Remarkk!

Digital Media is the hot sector du jour in Ontario, and for good reason. It is one of those rising sectors that are the great hope to support economic growth in an age of de-industrialization. In case you hadn’t heard, there’s a bit of a government-led gold rush going on.

At ICE08, we learned that Ontario’s Ministry of Research & Innovation is investing $9 million in OCAD’s’ Digital Futures Initiative to expand training and research programs in digital media. Sara Diamond, President of OCAD, is a remarkable force of nature and under her leadership, OCAD is aggressively pursuing a reinvigorated research agenda and building partnerships with technology and content industry partners large and small.

We also learned that $10 million is being invested in a new Stratford campus for the University of Waterloo, bringing UW’s acknowledged strength in technology together with Stratford’s vibrant arts and culture community, focusing on digital media.

Both announcements came out of are in addition to the new Next Generation of Jobs Fund, a $1.15 billion initiative modelled after Ontario’s Auto Investment Strategy, which put $500 million into strategic projects and leveraged private investment of $7 billion. The Next Generation of Jobs Fund focuses on three broad sectors: green/clean tech, bio/pharma/health and digital media/ICT. There are three program streams:

• the Biopharmaceutical Investment Program
• the Jobs and Investment Program (focused on projects with specific job targets, including attracting Foreign Direct Investment) and
• the program of most interest to my community, the Strategic Opportunities Program, which is open to “creative industries such as digital media and information and communication technology” to fund public/private partnerships

What is a “Strategic Opportunity?”

An opportunity where:

• A large scale global market opportunity exists, coupled with a unique strategy to deal with the competition, or a niche global market opportunity where Ontario has significant capacity and little competition and;
• Ontario has a demonstrated competitive advantage such as strong private sector strengths including global market leadership, and globally competitive research strength.

Now, here’s an innovation challenge for the Strategic Opportunities Program itself:

How do you identify and evaluate the best strategic opportunities?

The Ministry is holding a series of workshops and doing a SWOT analysis within each of the three focus areas. (sigh)

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good SWOT analysis as much as the next strategy consultant. But have you seen a SWOT analysis yet that provides the needed insight or foresight implied by the goal of developing “next generation jobs”, particularly in an environment of accelerating tech and cultural change?

In the auto industry, panning for job gold is pretty straightforward - you call up the Big 3, the major import manufacturers, the parts and auto technology makers and you’ve got a pretty manageable group to work with. Eventually BIGCO installs some equipment or builds a plant somewhere. Now look at a map of the 11,000 enterprises in the entertainment and creative industries in the Toronto CMA, including digital media and ICT, and you’ll see the problem: 77% of this $9 billion industry are sole practitioners or micro-enterprises. That’s a mighty big river to pan in!

In order for this strategy to be successful, strategic opportunities have to be found, validated by expertise and evaluated against investment criteria in order to be funded. Is there a community engagement strategy that could support this process? What role does strategic foresight, design thinking and collaborative innovation play in its execution? I’m interested in finding out. Leave a comment if you have some thoughts.

[ICE08] A vision for Canada’s future in digital and interactive media and technology…

In 2018, Canada has embraced its role as a model power of digital innovation and become a key node in the emerging global network economy.

Accelerating technological change has altered human behaviour patterns and radically reduced the transaction costs of communication, negotiation and enforcement between and among firms and individual creators.

The web is us. We are increasingly aware of each other, our interdependency and the artifacts of our physical lives made digital. We are also rediscovering lost aspects of ourselves through our heightened relationship with the Other. Canada’s digital citizens have embraced the creative age and are rediscovering their individual creative agency, sense of purpose and values.

Significant private and public investment in ultra-broadband fibre and the continuous march of accelerating technological change is reducing the cost of moving bits towards zero, both over fixed and wireless networks. This inevitable technosocial reality has reconfigured the relationship between creator, content and audience.

Infinitely abundant digital content itself has been transformed. Content is currency, signal and signifier of resources that are naturally scarce: attention, the rare and valuable relationship between creator and audience, unique experiences of transcendent collectivity and the appreciation of rare social and physical objects of culture.

Canada’s media and technology industry underwent a painful transformation process, remaking the supply chain from a few large companies into open commercialization networks of micro-enterprises building social web tools and embracing the economics of abundance.

The new Canadian broadband and media conglomerates embraced their roles as pools of brand-power and capital within a broader open commercialization ecosystem. They shifted their business models and attention towards the edges, embracing the 1% as important to their future adding new venture investment arms attached to their innovation groups.

