a chat with Crawford Gillies, the persuasive, ever-positive chairman of Scottish Enterprise, on the subject of Regional Selective assistance (RSa) allocations, this year amounting to ?52.2 million, creating or safeguarding 7160 jobs in Scotland. Since last year, Scottish Enterprise has taken over responsibility for administering RSa, making it easier, Gillies says, to streamline interventions. If you take the recent amazon announcement of 950 jobs in Edinburgh, one of the things they said attracted them to Scotland was the speed with which we are able to move. It s now easier for us to target ambitious account-managed companies. Gillies sees real progress on inward investment, and even suggests that we may be seeing the stirrings of a repatriation of high-value manufacturing that had previously gone abroad. Other bright spots include progress on multiple fronts in renewables and the continued emergence of Glasgow as the engineering hub of renewables in Europe . We are seeing the development in supply chain and the oil services sector is starting to get interested, Gillies says, citing the multiplier effect of Glasgow s new International Technology and Renewable Energy Zone. as for SE itself: Over the last couple of years, we have shown we can respond to downturns and reassess the priorities. If we had more resources we could achieve more, but I am realistic given the state of the public finances. Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce is taking nothing for granted in its bid to secure the Green Investment Bank in the capital, but its main rival, Bristol, is not putting up much of a fight. It s not a big part of our economic development plan, a spokesman for the Business West Initiative tells agenda. Bristol is more focused on next week s announcement of the location of the new enterprise zone, which the Treasury asked if it wanted the day before it was announced in the March Budget.