Helping Scotland's innovation clusters connect and grow
Scotland has world-class innovation activities in energy transition, life sciences, fintech, space, and advanced manufacturing. But the businesses, investors, and researchers who needed to engage with that activity - to find partners, assess supply chains, access expertise, or make location decisions and had no single authoritative place to do it.
While some sectors have historically had well-established Cluster Management Organisations with professional leadership and clear strategies, others were informal, inconsistently resourced, and largely invisible to the businesses, investors, and policymakers who needed to engage with them.
Scottish Enterprise, working with Scottish Government, Highlands & Islands Enterprise, and South of Scotland Enterprise, set out to change that. The ambition was a single national platform, a trusted, authoritative home for the Scottish Clusters Scheme that would make Scotland's cluster landscape visible, navigable, and credible to a global audience.
Ember delivered three interconnected components under a single platform at clusters.scot.
The Clusters Scheme provides a structured public presence for each of Scotland's priority clusters, individual pages for each Cluster Management Organisation covering purpose, accreditation status, case studies, and contact routes. For the first time, Scotland's cluster landscape is visible and navigable in one place.
The Industry Directory gives businesses, investors, and development agencies a powerful way to search Scotland's industrial base by sector, geography, and keyword. A permission-based model allows Scottish Enterprise account managers to access commercial intelligence while the public directory remains fully open. The architecture is built for future integration with SE's broader data infrastructure.
The Cluster Playbook transforms a substantial body of guidance developed by the four enterprise agencies into an interactive digital resource for Cluster Management Organisations - structured frameworks, process maps, and stage-by-stage tools to help CMOs develop their clusters with confidence.
The platform was built to WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility standards, hosted on Ember's ISO 27001-compliant, Net Zero cloud infrastructure, and delivered with a CMS that empowers SE content teams to manage everything without technical support.
The Scottish Clusters Platform launches on 1 July 2026 as the public-facing centrepiece of the national Scottish Clusters Scheme, giving Scotland's innovation clusters a professional, consistent, and internationally credible digital presence for the first time.
It is the third platform Ember has delivered for Scottish Enterprise in the economic development space. Our earlier work includes GlobalScot, SE's flagship international business collaboration network, connecting Scottish businesses with experienced Scottish leaders around the world, and, Scotland Europa, the digital platform for Scotland's Brussels-based EU engagement service, built as a derivative of GlobalScot and delivered in eight weeks.
Across all three projects, the goal has been the same: help people find each other, connect around real business challenges, and organise under a shared strategic purpose. The Scottish Clusters Platform is the latest expression of that work and a further demonstration of what sustained, expert digital delivery can do for Scotland's economic development ambitions.
