Heriot-Watt University and Scottish Edge CIC KTP 24_25 R5

Scottish EDGE, a competition that has already funnelled millions of pounds into early-stage businesses, is being redesigned so it can be cloned in other regions without losing what makes it work. The problem is straightforward: a successful model for supporting entrepreneurs—combining prize money, mentoring, and investor access—has proven difficult to export. Each new region has different economic conditions, local business cultures, and administrative rules. Without a flexible framework, attempts to replicate the competition risk either becoming too rigid to adapt or straying so far from the original that they lose the core values that made Scottish EDGE effective. This project embeds sociotechnical design expertise at Scottish EDGE to build that framework. If it succeeds, the result is a replicable template that other regions—across the UK and potentially internationally—can use to launch their own versions of the competition. The practical impact would be more localised support for early-stage companies, more diverse entrepreneurial ecosystems, and a faster route from idea to viable business in places that currently lack such infrastructure. The research is applied and directly actionable: it aims to change how a specific funding mechanism operates, not to generate new fundamental knowledge.