BUILDING A NEST FOR TECH SECTOR
Ottawa has big plans to better nurture its innovators so startups can thrive — without leaving the capital
When it comes to the tech sector, it’s tough being Ottawa.
Being geographically situated between the booming tech communities of Montreal and Toronto is no enviable position. There are direct flights between those two cities and Silicon Valley, but not so with Ottawa. That can be a vital lifeline for startups.
To capture outsiders’ attention, Ottawa has to offer something special that no other city can. It has to be a hotbed of specialized innovation, a place on investors’ maps, a destination for tech workers.
Invest Ottawa, the anchor tenant of the recently opened Bayview Yards innovation hub, is trying to light that spark — but will their efforts be enough?
“Ottawa trying to rebrand itself as a tech hub is an interesting exercise. I’ve been down this road before,” says Luc Lalande, manager of community innovation at Algonquin College and a longtime tech-community advocate in Ottawa.
He says Ottawa has tried at least once before to establish an innovation centre, lobbying at the time for $100 million worth of investment to set one up. It got nothing. The organization at the helm of that effort, the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation, was renamed Invest Ottawa. Along with the new name came a change of mandate — to be more inclusive rather than focused entirely on tech.
This third instalment of The IT Factor looks to examine the spaces Ottawa’s tech sector occupies, and how those spaces have shaped the city’s past, present and possibly its future.
INVEST OTTAWA IS A GOOD START, BUT GAPS REMAIN
Bayview Yards is a beautiful, well-lit, minimalist space characterized by heather-grey polished concrete, brightly coloured furniture and a fire-engine-red central staircase.
Opened just under a year ago, the $38-million centre — funded by all three tiers of government, as well as private dollars — is meant to be the tech sector’s crown jewel and a buzzing hive of startup activity.
On a mid-week summer’s day visit, it was exceptionally clean, if a bit empty. Compared to the college-dorm charm of Montreal’s Notman House tech hub, it’s even a little sterile. The MadeMill maker space, where entrepreneurs can prototype and workshop products, is impressive, but mostly quiet this day. Many of the desks inside of the incubator space were occupied; sprinkled throughout the building were a few handfuls of people.
Michael Tremblay, Invest Ottawa’s president and CEO since February, says he anticipates things will pick up significantly once a new strategy is rolled out next year.
For now, the incubator is the main draw. Businesses have to pay a modest rent to use the space and access its resources, which include an entrepreneur-in-residence and an in-house adviser from the National Research Council Industrial Research Assistance Program.
Brennan Turner, co-founder of online grain marketplace FarmLead, recently moved out of the Invest Ottawa incubator into his own office. But while working out of Invest Ottawa, he says he maximized the resources there to move his company forward.
“We picked our consultant’s brain on everything. We talked to everyone. I can tell you Invest Ottawa provided the largest pool for us to access resources from,” Turner says, adding he thinks too few people leverage networks and resources to the same extent.
However, the building itself — a converted heritage building once used as a city workshop — is at the end of desolate semi-industrial road. It’s a 10-minute walk from the nearest bus stop, and there are no free parking options.
What is clear is that Bayview Yards is designed to capitalize on the broader momentum of Canada’s tech scene. Tremblay says Ottawa’s overall stability has protected it from the push and pull of the larger technology arena, and it’s now time for the capital region to step up efforts to access the global market.
“We have to get a kick in our step and we need to be aggressive, and I believe we have it in us to do it,” he says.
But as Lalande alluded to, Ottawa has been down this road before. The trajectory of Ottawa’s tech path is not so much a line as it is a roller-coaster, a swirl of new ideas and a revisiting of old ones.
SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED
Ottawa is in a bit of a bubble while the rest of the tech sector is moving fast, Lalande says.
“Just relying on one organization like Invest Ottawa to pull (it off ) doesn’t make sense to me as a strategy. You need all hands on deck,” he says.
Lalande is critical of what he sees as Invest Ottawa’s only superficial level of exchange with post-secondary institutions. Even with higher-ups from Algonquin, University of Ottawa, La Cité and Carleton on the Invest Ottawa board, he believes schools are often looked at in terms of sponsorship dollars and advancing the mission of Invest Ottawa, rather than for building a circular exchange for cross-pollination. Getting the schools to pay for their own spots at the hub “isn’t how you build an ecosystem,” he says.
