“You can build anything you want if you conspire together.” With Mark Logan

Mark Logan is an entrepreneurship advocate and advisor. Formerly Mark was the Chief Operating Officer of Skyscanner and Chief Entrepreneurial Advisor to the Scottish Government. He now supports entrepreneurship education at the University of Glasgow, the University of Strathclyde and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

Sarah and Mark talk about

• How a love of building things evolved into a love of building teams  
• Why ‘scale-deep’ businesses need more recognition and support
• Encouraging universities to take economic impact as seriously as teaching and research
• The untapped potential in Scotland's world-class creative arts sector

 Connect with Mark on LinkedIn 

Follow the Academic Adventures podcast on LinkedIn 

This podcast was a collaboration between the University of the West of Scotland, Converge and Sarah McLusky, working in partnership with Ross Tuffee and The Connect-Ed Network. The podcast team includes Orla Kelly, Adam Kosterka, Jen Black and Sarah McLusky. This season of Academic Adventures is supported by the Scottish Funding Council.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Mark Logan: The jobs of today disappear and jobs of tomorrow need to be invented. The vehicle by which you invent them is via the creation of new companies. And if you're not doing that, then your economy's going to decline and decline.

[00:00:13] Mark Logan: Roughly half of their graduates start their own businesses. And I thought are we doing as much as we should with not just these artistic assets, but these economic assets?

[00:00:23] Mark Logan: You can build anything you want if you conspire together

[00:00:26] Sarah McLusky: Welcome to the Academic Adventures Podcast. This podcast is all about the journey from teaching, research, and innovation to real world solutions. For season two, we are joined by experienced founders and other experts who work alongside university staff and students to help create and support a culture of enterprise on campus.​Hello there. I'm your host, Sarah McLusky, and you've found your way to the seventh episode of season two of the Academic Adventures Podcast. My guest for this episode is Mark Logan. With a background in electronic engineering Mark is perhaps best known for being the Chief Operating Officer for the Edinburgh based flight booking company Skyscanner as they scaled the business from 100 to 1000 employees in less than five years.

[00:01:10] Sarah McLusky: Since 2016, he's focused on supporting entrepreneurship. This is included a spell as Chief Entrepreneurial Advisor to the Scottish Government, and he's currently a professor of computing science at the University of Glasgow, a senior enterprise fellow at the University of Strathclyde, and an entrepreneur in residence at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. He's also been awarded honorary doctorates from the Universities of Glasgow and Robert Gordon, an OBE, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

[00:01:37] Sarah McLusky: So it's safe to say that Mark knows a thing or two about building businesses. In our conversation, we talk about the difference between scale up and scale deep businesses, and why more focus on the latter could be transformational, why universities need to think more about their economic impact and the untapped potential in Scotland's world class creative arts sector.

[00:01:59] Sarah McLusky: Welcome along to the podcast. Mark. It is absolutely fantastic to have you here as a guest. I wonder if we could begin by hearing a bit about who you are and what it is that you do.

[00:02:11] Mark Logan: Firstly thank you for having me Sarah. I'm delighted to participate today. So my name is Mark Logan and I guess my history is I spent many years working in the startup and scale up aspects the tech sector. For example, I was the COO and Skyscanner during its high growth years where I was leading the general management of the business. Since then I've sort of built a portfolio of activities based on trying to help entrepreneurship flourish in Scotland, where ranging from teaching the subject at Glasgow University through to working with a lot of startups and more recently universities outside Glasgow to just stimulate the entrepreneurial scene or make my contribution to doing that. So that's me. 

[00:02:58] Sarah McLusky: That's exactly the sort of thing we want to talk to you about today. But I think before we get into that, maybe you could just tell us a little bit more about your career journey. So you said you, you really were involved in tech companies. That was your sort of background. 

