Opinion Piece by TecTonic Director, Nick Murray. Originally published in The Scotsman, 15 Aug 2026
After more than a decade working across startups, creative industries, international programmes, and now impact ventures, I’ve realised that most of my jobs have had the same underlying purpose: creating situations where good things can happen between good people.
That sounds simple, but it’s surprisingly difficult to design.
The best ideas rarely come from a perfectly mapped-out process. More often, they come from a conversation that wasn’t planned, or a question asked by someone outside the echo chamber.
That, to me, is one of Scotland’s greatest strengths. We are small enough that almost everyone is closer than they appear. Need to speak to someone who has raised venture capital? Built a games studio? Produced a theatre show? Designed satellites? Run a distillery? Chances are you’re just one degree of separation apart. In a larger country, those worlds might never meet. Here, they could overlap with ease.
The challenge is that modern life is increasingly designed around familiarity. The platforms originally built for community and discovery now encourage siloed thinking and tribalism.
The most valuable conversations are often the ones that weren’t planned. That is why curiosity matters and innovation blossoms from these positive collisions.
Not the version of curiosity that appears on LinkedIn from personal development slop or a manufactured epiphany used to sell a value proposition. True curiosity is walking into a room where you don’t know anyone, asking a question without worrying whether it sounds obvious, and being interested in someone else’s world without calculating how it benefits your own.
I saw this clearly while travelling through ecosystems abroad. What stood out wasn’t the investment or the scale, but the generosity. Conversations started with “How can I help?” rather than “What’s in it for me?” That mindset compounds, and it’s something Scotland already has in abundance. We just need more opportunities for it to happen.
That’s one of the reasons Glasgow Tech Week’s format really matters. For a week every year, the city becomes a playground where different communities naturally overlap, and those accidental conversations are usually where the magic happens.
It’s the belief behind everything we’ve tried to build through TecTonic Night Summit. Not another talking shop where people sit and nod politely, and draft an AI-generated LinkedIn wrap-up post on the way home, but a space that reflects the reality of innovation here: messy, vibrant, and full of people tackling problems from completely different perspectives. You can’t manufacture those moments, but you can create the conditions for them to happen.
It’s easy to focus on what we lack. We should also recognise what we already have: a country of five million people with an unusually powerful ability to connect ideas, industries and individuals.
Perhaps the question isn’t only what we build, fund or scale, but how we choose to show up for one another. Because curiosity is more than a personality trait. It might just be one of our greatest competitive advantages.