Innovation Corridor: Together we are stronger

As we all know, competition in the economy is now global. The products we make compete against products made on the other side of the world. That is why, more than ever, it is important that we work together to achieve global scale.

One such effort that has started is the collaboration to create a global scale Innovation Corridor between Hamilton-Burlington and the Kitchener-Waterloo and Greater Toronto Area cities. This is important, since together these cities represent a “supercluster” estimated to be second in North America in the all-important information communications technology (ICT) area.

I will go into more detail regarding the Innovation Corridor when I speak with community leaders attending the June 27 Hamilton-Burlington Bay Area Economic Summit at Royal Botanical Gardens.

The area of ICT is responsible for driving most of the innovation we are experiencing throughout the world in things like cloud computing (Amazon), the sharing economy (Uber) and the Internet of things (autonomous vehicles). These are the technologies of tomorrow upon which our children’s jobs will depend.

We in Ontario and Canada are fortunate to have an excellent education system. Yet our challenge is to turn that knowledge into innovation and create the jobs of tomorrow.

I recently co-authored a book on the history of innovation in Canada with Governor General David Johnston titled Ingenious. In this book, we tell hundreds of stories of how Canadians collaborated to change Canada and the world. There are also many cautionary tales in the book about things like the light bulb that was invented and patented in Canada but commercialized in the United States by Thomas Edison because Canada did not have the scale in management talent or financing to take full advantage of this invention.

This highlights an issue that we have with global competition from a base in Canada — we only represent 0.5 per cent of the world’s population and only 2 per cent of global GDP. This is a very small base from which to compete and we must take care to not subdivide it further and make our position even smaller. Size matters in global competition.

With universities such as McMaster, University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo, and colleges such as Mohawk, Humber, George Brown and Conestoga, we have the intellectual capacity to compete with the best in the world.

McMaster University and the surrounding ecosystem are world leaders in materials science and life sciences. Toronto is a world leader in artificial intelligence and finance, and Waterloo is a world leader in computing and software.

This is a great base of knowledge from which to compete in the global economy. However, even with these advantages we will be subscale on a global level if all these schools and their cities act independently of themselves as well as industry and other levels of government.

When you are in Japan, Germany, India or China, residents and businesses there only recognize regions with tens of millions of people. After all, some of the cities in various parts of the world have populations that exceed the entire population of Ontario. That is the scale of our competition.

This is why collaborating in a cluster along an Innovation Corridor anchored by the GTHA matters. If we do not, we simply will not achieve global scale.

We Canadians are very good at global competition and I know what it can do. I have experienced this myself in my life. I was born in Hamilton and went to Cathedral High School and graduated from McMaster University in engineering. From there, I attended graduate school at the University of Toronto before moving to Waterloo to help create OpenText Corporation, the largest software company in Canada and the ninth largest enterprise software company in the world.

I am now Chancellor of the University of Waterloo and Chair of the National Research Council. I have seen first-hand what our country can do when it puts its mind to it.

This generation has an opportunity to change Canada and the world by collaborating in the Innovation Corridor to create the next economy, thereby ensuring that our children will have the same quality of life and standard of living we have enjoyed.

We cannot take our past success for granted. Working together matters. The Innovation Corridor will ensure that we will win in the global race.

Tom Jenkins is board chair of OpenText Corporation, the largest software company in Canada. He will be a featured speaker at the June 27 Hamilton-Burlington Bay Area Economic Summit. Limited spots remain. Register at BayAreaSummit.ca or call 905-522-1151 x 100.