This past October, I had the pleasure of returning to Scotland—the homeland of my ancestors on my father’s side—this time on behalf of a Japanese law firm to attend a legal conference on technology in Edinburgh. My father maintained a long-standing professional relationship with the University of St Andrews, New College, and I have visited Scotland many times over the years. For reasons I cannot fully explain, there are two places outside California—where I was born and raised—where I have always felt a natural sense of ease: Scotland and Japan.
Japan’s people have long been shaped by geography and climate—volcanoes, earthquakes, typhoons, and tsunamis demanding resilience and adaptation. In a similar way, Scotland has developed within a stunning, at times stark landscape marked by harsh weather and limited natural resources—conditions that have fostered clarity of thought, perseverance, and innovation as a means of survival. Place, over time, shapes people; people shape institutions; and institutions shape how innovation emerges and is sustained.
Such conditions tend to produce societies that value durability over novelty, engineering over abstraction, and long-term resilience over short-term gain. In both Japan and Scotland, innovation has historically been shaped by an awareness of risk—natural, environmental, or economic—and by an institutional preference for careful design, incremental improvement, and systems that can withstand stress over time. For investors and industrial partners, this translates into ecosystems where technology development is grounded in practical application, disciplined execution, and long-term horizons rather than speculative scale alone.
An often-overlooked factor in Scotland’s innovation culture is its historically egalitarian approach to education. From the Reformation forward (16th century), an emphasis on broad literacy, driven in no small part by the Calvinist theological imperative that individuals had a personal obligation to read and understand the Bible, grew in Scotland. The result was a populace possessing levels of literacy, numeracy, and critical thinking well beyond elite circles. Compared with England, education in Scotland developed earlier as a national project rather than a privilege of class.
The long-term effects were profound, as this more egalitarian approach to education fed directly into Scotland’s universities, professional institutions, and industrial ingenuity—helping to explain how one of Europe’s smallest nations consistently generated ideas, technologies, and systems of global impact.
The effects of this educational foundation were visible far beyond Scotland itself. Scots were disproportionately represented among the administrators, governors, engineers, and educators who built early civil institutions across the British Empire—from India and Canada to Australia and beyond. Trained in law, engineering, medicine, and administration, they were often selected not for aristocratic lineage, but for competency. Scots became known as a generally capable, practical and pragmatic people.
Consequently, particularly for a nation of its size, Scotland’s contribution to invention, engineering, and the foundations of the modern world has been extraordinary. From Adam Smith’s economic framework and James Watt’s industrial engineering to Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, Scottish ideas and innovations have repeatedly shaped global systems—often in ways so deeply embedded in daily life that they are easily overlooked: every time we speak on the telephone, watch television, or fly safely guided by radar. The list of high-impact Scottish inventions is long and remarkable.
That inventive tradition has long extended beyond Scotland itself, including a deep and often underappreciated historical connection with Japan during the Meiji era. One of the most prominent figures in that exchange was Thomas Blake Glover, born in Scotland in 1838 and known in Japan as Glover-san. Glover supported the samurai domains that later formed the Meiji government, assisted the early founders of Mitsubishi, and helped introduce modern shipbuilding, industrial machinery, and engineering practices to Japan. For these contributions, some Japanese historians refer to him affectionately as the “Scottish Samurai.”
Against that historical backdrop, walking along Princes Street on a clear October day, Edinburgh Castle rising above the city from Castle Rock, I was struck by the thought that modern Scotland—home to a concentration of world-class universities and applied research—may be an underappreciated destination for Japanese companies seeking technology startups, university spinouts, strategic M&A, and long-term industrial partnerships.
Rather than rely on a moment of inspiration, perhaps triggered sentimentally by the visually dramatic setting and familial ties, I decided to stress-test the idea the way a Scottish engineer would—by assuming constraints, identifying failure points, and seeing what still held. What I found was more compelling than the initial impression suggested.
My focus shifted from history and a hunch to hard evidence, which began with examining Scotland’s contemporary research and innovation infrastructure—specifically, whether its universities consistently generate technologies, companies, and intellectual property that are relevant to global industrial and investment priorities. What emerged was a concentrated but diverse ecosystem of first-rate universities, many of which combine internationally recognised research with increasingly mature pathways for commercialisation, spin-outs, and strategic engagement.