[00:03:12] Mark Logan: Yeah. A common theme in my career is never to have really planned it. But and I'm always slightly suspicious of five-year plans 'cause they're very brittle and you're not really in control of so many things that they can sometimes just make you feel you're failing. So I've never really followed that pattern. So I started as a software engineer in BT's research labs when I graduated from an engineering degree. And that was all very enjoyable job and formative for me. But I remember one day in those days job adverts were in newspapers. If you might be old.

[00:03:46] Sarah McLusky: I do remember. I'm old enough to remember that. Yeah. 

[00:03:48] Mark Logan: And, I remember seeing an advert for a startup, somewhere in Cumbernauld, the most glamorous kind of tech centre of the world. And, I remember thinking, I want to do that. I wanna be part of a startup. Couldn't really explain why I just wanted to build products and, go through that experience. So I joined this very small company that's six people in it called Atlantech. And we went on a, an amazing journey, very precious experience where we ended up selling the company to Cisco for, at the time, about 200 million dollars or something like that. This is back in 2000 and you know I learnt a huge number of things, made a lot of mistakes

[00:04:27] Mark Logan: But it really set me on that path of interest in startups and after I spent a few years in Cisco as a director of engineering I left and started a company called Sumerian, under the leadership of David Sibbald, who was my CEO and founder at Atlantech. And, did that for a few years. I ended up in, in Skyscanner after having got to know Gareth Williams, the founder there. And he asked me to join as the chief operating officer to, to lead the general business while he focused on product and company direction. And another amazing experience. We went from 90 people to about 1000 and all the things that are implied in that journey all happened.

[00:05:13] Mark Logan: And then when we decided to sell the company eventually to a company called Ctrip, a Chinese company. But then I, in all honesty, I was pretty exhausted. I wanted to change tack and Skyscanner gave me financial freedom to have a few more choices and I'd had before. So it took me some time to figure it out, but decided to, I was used to people telling me and others that you can't grow a big tech company in Scotland. You have to be in London or Silicon Valley. I very much enjoyed being part of a team that proved that wrong. And also earlier with Atlantech. So afterwards I wanted to continue to contribute to tech sector, but not in a 24- 7 always on, highly stressed capacity, which you are in these types of companies. So I I started to do consultancy work. I started to advise startups and scale ups, mainly in Scotland, but also internationally. And I created a course on entrepreneurship for Glasgow University, which I now teach in the computing science school.

[00:06:14] Mark Logan: In fact, last week I just finished marking my exams. So a special week. Yeah. To be anyone who's done that knows what a joy that is. And then when COVID struck, I was asked by Kate Forbes to, to produce a report into how to stimulate the Scottish technical system. And make it just a bit stronger.

[00:06:33] Mark Logan: And, at time I was feeling guilty because I would, go to Sainsbury's down the bottom of my street and see the staff working and they were risking their health to serve us, we all needed these people to be in their jobs. And there was a sort of semi-retired tech guy feeling completely useless in a crisis.

[00:06:53] Mark Logan: So I was delighted to able to get involved in that. I'd intended to just hand it over to government and go and do other things I ended up working with government for initially two and a half years, under the radar to implement the reports. Which was adopted in full by the government.

[00:07:08] Mark Logan: And and then they asked me to take a more formal chief entrepreneur role, which wasn't quite my comfort zone. I'm used to being a sort of, slightly not in the public eye person. But I did that for another couple of years. And then last year I decided after about 5 years I wanted to do something else. And more laterally been working on some private projects, but also I'm now working with the Royal Conservatoire as an entrepreneur residence for reasons we may come onto.

[00:07:34] Mark Logan: But yeah, so that's how I got here. Never planned, but interesting stuff when you can, I think is the way to think about it. 

