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/813780
CENTRE: WBSKI/SKIINGBC; RIGHT: BRADLEY JONES MAY 2017 BCBUSINESS 33 1974: B.C. gets its first socialist government in 1973, and true to form, NDP premier Dave Barrett quickly finds ways to influence the provincial economy. Insurance Corp. of British Columbia, launched in 1974, remains one of Barrett's lasting legacies—untouched by successive right-wing regimes. 1975: As Whistler Mountain grows in popularity, the provincial government creates Canada's first resort municipality and begins build- ing a village on the table between Whistler and then- undeveloped Blackcomb Moun- tain. The Aussies have been squatting there ever since. 1979: Geophysicist Geoffrey Ballard–a fervent believer that the internal combustion engine's days are numbered–launches Ballard Research to help develop proton exchange membrane fuel cells. Almost 40 years on, Ballard Power Systems Inc. is selling its fuel cells to a variety of industries, annual revenue remains under $100 million–and internal combustion survives. newest addition to Finger Food Studios Inc. The com- pany aims high: to change the way industry works. Finger Food, founded in 2009 by chief technology officer Trent Shumay, started off in video games and app design. In 2016, after working for Microsoft Corp., it became the first Canadian agency partner for the HoloLens program, which is creating new applica- tions for so-called mixed reality. The 120-employee company's clients include U.S. giants such as truck- maker Paccar Inc. and home improvement chain Lowe's Cos. Inc. For much of the 2000s, CEO Ryan Peterson worked in Silicon Valley, where he says the success of Apple and Facebook showed him the importance of being first to establish yourself. Peterson also noticed that nobody was going after the services market. "In the Gold Rush, the people that actually made money were the people who sold services—sold the picks and shovels," he says. When Peterson joined Finger Food in 2011, he and Shumay set out to tackle that market by integrating new technology into businesses. As he points out, mass manufacturing still has remnants of the Indus- trial Revolution embedded in its workf low. Take automobile design: in the 1920s, General Motors Co. began drafting 3D models on paper and building clay replicas. Nothing changed until the 1980s, when car- makers started using Auto CAD—but they kept the clay model. "That process didn't change until last year, when this company called Finger Food and our part- ner Paccar went from Auto CAD to a full hologram," Peterson says. Finger Food has shortened the time it takes to build a model from six months to three days, he adds: "We get the data from Auto CAD, and then we massage it and we can put it into a mixed-reality scene." For car- makers, the other benefit is being able to create many different versions of the same model. "We save prob- ably about 10 per cent of the time on the development of a new vehicle," Peterson says of Paccar. "Saving 10 per cent in an advanced manufacturing process that's been going on for almost 100 years is transformational for a business like that." Finger Food is creating a new business, says Edoardo De Martin, director of Microsoft Vancouver. "They're on the leading front of mixed-world computing." As the technology becomes cheaper, small and- medium-sized companies will adopt it, Peterson predicts. He cites infrastructure—want to know what the Site C dam will look like at scale?—as one of many other industrial applications. "One of our big innova- tions is we focus on holograms from 15 feet to infin- ity," Peterson says. "Anything large-scale, that's where we see an incredible ROI, and you can transform busi- ness processes." —N.R. Driving Change A Vancouver automaker says electric cars are the only way to go n electric car is to a fossil-fuel car what the Internet is to a fax machine, says Jerry Kroll, CEO of Vancouver's Electra Meccanica Vehicles Corp., which debuted its Solo one-person electric vehicle in September. "It's less expensive, faster, cleaner, more fun," Kroll explains. "The only difference between a fax machine and a fossil-fuel combustion vehicle is fax paper wasn't killing the planet." Electra Meccanica is an offshoot of Intermeccanica International Inc., founded in Italy in 1959 by Frank Reisner, whose son, Henry, is now president. Relocat- ing to California in the 1970s and to Vancouver in 1982, Intermeccanica has custom-built 2,500 replica Porsche 356–style roadsters like the one Kelly McGillis drove in the film Top Gun. In March, the company unveiled an electric version of the roadster, which will be mass- produced and more affordable than the $80,000 to $115,000 for handbuilt gasoline models. "Our plan is to eradicate fossil fuels and do it cost- effectively," says Kroll, a New Westminster native who previously founded KleenSpeed Technologies in 2007 to develop electric race cars at the NASA Research