Once a proud symbol of the industrial revolution, the town was reborn in the 1970s when it became the headquarters of computer pioneer Digital Equipment Corp. The company had set up shop within the refurbished mill. But when Digital was subsequently “killed” by the rise of the PC in the 1990s, that same mill became home of the dot-com icon Monster.com.
With this anecdote in mind, Ottawa should eagerly anticipate the future and welcome, with open arms, the next generation of tenants housed in the Nortel campus as evidence of our emerging digital destiny to be Canada’s creative economy capital.
A few weeks ago, when OCRI chief executive Claude Haw introduced the innovation strategy for Ottawa, he outlined some of the challenges and many of the changes that have occurred here over the past few years. His message was clear that our city has evolved into a diverse and strong centre of innovation.
It’s true that Ottawa is better positioned than it has ever been for a prosperous future in what Richard Florida calls "the creative economy," where innovation, entrepreneurship and a highly educated workforce create community prosperity.
But how is Ottawa’s current corporate landscape shaping up?
Companies and markets typically grow on a standard bell curve, with emerging industries rising on the left and mature industries sun-setting on the right. The early-stage side of the curve is characterized by high risk but high growth potential in both job creation and capital gains - remember those heady days of Mitel and Corel?
The middle apex drives consolidation, stability and steady cash flow, demonstrated locally by the continued post-acquisition job growth and product success of the Cognos division of IBM. Nortel had a proud 108-year history but by the middle of this decade, traditional telecom was clearly an industry on the "reinvent or die" side of the curve.
Growth investors don’t want to be there. They want to be on the growth side of the curve, and growth communities behave the same. Rather than looking for government "stimulus" to prop up sunset industries for a few more years, they invest human capital in renewing that cycle of growth.
With excellent colleges and universities, and the highest level of workforce education in Canada, Ottawa excels in human capital potential. One in every two people here has a university degree or college education.
So if our stalwart - traditional telecom - is an ebbing market, what’s on the optimistic side of the curve? Wireless (that’s why Ericcson bought Nortel’s division), mobile applications, photonics, life sciences, digital content, clean tech and pervasive media. These are all future growth industries where Ottawa is remarkably well-represented.
Our telecom heritage makes us strong in wireless. In fact, there are nearly 140 wireless company employing more than 12,000 people in Ottawa, and the city is also home to RIM’s consumer applications division and mobile applications startups such as Seregon.
We are one of the five leading photonics centres worldwide. That sector has over 100 companies and 1,900 employees.
Companies such as Plasco, Iogen, Energate and Seprotech are putting us on the clean-technology map, and the life sciences employ over 1,700 R&D people here. We have the world-renowned University of Ottawa Heart Institute and exciting employers such as Abbott Point of Care and DNA Genotek.
And until the province invested $200 million to attract Ubisoft to Toronto, Ottawa had the highest number of digital gaming jobs in Ontario. We are still home to Magmic, the largest mobile gaming company in Canada.
These are no longer the traditional "tech" industries that characterized the old "Silicon Valley North," but the demand for technologically savvy employees remains. The new companies and the emerging sectors are definitive of the new mobile, digital, green "creative economy," and Ottawa is at the forefront of those trends. While none of them yet has the critical mass of the telecom sector a decade ago, many are already robust employers like telecom in the early 1990s. And all are in rapidly growing markets with huge potential for creating massive employment and wealth over the decade ahead.
This is the true face of Ottawa’s future, yet unfortunately many of us are still focused on the decline of old technology while and continuing to ignore the post-recession cyclical upside offered by our city’s new knowledge-based industries.
By Robert Thompson
Special to the OBJ
Robert Thompson is former CEO of Distil Interactive and a member of the Innovation Ottawa Task Force.