[00:07:40] Sarah McLusky: I think it's fascinating, this idea, as you say that never trust a five year plan. I always wonder why people ask that because almost everybody I speak to has had some kind of meandering, an opportunity comes up when you take it that just seems to be the way that, that most people's careers go. Or, you move house and you have to get a job where you've moved house, all those sorts of things as well. But it's interesting that despite the fact that you hadn't really thought that this side of things was for you when you saw that advert for a job in a startup, you thought, yeah, that's what I want to do. What was your notion of what that was gonna be like? Why was that something that attracted you? 

[00:08:20] Mark Logan: I think two things. One is that I, I wanted to build things. I suppose that's a, an expression of I wanted to make an impact in the world with the limited tools I had in this case I was a software engineer. And I think carrying that forward even, like skipping all the years in between when I came to do the government work, I also wanted to build things this time in a different way.

[00:08:40] Mark Logan: In terms of building ecosystem or help to influence building an ecosystem that was more supportive for startups. And even in, in Skyscanner, for example. You know initially, I was in love with building products. But I think I eventually changed, as we all do, and I changed to falling in love with building teams.

[00:09:01] Mark Logan: I was quite fascinated by the idea that, for example, Skyscanner at that point a small company in Scotland was under pressure from companies like Google and Booking.com who were trying to kill the company because it was taking some of their desired market share and the idea that you could come together as a group and build a team that was much greater than the sum of its parts to use the old cliche and could out compete person by person a company like Google with all it's advantages, which were vastly more than our. I think that's a, a magical thing. So I got more interested in that, I used to say to people that technology is not a technology problem. It's a people problem. You can build anything you want if you conspire together to so do, but can you conspire together to do it?

[00:09:49] Mark Logan: That's the hard part. So I found that very renewing. And but really the government work was just an extension of the same theme. It was then, let's take this to the scale, not the company level, but at the national level and look at the systems, et cetera, that can help us work together in a more coordinated fashion to create more opportunity for, for people going forward.

[00:10:10] Mark Logan: And the importance I attach to entrepreneurship nowadays is that there aren't any lamplighters anymore. I'm sure you've noticed that was a big job once, used to be. Most of us worked in farms, vast majority of the population worked in farm wasn't that long ago. The point being that they, the jobs of today disappear and jobs of tomorrow need to be invented.

[00:10:33] Mark Logan: The vehicle by which you invent them is via the creation of new companies. And if you're not doing that, then your economy's going to decline and decline. So it's vital that the starters the company leaders of Tomorrow are being stimulated to consider those careers today.

[00:10:48] Mark Logan: And I felt that was a way to make a contribution to our big little country, if I should call it that. 

[00:10:54] Sarah McLusky: And was it this interest in people and teams that, that led you towards this work with universities, do you think? 

[00:11:02] Mark Logan: Something I was very convinced of in Skyscanner was the importance of education. That by education I wouldn't just mean the formal education at school and so on. The need to constantly educate yourself so that you can be good enough to face the challenges you now need to face. And the way we, I think out competed similar teams elsewhere.

[00:11:23] Mark Logan: Partly we had a great product idea and a credit the originator very much with that. But in terms of the team performance when it ended up, all the flight search products in the world were kinda similar, it was how you then took it to market, how you dealt with setbacks, how you adapted to new technologies and so on. And a great part of that was about people learning that they could be much more than the limits they had set themselves. I used to do a lot of education internally to our young people on leadership and what it meant. I educated myself aggressively. Almost to the point of exhaustion perhaps so I could stay ahead of the requirement for me to do what I was doing in an ever bigger company and an ever more complicated market.

[00:12:07] Mark Logan: We even had a Skyscanner University internally that was a thing, was a brand, was a

[00:12:11] Sarah McLusky: goodness

[00:12:11] Mark Logan: a substantial brand. So when I left Skyscanner I was very much in the view that if you think about all these tech graduates that we're producing that very few of them are switched on to the idea of either starting a company or joining a startup.

[00:12:26] Mark Logan: They're all told that this the right thing to do is to join JP Morgan or Morgan Stanley. No disrespect to these companies. We're glad to have them, but we need the starters of tomorrow. So I made the case to the computing science school at Glasgow that they should be teaching entrepreneurial growth techniques. I call it Startup Growth Engineering. That's the name of my course.

