HIE chairman sad to leave but is proud of successes

He wishes he could have delayed his departure, which makes way for leading Scottish lawyer Professor Lorne Crerar.

Mr Roe said: "Between now and the summer there will be inward investment announcements in this region that will be eye-watering in their positive impact.

"There is one that is a done deal already and it is just waiting for the First Minister to have a free day to launch it. It will be big, significant and headline-grabbing. There are others which are smaller but still very special that will come along later. They will not all be here in Inverness by any means."

Having whetted the appetite for more information, he refused to give any more details. But he is clearly proud about what will be announced soon, and of what already has been achieved

"What we have done over the past 10 years is to move the organisation to a much more outward-looking focus, across Scotland, the UK, the world.

"The scale of ambition has increased. It has become much more confident about taking on big things and exerting real leadership beyond what it used to do. It used to have a lot of money and used its money to support thousands of grants every year to community organisations, small businesses.

"Almost any business could come here and get a grant. That's not really what we do now."

There is particular pride in the huge growth in life sciences. HIE began working with Inverness Medical Ltd in 1995. The start-up of the company was made possible with an investment in shares and around £5 million in grants for building development by HIE.

The takeover of Inverness Medical in 2001 by Johnson & Johnson, renaming the business Lifescan Scotland, resulted in the company becoming a global leader in designing and manufacturing glucose test strips and electronic meters for monitoring diabetes.

Lifescan Scotland in Inverness is now the largest life sciences employer in Scotland with around 1300 employees, and a cluster has developed around the company. According to Roe many more players are to come.

One of the most recent arrivals, a company called AccuNostics, is based at the Enterprise Park, Forres.

He said the founders of AccuNostics had a track record in the development of game-changing medical device products.

Olly Davies had been responsible for the co-development of the One Touch Ultra, a radical diabetes monitoring system that has made a big difference to the health of millions of people worldwide.

Giles Hamilton, meanwhile, was previously CEO of Glysure, developers of glucose sensors for intensive-care use.

He recalled: "They came here against competition from Edinburgh and Glasgow, the Thames Valley, Cambridge, Zurich and a French location. They brought us this chart with the factors that helped them decide between the seven locations.

"The Inner Moray Firth came out top. We think our location is a problem for international investors, but it is not. They said that everybody getting to work in the Thames Valley has an hour or so journey and arrive angry or frustrated and take time to cool down before they get to work. That's not true here.

"Here they found a work ethic; a high quality, reliable and loyal staff, people turning up for work and being productive in the first minute."

He said these were the same reasons that had led BT to concentrate all their internal servicing work in Thurso.

"These are the factors that led Lifescan to take all its research and development into diabetes from California to Inverness. That was Johnson and Johnson people in Inverness talking to colleagues in California and persuading them it would be a good move."

Roe said HIE's internationalism is also underlined by its relationship with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

"The heart of what we do with MIT just now which has been most successful is getting business leaders from the Highlands and Islands to go and spend time there and get people from MIT to come here on intensive entrepreneurship programmes.

"If you speak to the mostly small business leaders, they are evangelical about the benefits. What they tell us is that when they go to Boston, it is the exposure to people like themselves from other countries in the world, all being there doing entrepreneurship development together, it changes the mindset. Makes them think about the world and exporting."

Roe had a tough time three years ago when he resigned as chairman and director of the Rocket Science consultancy after an audit found it had won almost £150,000 worth of contracts from HIE.

There was no evidence any of HIE's decisions to use Rocket Science had been influenced by his roles in either organisation, but he left the company.

He remembers it well. "These were distractions. Everything had been put in place properly with me coming here, but what it revealed was people had higher expectations, that there should be no possible perception of a conflict of interest."

The following year HIE's long serving chief executive stood down as his house was too close to a controversial development.

Sandy Cumming had been chief executive for nine-and-a-half years, but had served with HIE and its predecessor the Highlands and Islands Development Board since 1973.

HIE had bought the £5m 215-acre site to develop the Inverness Campus, a few years after Mr Cumming and family moved into their new house. But there was deemed to be a potential conflict, once the board decided to invest up to £25m in infrastructure development.

Mr Cumming is understood to have first raised the issue, but in the end had to resign.

Roe is clear. "You can't have half a conflict of interest. You have to deal with it decisively. We have moved on from there. We now have an outstanding chief executive, Alex Paterson, who is driving HIE on to new heights."

It's an ascent Willy Roe would like to be on rather than being left at the 2012 base camp. After all it was a climb he started a long time ago.