SCOTLAND is building a global reputation as a “destination of choice” for data science companies to invest and develop their businesses, as the country’s data innovation centre declared 250 jobs will be created by the projects it supports.

The Data Lab, one of the UK’s eight publicly-funded innovation centres, said the jobs boost stems from the 52 projects it has signed up to support, with 190 of the total described as high-value roles.

The prediction comes as the economic contribution from those projects, based on the feedback from their leaders, is expected rise to £70 million over the next five years. This is up from £34m this time last year, and The Data Lab hopes the longer term impact with be significantly higher.

Gillian Docherty, chief executive of The Data Lab, said companies such as Spiritus Partners and Brainnwave are choosing to grow their businesses here because of the support they can leverage and the skills they can access. The decision by Spiritus to invest £3.4m in a new programming and development centre in Scotland was announced by Nicola Sturgeon on the First Minister’s recent trip to the US.

Ms Docherty said: “I do think we are building momentum, and it is very exciting to see foreign and direct investments, and organisations coming and being based in Scotland when they didn’t have plans to. Certainly Brainnwave… now have a base in Edinburgh. They have set up their team here when they were not going to until they started to look at the support, the work that we were doing and the access to that talent.

“It’s examples like that [which] are really helping to articulate the value proposition Scotland has, and why organisations should come and set up here. If you look at how the world will change, with automation and artificial intelligence… essentially we want to help make sure we are right in the middle of that, helping build the technologies –not just using them.”

The Data Lab was set up with a £11.3m grant from the Scottish Funding Council, with a remit to enable industry, the public sector and university researchers develop new data science capabilities in collaboration.

Its work ranges from making introductions between companies and academics to commercialise research, to funding training opportunities. This year it expects 90 students it has sponsored, in partnership with industry, to graduate with masters of science (MSc) and aims to have 130 students on next year’s course when it begins in September. Around 40 of this year’s graduates have been placed into internships, giving rise to confidence that the 48 jobs currently supported by projects backed by the centre will expand significantly in the summer.

Among the projects The Data Lab has been involved in is a collaboration with NEL, the East Kilbride-based centre of excellence for flow measurement and fluid flow systems, and Robert Gordon University. The project has been developing data mining software to analyse large data sets from oil and gas industry pipelines. The analysis will be used to forecast predict future trends and identify potential issues before they turn into costly problems.

The Data Lab has also funded a partnership between Brainnwave, a geospatial data specialist which aims to radically cut the amount of time and resources organisations devote to finding the right data, and the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. The project was designed to allow Brainwave to develop technology behind its data marketplace platform.

Ms Docherty noted he University of Edinburgh is the UK leader in terms of the research impact of its work in data science and analytics. With other Scottish universities also scoring highly, she added that they “punch well above our weight” in this area.

“One of the reasons we were set up was to help leverage the capability we do have even further. Part of our role is how we take that and help embed it in industry, such that industry can leverage that for economic benefit,”

Meanwhile, Ms Docherty hopes Scottish universities and data science companies will continue to have access to the talent they need to fulfil their research and commercial ambitions after Brexit.

“It’s important that we have some way of retaining that capability and talent, and that Scotland and Scottish universities are places that world-leading talent want to come and work,” she said.