[00:12:47] Mark Logan: Give these young folks the techniques, but also the interest to explore that field. And that, that was my first entry into working more closely with the universities. Then I started working with some of their spin outs, et cetera.

[00:12:59] Mark Logan: And then my job as chief entrepreneur took me to other places. So I'd already become a senior enterprise fellow at University of Strathclyde. But I had the great privilege of meeting the people at both the Glasgow School of Art and the Royal Conservatoire, and I was, every time I visit either of those institutions I always feel very emotional afterwards.

[00:13:20] Mark Logan: It's how they think about the world, the importance of creativity. But what I was really struck by. Apart from the, the super high standards people set themselves in these environments was the fact that they're very entrepreneurial. And I hadn't quite clocked that would be the case, because I'd come from this myopic world of entrepreneurship means tech and all those things.

[00:13:43] Mark Logan: But I was struck by roughly half of their graduates start their own businesses. And they network together into bigger, invisible businesses that are working in all our favorite Netflix shows and I was really taken with that and I thought are we doing as much as we should with not just these artistic assets, but these economic assets?

[00:14:03] Mark Logan: Have we plugged these emerging founders into the same support systems that other founders get? No, we haven't. So I started to have conversations with their leadership teams at both institutions and, and I found, for two schools that are absolutely elite in the world, genuinely top five, top 10, the humility and the openness to ideas that they exhibit is, is wonderful.

[00:14:26] Mark Logan: So that's how I started to explore this space as well. So yeah, and it's very refreshing for me. 

[00:14:32] Sarah McLusky: That makes sense. But because it is, that's, I think people looking from the outside, the fact that your career has all been about tech and engineering and then now you've got this connection with the arts and the Royal Conservatoire and the School of Art, helping to connect the dots there I think is really helpful.

[00:14:50] Sarah McLusky: But yeah, as you say, we, when we think of enterprise and scale up businesses and things like that, we. We're not generally thinking of the arts, are we, we're thinking of life sciences or engineering or technology, that sort of thing. Yeah. 

[00:15:07] Mark Logan: Yeah. And I take the view that I think I've made my case and made my point on how we should think about scale ups.

[00:15:14] Mark Logan: And I've made my contribution to Skyscanner. Now there's lots of people making that contribution. So my interest now is, be means support everybody who's doing that, but we need to understand that societal and for that matter, economic success isn't about the occasional so-called unicorn, it's about businesses of all sizes and shapes.

[00:15:36] Mark Logan: And I divide them say into two categories. Just bit simplistic this, but there's a scale up and we all understand what that means. Company, grows and hires lots and lots of people. These companies tend to be based in central belt. The product doesn't, except by coincidence, doesn't serve the community from which in which they're based.

[00:15:55] Mark Logan: But they create a lot of belief in the country. They employ a lot of people and highly paying jobs, et cetera. The other categories, what I would call scale deep companies, these are. Very small companies that aren't going to individually make headlines necessarily, but they're interesting from the first of all, the fact there's so many of them.

[00:16:16] Mark Logan: Secondly, they're geographically very distributed, but most importantly, their product or service usually directly benefits the local community in which they're based and I'd include all social enterprises in that definition or pretty much all.

[00:16:35] Mark Logan: If you really want to reverse the decline in our towns and cities and rural areas. We've got to plan the ability for people to help themselves, which they're perfectly capable of doing in those communities. You can't, persist with a sort of dependency mindset. And therefore, I think scale deep businesses are absolutely as important.

[00:16:54] Mark Logan: And by the way, I think that scale is needed in the early stages of a scale up and scale deep are essentially identical. 

[00:17:01] Mark Logan: so I think there's great opportunities there for us to. To reprice the value of the, that entrepreneurship. I think the reason we don't is not 'cause we don't get it rationally, it's just, it's too difficult to support because there's lots of small things instead of a few big things.

