Part of National Productivity Week, discover how The Crichton Trust Estate empowers rural businesses with heritage spaces, green innovation, and NetZero solutions. The 2025 Scottish Productivity Week will focus on unlocking the potential within the Scottish economy for inclusive growth and prosperity for all, developing the key themes of the December 2023 Productivity Week, which focused on improving productivity to generate a strong economy, prosperity for all, and quality public services. These remain important and the 2025 Productivity Week will address how to unlock the potential of the Scottish Economy to support the above.

To do this, it will explore:

• Ways of working
• Ways of investing
• Ways of innovating.

We need to explore innovation in the ways we work considering the rise of purpose in business, different modes of working including hybrid work, and wellbeing at work. The investment landscape is changing and evolving in relation to broader socio-economic and environmental challenges, new investors and strategies and innovative approaches such as crowdfunding. In terms of unlocking potential, innovation is key, including technological as well as business process and organisational change.

The Scotland Productivity Forum, in collaboration with Prosper and Peer Works, along with businesses, universities, and public and third sectors, seeks to identify a range of opportunities and challenges for unlocking the potential of the Scottish economy. This needs to consider Scotland’s diverse geography and its range of businesses in urban and rural places across many sectors (finance, manufacturing, agriculture, creative) and sizes (SMEs, multinationals, large businesses, and start-ups). To this end, National Productivity Week will see events happening across the Central Belt, as well as here at The Crichton in Dumfries and Galloway.

The Scottish Productivity Week 2025 aims to raise awareness, improve knowledge and share and learn amongst businesses to unlock their potential. From this learning and sharing, the Scottish business community, Government and policymakers can identify what support is needed – whether that’s infrastructure, skills training, investment, worker wellbeing practices and/or technology. The programme brings together experts from business, policy, and academia to discuss the characteristics of the level of Scottish economic growth and how to improve levels of growth.

Agenda

13:00 – 13:15 Welcome and introduction to the Crichton Trust from Gwilym Gibbons (CEO | The Crichton Trust)

13:15 – 14:30 Tour of the site & meeting local businesses

14:30 – 15:30 Discussion: Unlocking the potential of the rural economy