THE hunt is on for Scotland’s leading entrepreneurs as nominations open for a prestigious awards scheme.
Run by Entrepreneurial Scotland in association with media partner The Herald the awards will recognise people who have excelled in entrepreneurial leadership over the past 12 months.
Sandy Kennedy, chief executive of Entrepreneurial Scotland, said: “We are committed to shining a light on the most outstanding entrepreneurial talent in the country. They are the ones who can inspire others and who will play a leading role in Scotland.”
The 2017 awards fall into two categories.
The Entrepreneur of the Year award celebrates the achievements of business figures who are leading established firms. It is supported by professional services firm Deloitte. Past winners have included Jim McColl of Clyde Blowers
This year Barclays is backing a new award category, ‘Scale-Up Entrepreneur of the Year’. The award will recognise the achievements of leaders who are building scale-up organisations or firms with outstanding potential.
Winners of the previous Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year category have included Lucinda Bruce Gardyne of the Genius Gluten Free business.
Specialists in entrepreneurial business at Deloitte noted the past few years have demonstrated how many inspirational leaders and innovative new businesses there are in Scotland.
A spokesman for Barclays said the country has a growing number of companies with the potential to scale-up and become major forces.
The awards will be presented at a celebration dinner at SWG3 in Glasgow on Thursday, 30 November.
Nominees from all sectors will be considered. They can be company founders, chief executives or leaders of innovative organisations or family businesses.
Nominations are open until Wednesday 16 August. They can be made by people on their own behalf or by anyone who believes their candidate qualifies.
A short list of finalists will be judged by a panel that includes last year’s Entrepreneur of the Year, Jimmy Milne of Balmoral Group, and Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year, Chris Gauld of Spark Energy.
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 here