[00:17:17] Mark Logan: So we tend to rationalize why it doesn't matter. If you consider in particular the case of the creative industry, the creative industries and the performance industries are genuinely one of the few places where Scotland really is still leading in the world. I'm not really that interested in being world leading. I'm interested in being good enough. 

[00:17:36] Mark Logan: But it so happens that in our university sector and our creative sector we are actually world leading. And, and if you combine those two things, what could we do with that creative engine. Could the next Pixar come from Glasgow, for example, or could we just enrich the environment around us by giving creatives more reach, and more ability to convert their potential. See what happens, let 'em surprise us because by definition, these people are creative. So I just think there's an opportunity to miss and I'd hate to in a hundred years.

[00:18:10] Mark Logan: I wouldn't be here obviously, but I have someone reading. A hundred years ago, Scotland was one of the most creative countries on earth per capita. It also had some of the best universities on earth per capita. But you know what? They didn't do anything about it until it faded away like the ship industry.

[00:18:24] Mark Logan: Let's be a bit more assertive about using the assets we have for the betterment of the society we live in. 

[00:18:31] Sarah McLusky: Yeah. I think that is such a fantastic way, such an interesting way of thinking of it, this difference between scale up and scale deep and yeah, you're right these small companies, maybe one person, maybe just a handful of people, but they are serving their local communities rather than serving the world.

[00:18:48] Sarah McLusky: And yet, what an impact that could make on that level. So saying then you feel like there's this opportunity there for these universities, these creative minded people to be making a bigger difference. What might that look like? What sorts of things can you envisage that might help? 

[00:19:09] Mark Logan: So I think when it comes to the question of supporting any form of entrepreneurship, I, I think you always then come down to three categories and how you configure these categories will vary depending on the type of entrepreneurship.

[00:19:22] Mark Logan: But one of those is equipping people with the skills to be entrepreneurs. And there's some obvious implications of that in terms of how we teach students, and do we spend the time to teach students about that and when they leave university do we continue that education? So like for example, we have done that tech industry with Tech Scaler, which is in a national network of incubation centers where, educating founders in the playbook of building a company and growing a market is very much a part of it.

[00:19:54] Mark Logan: So there's education, that's the first part. The second part is infrastructure. So do people have places to, to nurture their companies in. Do they have the social infrastructure or the networks of other founders, people to learn from the mentorship networks? These things can happen by themselves, but they can be accelerated and stimulated.

[00:20:13] Mark Logan: What are we doing there? And then thirdly, of course, there's a question of investment. Now investment comes to entrepreneurs when you've figured out the first two, people don't put money into a barren environment, you can see the potential and money starts to flow, but you can feed investments into some of these areas just to help stimulate the ecosystem.

[00:20:33] Mark Logan: You're not investing, per se in one company. You're investing in the ecosystem. May maybe via companies, maybe via o rganizations that help the ecosystem but those three categories of education, infrastructure, and investment we need to have for the creative sector a narrative a position in each of those.

[00:20:52] Mark Logan: Now, if you look at the tech sector, by way of contrast, we do have a very strong position, on each of those things, there's a lot going on there. So my ask is, you know I haven't figured out all the details yet, but let's have an answer in each of these categories. I'll give you like one example in the infrastructure category 'cause it's more easy, easier to visualize infrastructure and we can touch it and see it to some extent.

