FOUR YEARS after his abrupt departure from high-profile public life in Scotland, Dr Robert Crawford CBE is very definitely back. The background for business in Scotland has changed greatly in the meantime, and so has this globe-trotting tsar of economic development. While the nation has become acutely dissatisfied with the slow pace of improvement, the Ayrshire-born Crawford, 57, by contrast, has mellowed.

The former chief executive of Scottish Enterprise now wears three principal hats, supplementary to his day job as director of business development and commercialisation at Glasgow Caledonian University. He also chairs the Scottish Industrial Development and Advisory Board, which advises Scottish ministers on the allocation of the EU's Regional Selective Assistance funding.

Then there is his chairmanship of the Clyde Gateway Urban Regeneration Company, which has £57 million to spend on transforming Glasgow's east end, and which has just appointed former adviser to the council leader Ian Manson as chief executive.

Any idle moments apart from these duties are taken up with his role as prospective SNP candidate for the Westminster seat of North Ayrshire and Arran, where he hopes to overturn the Labour MP Katy Clark's 11,000 majority.

Crawford, who has one of the most varied and high-flying CVs in Scotland, is a compelling talker who combines clarity of expression with a confiding willingness to talk about his background and family. Their concerns feature heavily in his account of the Scottish Enterprise trauma but he appears to hold no grudge against the Scottish press that, in a sometimes shoddy manner, turned his tenure at Scottish Enterprise into an ordeal. As well as powerful willpower and brain power, he shows rueful acceptance of not being suited to all types of adversity.

Even so, his past history shows this scholarly son of a Largs butcher-turned-factory worker to be a great adaptor. Flitting between the public and private sectors in a style more common in the US than the UK, he has worked as a political researcher (librarian for the SNP), salesman and inward investment magnet for Scotland at the Scottish Development Agency and Locate in Scotland, along with a stint at the World Bank and as an academic and partner at an accountancy firm. Perfectionism, ruthless focus and single-mindedness have made him a demanding and sometimes difficult colleague, but Scotland needs world-class technocrats who get things done more than clubbable members of the professional old boy network.

If the SNP achieves the political gains it expects, he will not be around in Scotland for much longer. North Ayrshire and Arran is on the SNP's target list of 20 Westminster seats, though Crawford's skills as a glad-hander and persuader of traditional Labour voters are untried, and he jokes that he does not yet think like a politician: "I have a terrible habit of agreeing with the other side if I think they are right."

A history of attracting inward investment in direct competition with countries such as Ireland allows Crawford to beef up the SNP's case for the fiscal powers of an independent state. "I got involved in politics because I genuinely think that, based on my experience and knowledge, Scotland has a different set of requirements from those which govern the needs of our good friends in the other parts of the UK."

"Working in inward investment I came to the conclusion that we needed the mechanisms, above all fiscal, that allowed us to do things that we can't do under any kind of devolved settlement, no matter how far you take it. I know people keep talking about Ireland, but I went through a point in my career when we were competing head to head with them. Parallels with that country are very limited but the one thing that is certain is that sovereignty creates opportunity."

Crawford's own story explains a lot about his intense personality. As one former colleague puts it: "Robert doesn't suffer fools gladly, but then again, why should he?"

He embodies what he calls "the democratic intellect thing", not uniquely Scottish but an outstanding feature of a country whose best-known business leader - Sir Fred Goodwin - emerged from Ferguslie Park in Paisley, one of its poorest environments.

Crawford himself was all but expelled from school at the age of 15 for being a trouble-maker, working as an apprentice printer for the Largs and Millport Advertiser, the first of several jobs on his crowded CV - even phenomenally well-paid ones - that have proved uncongenial to this restless and relentless self-developer.

Salvation for the young Crawford came through inward investment, via his employment at IBM in Greenock, where he procured parts for long-forgotten piles of hardware. The high-school dropout with a private reading habit (history mainly) was encouraged to attend night school. He won a place at Strathclyde University, and nine years after his ignominious exit from school, he was studying at Harvard University.

"I have nothing but affection for IBM," says Crawford. "They employed people from diverse backgrounds and internally trained and developed them, their whole attitude was quite remarkably different."

Although he no longer controls the levers of the enterprise agency, Crawford's views on how best to position Scotland in the global economy, because of his political connections, arguably carry more weight than ever before. Certainly he intends to play a major part in the Scottish government's "full-scale review of the structure of the Scottish economy".

More of an interventionist (against "market failure") than is currently fashionable, he is concerned about the turning away from manufacturing and the relatively low value of many of our much-vaunted financial services sector jobs.

Back where he belongs at the centre of economic development, and armed with a unique international experience, Crawford's own value proposition now has the space to unfold.