Lena wilson scottish enterprise biography of williams

I am looking forward to continuing to work with her as we move forward into the next stage of our development. She has an excellent track record in delivering results. Skip to content. Scottish Enterprise chief executive Lena Wilson steps down. I was 22 and it was an amazing opportunity; I think when I look back now they definitely mistook enthusiasm for actual ability.

A couple of years after she started one of the directors left to join a competitor company from Florida in the US. He headhunted Wilson to join them as part of the start-up team of Techdyne in Livingston. By the time I came out I could have probably passed myself off as a technician.

Lena wilson scottish enterprise biography of williams

I think it has probably stood me in good stead even today because I do have that manufacturing background and understand a lot of the issues and always take a keen interest in all things manufacturing. After five years Wilson decided it was time to move on. Following months of tests and interviews and then a weekend away to choose the final few she was accepted.

Ironically Wilson was the last person to be recruited for the programme but she has now brought it back 21 years later. As well as looking for the brightest and the best and a great attitude we are looking for subject matter expertise as well. I am really passionate about that. She also did an MBA at the University of Strathclyde Business School as soon as she joined spending two nights a week at the institution.

Meanwhile she was quickly promoted and was the first female executive LIS had for investment in Japan. One of her biggest and earliest tasks was organising the first big healthcare conferences it had in Japan promoting Scottish healthcare opportunities. She also worked in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and in Seoul. Then she got a more senior post on the US covering the southern states.

It was the heyday of inward investment in Scotland and many deals were done and Fridays were often a celebration day. But equally losing a deal was devastating. We lost that project and it was like a death. Wilson stayed with Locate in Scotland until when she successfully applied for a job as director of development for Forth Valley Enterprise to widen her experience in the SDA.

Later she was promoted to become chief operational officer of the LEC. She became heavily involved in the creation of new business parks in the area in co-operation with the local council. I was just gathering experience and knowledge all the time. In she was seconded to the World Bank following in the footsteps of Robert Crawford who was chief executive of Scottish Enterprise between and Scottish Enterprise had an internal competition and Wilson was one of three put forward for the post.

Her role was as a special adviser. There are lots of actuaries and lots of insurance specialists and risk analysts. So I was advising on how we should be doing that and the kind of materials we should be using and the content. She worked with about 28 countries over two and a half years. I had never worked in a developing country before and it was the first time I realised how transferable your skills can be to other environments so I could take what I knew from the developing world.

But also it was really humbling. I was in countries where we stayed in the best hotels and realised most of the world lives on less than two dollars a day. I got to sit alongside the president of the World Bank. I got to go to Harvard. I won a place on the executive development programme whilst I was there which was a tremendous experience.

Today she acts in an advisory capacity to a team within the World Bank that undertakes foreign investment. Last year she delivered a seminar at the International Monetary Fund in Washington. After her time with the World Bank she came back to a brand new role at SE as senior director of customer relations. It was about seeing ourselves much more as a service-orientated business like a big-five consulting firm as well as an economic development agency.

It was change management. It was a blank sheet of paper. I think we had become quite fragmented with 12 different local enterprise companies and it was to bring a stronger sense of one Scottish Enterprise. There was quite honestly duplication and so a lot of the work there was leading us towards the reforms John Swinney was brave enough to make in Scotland is too small a country to have such fragmentation.

Early life and career [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. Retrieved Offshore Energy. BBC News. The Royal Society of Edinburgh. Categories : births Living people Civil servants from Glasgow 21st-century Scottish civil servants 21st-century British women civil servants Civil servants in the Scottish Government. Hidden categories: Articles with short description Short description is different from Wikidata Articles with hCards.

Toggle the table of contents.