However, Tremblay says the partnerships with the post-secondary institutions are very interconnected. The University of Ottawa’s three-month entrepreneurship program Startup Garage runs jointly out of the university campus and Invest Ottawa.
Invest Ottawa also says there’s a pipeline between itself and local post-secondary institutions to find active student entrepreneurs to work with, and the organization says it helps facilitate co-op placements and research partnerships with the companies it supports. Masterpiece VR, for instance, is using Invest Ottawa’s incubator space and is working with graduates, a PhD candidate and professors from local universities.
Tremblay also points to the coming LRT, which would connect Invest Ottawa’s HQ to the major academic institutions in town.
“The roots run deep here in the city and I feel blessed to have their support,” Tremblay says.
Still, Lalande isn’t the only critic who says partnerships could be stronger. Jennifer Francis, board chair of the Capital Angel Network, says Ottawa’s technology scene has historically been fragmented — not only owing to its size, but also its siloed subdivisions.
Besides Invest Ottawa, there’s the University of Ottawa’s Startup Garage incubator and the Enactus entrepreneurial program, Carleton’s Hatch and Lead to Win programs and a variety of other student-centered initiatives. There are co-working spaces such as Impact Hub and Code Factory. There are pockets of companies throughout downtown Ottawa, especially between Bank and Elgin, where Shopify and Klipfolio live. Then there are hundreds of companies in all kinds of industries and domains spread out throughout Kanata, as well as L-Spark, a software-as-a-service accelerator in a drab building next door to Mitel.
There’s a lot going on to be sure, but there’s also a major duplication of efforts. Meanwhile, there’s not one single place where wannabe and early-stage entrepreneurs know they should go to find help starting a company. With a broad mandate primarily concerned with scaling businesses, Invest Ottawa might not be able to help everyone.
“I think it’s more the factions that dilute the message, and I think this is where Invest Ottawa could play more of a role,” Francis says.
Those divisions wouldn’t be so bad if the factions at least had a cohesive framework for collaboration and economic development. Right now there are few support options for an entrepreneur or startup that doesn’t get accepted into Invest Ottawa’s incubator — and this is where we risk losing our young talent.
A DISCONNECT BETWEEN OFFER AND DEMAND
Ottawa is a great, livable city — primarily for entrepreneurs and workers with families and a car. For those who rely on public transit, accessing the two main tech areas — Kanata and Invest Ottawa — is a bit of a slog.
At the same time, there are major differences between what young workers want and what Ottawa offers. We know most young people just starting their careers prefer living and working in urban environments and tend not to drive. Young workers like to network with their peers, but there’s no central downtown tech hub. They also have a greater entrepreneurial spirit, with more flexible-workplace demands, which can make working for older, more established organizations an unusual fit.
“I’ve become so used to being a decision-maker. I don’t want to be at the bottom of a very long chain where you get handed down menial tasks,” says Holly Todd, a 20-year-old business student and the president of Enactus, a student-entrepreneurship club at the University of Ottawa.
Todd says she plans to leave Ottawa. “I might come back when I’m ready to settle down,” she says.
Recent Telfer School of Management grad Lea Abboud says she’s excited to see how Ottawa’s ecosystem grows up. “However, I definitely see myself working in the States at some point in the next four to seven years,” she says.
When asked why they want to leave, they said they have larger ambitions than what they think Ottawa is prepared to offer. You can get a decent salary and a stable gig working for the government or a big tech firm, but being an entrepreneur and working for a startup is seen as a more engaging and satisfying prospect — and Ottawa’s tech scene is, as Todd says, just starting up.
Compared to a bigger city, she says, “people don’t think there’s as many opportunities here.”
She’s not wrong. Lalande calls the post-graduation entrepreneur support network a “valley of death,” noting that many of his most promising students tend to leave Ottawa. One recent student went to Toronto to start a company that was acquired by Intel.
“That could have happened in Ottawa, but there was no glue keeping the entrepreneur here,” he says.
There’s no single solution to fix all this. Rather, it requires greater and more meaningful collaboration between business, government and academic institutions, more support and money for earlystage entrepreneurs, more central meetup spaces and networking events, better transit and, perhaps most difficult of all, a major change of perception. Ottawa’s tech scene has a bright future — but it also has a long road ahead. Next week: The next instalment of The IT Factor takes us to Kanata, where autonomous-vehicle innovation could become a defining characteristic for Ottawa.
We have to get a kick in our step and we need to be aggressive, and I believe we have it in us to do it.