Finance Secretary John Swinney will this week set out the opportunities that independence provides to enhance business innovation and internationalisation.
Speaking ahead of the UK Budget to an audience at Edinburgh University, Swinney is expected to call on the Chancellor George Osborne to improve the existing tax framework for research and development (R&D) in the UK to provide the most efficient mechanisms to stimulate investment by innovative industries.
He will point out that Denmark and Finland spend nearly twice as much on R&D as a proportion of GDP as Scotland.
Swinney will say: "Independence - in providing access to all economic levers - would present an opportunity to develop a fully aligned and coherent framework to encourage and support Scottish innovation.
"In [its document] Building Security and Creating Opportunity, the Scottish Government set out financial levers available to support and encourage innovation, including tax incentives such as the WBSO, a payroll tax incentive which currently operates very successfully in the Netherlands.
"Research shows that this type of scheme can have strong positive impacts on SMEs, increasing their R&D spend, helping with cash flow, stimulating demand for innovation and creating high value jobs.''
Swinney will points to Finland as "one of the few high-performance countries with high rates of both higher education R&D and business R&D".
Scottish Culture and External Affairs Minister Fiona Hyslop visited Finland's innovation agency, Tekes, in Helsinki last week.
"The Scottish Government is in active discussion with the Tekes agency,'' Swinney will say.
"If we truly want to see a major change in Scottish business innovation to transform our economy we need full responsibility for innovation support in its entirety, including control of all fiscal levers.
"We could then put this at the command of a high-profile and empowered Scottish Agency for Innovation that would become the engine behind business innovation growth in Scotland."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article