[00:21:14] Mark Logan: The institutions I mentioned there earlier, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the Glasgow School of Art, they're joined in the same geographic area by, the Scottish National Orchestra, which does lots of film scores for Hollywood movies. We've got the the Royal Opera. We've got Scottish National Ballet, just the other end of Sauchiehall Street and not far from there. We've got the fantastic studios at Kelvingrove. So configured on or around Sauchiehall Street, we've got some of the finest assets any creative cluster or performance cluster could wish to have, but it doesn't feel like that when you walk along Sauchiehall Street, as we pass by empty shop front after empty shop front after shop front. And the answer can't just be, let's create student accommodation over the next 15 years. We should use some of those empty spaces to create performance studios to create craft studios where em emerging creatives from, the two institutions I mentioned can set up shop and work with each other and sell their wares and so on and so forth. A small step like that gives an off ramp for these people to stay in the city and to, perfect their art and to create a sense of community from which other things will then flow.

[00:22:32] Mark Logan: So that's just one example. I'd love to see that people take the risk in Glasgow City Council or Scottish Enterprise, Scottish Government, wherever they may be located to just cut through all their excuses as why we shouldn't do things like that and just do it and see what happens, plant some seeds and see what happens.

[00:22:51] Mark Logan: So that's one small example. But we really need a, a deeper sort of narrative and strategy in each of those categories for how we're going to develop this ecosystem as we have elsewhere. And I think we'll be surprised at the benefits. And one other thing, we shouldn't forget that the, one of the most valuable industries on earth right now is the computer games industry. What is the computer games industry? 70% creatives and performers. 30% engineers. We have a pretty interesting game sector in Scotland. We've got a world-class creative and performance sector, and we've got a very strong tech sector. Why on earth aren't we colliding these things? Yeah. What would come from that? So these are the opportunities and I think via those three categories of education, infrastructure, and investment, we can explore that space. And I vote that we do. 

[00:23:42] Sarah McLusky: It does sound like a fantastic vision. Yeah, I can imagine all of those things coming together in really interesting ways.

[00:23:49] Sarah McLusky: I know one of the other things that you're really interested in is universities taking perhaps more seriously their economic impact in their local area. Can you tell us a bit more about that? 

[00:24:02] Mark Logan: Yeah, certainly. I, my, my sort of anchor institution, if you like is University of Glasgow now about a hundred years or 150 years ago the best example of a university on earth combining research, teaching and industrial engagement was University of Glasgow. The Industrial Revolution was highly accelerated by that institution, James Watt and James Clerk Maxwell and before that Adam Smith.

[00:24:36] Mark Logan: These people were seamlessly engaged in industry just as they were engaged in research. Now, wind forward, many years, we had a tendency in society to erect barriers and taxonomies of skills. So universities not in all cases by any means, but tended to fall into this idea that it was sufficient to be good at research. Maybe good at teaching, although that seems to be optional sometimes. And and industry, did that really matter? But not really. Now, if you look at the modern equivalent of the University of Glasgow, it's like MIT Stanford, these universities, which are now not coincidentally the regarded as the best in the world.

[00:25:18] Mark Logan: Very much. And Oxford, also in Cambridge, very much see this as a triangle, teaching, research and industry engagement. And what one of the most important expressions of that engagement for universities should be entrepreneurial stimulation. Why is that? Because the universities have a privileged position where they stand at the intersection of cutting edge research.

[00:25:43] Mark Logan: Lots of bright minds with time to, to look at that. Lots of young industrialists moving through the system and a bird's eye view as to what society needs. Now if you cut off one of those parts, if you say we're not really an entrepreneurial university. We do research and teaching, I think you're reducing all of those factors.

[00:26:03] Mark Logan: How can you be a world class teaching institution if you don't know what industry needs from your graduates, for example? How can you really say you're a world class research institution if too much of research is, that is an abstract and not really informed by societal needs. And also in the modern age, a lot of the best research happens outside universities.

[00:26:23] Mark Logan: Especially in the age of artificial intelligence. So how can you claim to be a leading institution if you're not deeply embedded in that? So I think strategically universities need to just natively be entrepreneurial. And there some shining examples of that you know I mentioned, creative and performance universities who I think really get this. Strathclyde University is another great example where Sir Jim McDonald some years ago decided that he would differentiate this institution by its entrepreneurial endeavor. And in the most recent version of their strategy for entrepreneurship. They're emphasizing that entrepreneurship isn't about entrepreneurs starting companies, it's about people who are trying to change things. And that can be in social entrepreneurship, it can be in charities, it can be anyone in society.

