|
|
As a relatively new industry, software requires analysis in terms of skills whether they fall inside or outside any formal industry. Our exemplar studies have shown that other leading and emerging software regions have recognised that skills dominate the development of the software industry rather than the technology.
Accordingly a metric for assessing the economic development approach in software is employment. In examining development paths for the software industry, we must take into account:
For Scotland, these factors are borne out of the high instances of embryonic firms that emerged from large, non-software firms. They are supported by our consultations with the principals of Scottish software firms who emphasised the role played by large, non-software firms in providing skilled professionals in the most important technologies.
Therefore, for the purposes of our analysis we included software developed within firms whose business is not principally software as well as independent software firms and software consultants (we describe the scope in Appendix A). We describe this potential in the next section. We use the following terminology to distinguish this characterisation:
|
|