With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1081341
MARCH 2019 BCBUSINESS 17 1 What is Canada's Digital Technology Supercluster? It's the coming to life of cou- rageous public policy from the federal government that is designed to do a number of things. One is to encourage and promote the scaling up of small and medium-sized Canadian enterprises, especially in the eld of digital technoloy. The second is to produce platforms, processes and tech- nologies in the digital space that are marketable domestically and internationally, and thereby grow our presence in the inter- national marketplace as the leader in digital technologies, and grow our GDP and jobs. The third is to change the way we do business. In British Columbia we still do most of our business either as an indi- vidual organization or some- times in partnership with another organization. What the Supercluster does is cre- ate a truly collaborative envi- ronment where at least three organizations, one of whom is a small company, work together. In that way, we are dramatically changing the way we come up with ideas and implement ideas into real business initiatives. 2 Why is B.C. a digital tech- nology leader? B.C. has a long history of being a strong environment for start- ups and the innovative think- ing that comes around that. B.C. has a long history of exceptional talent because of the startup culture and also because we clearly have a strong talent pool in digital. And when we think of digi- tal historically, we think of the entertainment industry—digital games, movies, et cetera. It's no accident that leaders in the digital space, whether it's Electronic Arts or Sony or Microsoft or even Amazon now, have come to establish signicant operations in B.C. It's because they know that we have the talent here. And the digital talent that grew up in the video game and the enter- tainment industry, that talent is transportable to other forms of digital, whether it's natural resources or precision health. 3 What do you say to people who are skeptical about the federal government putting up $950 million to fund the national Innovation Superclusters Initiative, which consists of five superclusters across the country? We haven't considered our- selves leaders as a nation in technoloy, in innovation and in scaling startups. And so the federal government has said we are going to invest $950 mil- lion, and we're going to ask the private sector to lead it. You've got a choice: as a government you can either make an invest- ment that is founded on good due diligence and do something that hasn't been done before and really drive it to success, or you can wait for the world to take us over on that front. The second thing I would say is, the very thought that we now have over 700 orga- nizations signed up to be involved in the Digital Tech- noloy Supercluster out of British Columbia says to me that organizations see merit in this initiative. 4 With some experts sounding the alarm about Canada's declining R&D spending, how much will the Superclusters Initiative help reverse that trend? If you look at the rate of invest- ment that we see in R&D across Canada and in B.C. over the past 10 years relative to the U.S. or the rest of the world, that's alarming. So is our productiv- ity rate; that gap is broadening. This gives us an opportunity to encourage and incent invest- ment in research and develop- ment and innovation, and I'm hopeful that the fact that we've got so many organizations pre- pared to invest in this initiative suggests that they see a benet and we'll see an increase in investment in that area. ILLUSTRATION BY KAGAN MCLEOD SUE PAISH The CEO of the B.C.-based Canada's Digital Technology Supercluster shares her vision for the business-led effort by Nick Rockel F I V E Q U E ST ION S PREVIOUS ROLES CEO, LifeLabs Medical Laboratory Services; CEO, Pharmasave; managing partner, Fasken FAVOURITE CONCERT Perhaps most memorable was an impromptu Eagles set outside Rockefeller Center in New York FAVOURITE PLACE IN B.C. The Pacheedaht First Nation on Vancouver Island at Port Renfrew — HOBBY I love cooking weekend family dinners for our three daughters and the guys in their lives ( the informer ) The risk we face is that our humility, which is a very desirable quality, can become a drag on our success and celebrating our success. We will never as a country be boastful or arrogant–nor do we want to be. But let's take stock of the success that we've had, and let's celebrate the fact that we've got the world's only functioning quantum computer [at Burnaby-based D-Wave Systems] and we are the birthplace of real AI, and let's build on that. 5. WHAT CHALLENGES WILL CANADA FACE AS IT SEEKS TO LEAD IN TECHNOLOGIES SUCH AS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, QUAN- TUM COMPUTING AND VIRTUAL AND AUGMENTED REALITY?