BUILDING A TECH FUTURE
There are concrete steps we can take toward turning our town into a tech hub
Steps that could make Ottawa a hub
In the waiting room of the mayor’s office, a folksy rendering of Ottawa’s coat of arms is mounted on the brick wall. “Advance Ottawa En Avant,” reads the banner, written in block letters.
It’s a phrase that once served more militaristic purposes, but it’s still very much the battle cry of the mayor’s office today — particularly as Ottawa rallies to become a tech destination.
Mayor Jim Watson pounded the drum for Ottawa when he visited Amazon at its Seattle headquarters in September, trying to persuade the e-commerce giant to set up its second HQ in Ottawa. He took that drum up again when the city’s lead economic-development agency, Invest Ottawa, opened the $30-million Bayview Yards Innovation Centre about a year ago. And he pounds the drug once more when he meets with me in his office to discuss the city’s tech sector.
“Certainly, locally in Ottawa, I’m very optimistic about the tech sector and its potential to grow even bigger and see great success stories like right across the street there, Shopify — they’re bursting at the seams and taking floors in other buildings in the downtown core,” says the mayor, sitting in his aquamarine-painted office.
He enumerates Ottawa’s best qualities, touching on its green space, walkability, cultural institutions, quality of life and low crime rate. One in nine workers is a scientist or engineer, Watson continues, handing over a printout from Invest Ottawa’s website listing the city’s recent accolades. It’s an impressive list that names Ottawa the best place to live in Canada, the best tech hub to live and work in the country and the best home to new Canadians, among other honours. These are the selling points his office uses to woo outside talent and investors to the capital.
The page is titled, “The Capital advantage: We’re not the only ones who think Ottawa is special.”
That graciously polite, halfjoking title may appear benign and even a little self-deprecating, but it has a larger symbolism in the context of the city’s tech community. Ottawa is self-conscious about celebrating itself, and when it does there’s often a “don’t forget about us” character to it, almost as if it’s a neglected middle child tugging at the sleeve of Canada’s technology family.
That showed through when an applause-o-meter at a Senators game asked fans to “make noise for Amazon” — a cringeworthy move that got it named on Verge.com’s list of the eight “most outrageous things cities did to lure Amazon for HQ2.” Amazon says it received 238 applications from cities looking to host its second headquarters.
Since The IT Factor series began in October, the Citizen has explored the reputation and branding of Ottawa’s tech sector, its talent pool and future needs, the spaces where innovation magic happens (and is supposed to happen) and how its burgeoning autonomous vehicles cluster could give Ottawa’s claims of tech greatness some credence.
In this final instalment of The IT Factor, we’ll look at what it would take for Ottawa to move forward on its tech dreams — or, as the motto says, “advance.”
BUILDING AN ECOSYSTEM 101: IT’S HARDER THAN IT LOOKS
So, is Ottawa’s tech sector special? Sure it is — just like everyone else’s.
The promise and the peril of the tech biz is that someone could be working in total obscurity on something completely life-changing and disruptive to the status quo. Other cities have perhaps done a better job of mining those dark corners where geniuses toil away and of exposing them to the spotlight.
This is often accomplished through concerted, collaborative efforts to spur investment, creativity, networking, partnerships, discovery, innovation, risk, support and growth. Building an ecosystem like this is both a money-maker and a labour of love, with various players pouring swimming pools’ worth of sweat equity into the community.
Ottawa’s tech sector isn’t one ecosystem, though; rather, it’s multiple microcosms living side by side. Perhaps that’s an echo effect of the government’s organizational influence. Still, Ottawans mostly live in silos, where most people are content to keep their heads down and do their own thing. Sometimes we inquisitively look over the fence at our neighbours, maybe make polite conversation — but mostly we mind our own business.
The thing is, Ottawa already has some of the parts it needs to build a decently cool ecosystem. It’s got a highly educated population, four post-secondary institutions, several individual programs geared at helping startups, as well as hundreds of high-tech companies.
And yes, there are some examples of industry-specific collaborative efforts — e.g., the Centre of Excellence in Next-Generation Networks and the autonomous-vehicle cluster, where big companies work with smaller ones toward advancing a common mission.
However, proximity breeds collaboration, and Ottawa sure is big. Supercluster status may have helped forge these bonds, but alas, the city’s applications did not get shortlisted for the federal supercluster program.
When it comes down to it, building an active, inclusive and exciting tech ecosystem requires just a few people with vision to do some serious heavy lifting.
This from-the-ground-up kind of work often feels like herding feral cats. Like most other community work, it’s exhausting and typically not well-paid, if paid at all; if you work an unrelated full-time job already, it means spending most evenings and weekends organizing and networking — sometimes for years before anything fruitful emerges.
And it can’t be approached with a build-it-and-they-will-come mindset, either; the work requires asking other people to shift their thinking and contribute their thoughts, time and efforts — for free, or even at a cost to them — to a communal goal.
Luc Lalande, a longtime advocate for Ottawa’s tech community and the manager of community innovation at Algonquin College, points to Pittsburgh as an example of academic-industry-government collaboration done right.
“(Pittsburgh’s) current position is the result of quiet leadership from across the public, private and civic sectors, by people who understood the need to move away from a sole reliance on heavy industry, and developed the robust innovation ecosystem powering today’s growth,” wrote CityLab earlier this year.
“I haven’t seen that in Ottawa,” Lalande remarks. We have the National Research Council, and so many other resources at our disposal here, and they barely feed into the ecosystem at all, he concludes.
Community isn’t everything, but as other cities have learned, it certainly helps. Still, these gaps may prove too big and difficult for Ottawa to overcome in a meaningful or timely way, and that’s fine — but if that’s the case, it will have to adjust its self-perception and goals accordingly. It’s good to be optimistic and hopeful, but not at the expense of taking action on the present reality.
SO WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
The truth is, if founders have an opportunity to grow their businesses faster and better elsewhere, most will take it. As The IT Factor explored, Ottawa’s tech sector needs more investment — and a smarter allocation of resources and money — to help startups scale into profitable companies here.
That means there need to be incentives to keep promising Ottawa-born companies at home, as well as to attract other startups to the area. “Incentives” here doesn’t mean tax cuts; it means making sure companies on the brink of success don’t fall off the funding cliff in Ottawa.
As facile as it sounds, lobbying for a direct flight to Silicon Valley could help. So would having more links to venture capital — perhaps a venture-funded startup accelerator like FounderFuel, publicprivate accelerators like InnoCité and a more solid link between academic startup labs and the investor community. After all, investors follow each other and often go in on funding rounds together, so it’s in Ottawa’s best interest to make it as easy as possible for them to discover new technologies, companies and founders.
And finally, keeping more exciting startups in town will likely also keep younger and specialized talent here. With five or 10 years of tech-sector experience, they’ll be ready to scale a company or start their own — ideally right here in Ottawa.