a badge.

• Awards or designations that recognise those people that don’t just provide advice but actively take the movement into the non-virtual world and organise gatherings

• The ability to build up a picture of people’s ability or their standing in the eyes of respected members of the community. Almost like the credit rating agency of your reputation. For instance, if you have had several interactions with people that the movement recognise as senior players and their feedback on you is strong then it effectively gives you a personal rating as a leader. Many investors that back companies back the jockey as much as the horse but it’s much harder to find tangible feedback on the jockey than the horse!

• Capture the best outcomes from the interactions that have taken place so we can inspire the movement to what is possible.

What is the commercial opportunity beyond a CivTech contract?

Significant commercial opportunity. Many organisations not just in the public sector are looking to build deep and meaningful community engagement between the those in the various clubs and communities they bring together.

Organisations such as Nike and Adidas establish large running communities and allow people to interact and build relationships whilst also building brand loyalty. 

Who are the stakeholders?

• Entrepreneurial Scotland Foundation

• Economy Directorate, Scottish Government

• CivTech, Scottish Government

Who’s in the Challenge Sponsor team?

Entrepreneurial Scotland Foundation team is the lead partner.

What is the policy background to the Challenge?

The key policy addressed with this challenge is Workstream one in the new National Strategy for Economic Transformation (NSET). This Workstream attempts to make Scotland a more entrepreneurial nation. The platform developed here will support the grassroots movement that is needed to make this a reality.