“Blown away” are the words Brad Duguid, Ontario’s Minister of Economic Development and Innovation, chose to describe how he felt after visiting three key centres of innovation in Waterloo Region on Tuesday.
I caught up with Minister Duguid for a quick Q-and-A after he toured the Communitech Hub, the Accelerator Centre and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. A transcript of our chat follows here.
Q – You’ve seen a lot of Waterloo Region’s innovation infrastructure today. What were your impressions?
A – There’s no question that the Kitchener-Waterloo area is a global leader when it comes to bringing together startup ideas, research and innovation, and incubating those ideas and taking them into actual companies.
I was blown away by the creativity going on and with the sheer number of startups that are taking place there. You can see that thousands and thousands of jobs are being attracted to Waterloo Region as a result, and the success, I mean you can see it popping up all around this cluster.
With Google there and others, I think it really is a forebear of that next-generation economy that we’re trying to build in Ontario.
Q - What did you find most interesting about the Communitech Hub in particular?
A – First of all, you saw the names of the companies that are mining that facility for good ideas and opportunities; I mean, some of the biggest players in Ontario and North America are coming through there.
I ran into venture capitalists in there, looking for opportunities.
It just seemed like a mecca for innovation.
Q – What can you tell me about your government’s plans to foster innovation and entrepreneurship in the next few years?
A – First and foremost, we’ve invested more in research than any government has previously; in fact, 50 per cent more than the previous government, over $3.6 billion, so our commitment to research and innovation in Ontario is unprecedented.
Second, it is a critical piece to our efforts to build a global-leading, post-recession economy, and without global-leading innovation, it will be challenging for us to be able to continue to be a leading economy going forward.
It’s a critical piece, and certainly the facilities I visited today are an important part of that plan.
The world is changing so fast and technology is improving at such a rapid pace that we have to be able to adapt our strategies here in this province to that changing world.
The best way we can ensure we’re on top of those changes is to be world-leading innovators.
I think we’ve been good at innovation in the past. What’s happening in Waterloo is bridging the gap between innovation and commercialization, and that’s where we need to continue to improve.
Q – What do you think the rest of Ontario can learn from what we’re doing here in Waterloo Region?
A – I think what we’re looking at in Waterloo is a global best practice. The question I asked many whom I spoke to today is, should we be duplicating this best practice in other parts of the province?
And the response was, it is a best practice, but different parts of the province have different clusters around them. So, there are things we can learn from what’s going on in Waterloo, but whether it can be duplicated in other parts of the province remains to be seen.
The IT cluster and communications cluster in Waterloo is pretty unique, and you put that together with very high-tech-oriented, entrepreneurial post-secondary institutions like [the University of] Waterloo, [Wilfrid] Laurier and Conestoga [College], and you’ve got a pretty unique cluster there that is really ripe to be a world leader.
Q – What can regular Ontarians do to make sure that we maximize our share of opportunities in this new economy?
A – I think one of the things we ought to do is talk about and promote what’s happening in Waterloo a little bit more, in terms of what this cluster is doing and the global interest that it’s attracting.
We sometimes are too modest in this province; we ought to be promoting this as a place of interest in the new global economy so that it’ll continue to attract more attention, more venture capital interest and more large companies, like Google, coming in to take advantage.
Q – Overall, how would you gauge Ontario’s innovative competitiveness on the world stage?
A – I think we’ve gone from a relative non-player to a jurisdiction that is now seen as a hub of research and innovation, whether that be in Waterloo’s sector or whether it be in places like MaRS in downtown Toronto that’s huge in things like biosciences, life sciences.
The Premier’s vision of creating an innovation agenda in Ontario is taking shape and it’s beginning to have an impact. I think that is going to be a critical factor in our efforts to build a strong economy in a fiercely competitive world economy.