[00:27:11] Mark Logan: Secondly, they want to take their entrepreneurial engine 'cause they're very good at stimulating new spin outs. Take it outside the walls of the institution into the community. And that's a great expression of, I think what all universities should be. And I, I know that this is perhaps the most difficult time for universities in many years. We should never use that as an excuse for bad strategy. We should still find a way. So that, that's my opinion. Others, that other opinions are available as they say, but that's mine.

[00:27:41] Sarah McLusky: Yeah, I think often these times of crisis, there were the times when you do need that vision and it is that opportunity to make a change, isn't it? And to say, yeah, this is where we are going to plant our flag. This is what we are about, what makes us different, what makes us special. I think that can be a really powerful thing, even in, as you say, difficult times. 

[00:28:02] Mark Logan: Yeah, I think there's a anybody in our leadership position in our institutions has a very difficult job. So let's not pretend otherwise and have to balance many considerations. I think something to be really alert to is I don't know any company on Earth that hasn't had to reinvent itself if it's been around for more than a few years. And to do that, it has to try to figure out what next looks like and has to lay foundations now for that.

[00:28:28] Mark Logan: The companies that fail in these times of change tend to cling on to what used to work even as it becomes more fragile. Now let's translate that into the university sector. It's very tempting to say the bulk of income needs to come from, for example, Chinese students or foreign students from countries that have got enough population to send lots of them to Scotland. And you can protect your position by doubling down on that. But you're in a fragile position. The world is an unstable place. The economies of major countries are, are insecure, et cetera, et cetera. So I think you need to be saying what does a university of the future look like?

[00:29:14] Mark Logan: And it probably needs to find even if it's small, initially, like major revenue streams. It used to be all in government so hence it was, that was the source in the earlier days of universities. It's now all in foreign student fees, but it's a lot in industry and we've just got to find a way to make that a bigger contribution, or we may find that the recent sort of travails and wobbles of our university sector become catastrophic. It it's, it's a, it's a fragile time, when it's fragile out there. People tend to retreat, but I think you've gotta fight that, you've gotta be saying w hat else, what can we develop from the vast potential that we have as an institution to secure the institution's earnings into the future? 

[00:30:00] Sarah McLusky: Oh, well watch this space. We shall see where things go as we move on. Speaking of moving on, we should think about wrapping up our conversation. If people want to get in touch with you, find out more about the work that you do, whereabouts would be a good place to find you?

[00:30:14] Mark Logan: Probably the easiest way to do that in terms of easiest the email address to remember is perhaps my university address, Mark.Logan@glasgow.ac.uk.

[00:30:24] Mark Logan: That would work. Also uh, LinkedIn is a good, way to find me as well. Either of those two. i'm out there somewhere. You'll find me 

[00:30:31] Sarah McLusky: Track you down. Well, we'll get those links as well and put them in the show notes. So, remains to say thank you so much for taking the time. I feel we could have kept going a lot longer, but thank you for taking the time to come along and tell us all about the work that you do.

[00:30:44] Mark Logan: Thank you Sarah.

[00:30:46] Sarah McLusky: If you've been inspired by this podcast, head over to our LinkedIn page and tell us about your biggest takeaways. You'll find a link in the show notes or just search for the Academic Adventures Podcast. This podcast is a collaboration between the University of the West of Scotland, Converge and Sarah McLusky, working in partnership with Ross Tuffee and the Connect-Ed Network.

[00:31:05] Sarah McLusky: The podcast team includes Orla Kelly, Adam Kosterka, Jen Black, and me, Sarah McLusky. This season of the Academic Adventures Podcast is supported by the Scottish Funding Council.