Together, this tightly interwoven but loosely structured network economy is accelerating through time, projecting the cultural creative values of Canadians into a hopeful shared global future.

Enter the DEMOCAMP/ICE08 blogging contest.

A little more than 2 years after David Crow launched the BarCamp unconference meme in Canada with a mighty yawp, it looks like this “community thing” is catching on in Toronto’s technology scene.

The National Angels Organization has found religion, the Financial Post picked up the excitement, the Toronto Board of Trade loves being host to the energy of DemoCamp, Peter Evans and the crew at MaRS are great supporters of the community, John MacRitchie and the Ontario Centres of Excellence is actively engaged, the organizers of the Mesh Conference are kindred spirits and provide an important platform, Greg Wilson and the University of Toronto are onside, Rick Segal, Austin Hill and other VCs and Angels are joining in, Interactive Ontario sees the value and many other established institutions of the technology and business community are taking note of one of Toronto’s main sources of tech excitement.

The community is an open platform for collaboration, where the interests and resources of a diverse set of private industry organizations, educational and public sector support institutions can be pooled for shared benefit.

So who’s not getting it?

More after the jump…

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In the global economy, today’s winners can become tomorrow’s losers in a twinkling, and vice versa. Not so long ago, American pundits and economic analysts were snidely touting U.S. economic superiority to the “sick old man” of Europe. What a difference a few months can make.

read more | digg story

I attended, along with David, Will, Tom, Eli and another Mark (Raheja) , Don Tapscott’s Wikinomics book launch at Rotman. Wikinomics is co-written with New Paradigm colleague Anthony D. Williams. Anthony is clearly much more than a research assistant. He is an accomplished writer, PhD candidate at LSE, and the accompanying Wikinomics wiki chapter and blog have his fingerprints all over them.

Will and David commented on the interesting collision between the mass collaboration theme of the book and the (mostly) invite-only crowd. My former head honcho from State Street (now Thomson Financial) David Toyne was there, as was former Premier and federal Liberal leadership candidate Bob Rae:

“Bob Rae Loves Wikis” by Will Pate

I am looking forward to participating in the emerging community around this important new book. It links closely to my thoughts around the role of open innovation networks in regional economic development, a theme I will be pursuing this year with some great thinkers. Watch this space.

Technorati Tags: open innovation, open source economics, anthonydwilliams, dontapscott, wikinomics

Growth and innovation come from new urban corridors. China isn’t the world’s most ferocious new economic competitor—the exploding east-coast corridor, from Beijing to Shanghai, is. India as a whole is not developing high-tech industries and attracting jobs, but the booming mega-region stretching from Bangalore to Hyderabad is.

read more | digg story

A new report from Richard Soberman, Professor Emeritus of Civil Engineering at University of Toronto, points to the coming crisis in Toronto’s regional transit system:

Think traffic is bad now? Just wait till 2031, a new report warns, when morning rush hours will see 100,000 extra cars jam Toronto’s roads and 50,000 new riders crowd onto its public transit system as the region’s population swells to eight million.

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From OpenDemocracy:

Climate change is moving up the global political agenda. Two current developments are helping to build the issue’s momentum: the Stern report on the economics of climate change (published on 30 October 2006), and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change conference in Nairobi (6-17 November 2006). A third, the mid-term election results in the United States, may also prove significant in creating space for fresh thinking and policy initiatives in the world’s largest producer of greenhouse-gas emissions.

The article goes on to shed some light on the true nature of the challenge. It points to recent modeling by the Institute for Public Policy Research that attempts to model carbon emissions pathways for the future necessary to keep warming below 2°C. Understanding the possible paths available provides a better comprehension of the stakes.

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One of the most interesting avenues for economics research today is in the area of environmental economics. From Mancur’s classic “The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups” to today, we are still struggling with the economics of collective action and the tragedy of the commons. Our political paralysis over climate change and other environmental issues illustrates the need for new economic theory, policy mechanisms and political practice.
So I read with great interest the news of a report from the UK that attempts to take the climate change debate from the world of climate science to that of economics. The “Stern Report” was written by a former World Bank chief economist, Sir Nicholas Stern.

“Our actions over the coming few decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century,” Sir Nicholas writes.

The report suggests that 1 per cent of global domestic product be spent immediately on dealing with climate change, to avoid higher costs later. Failure to act would lead to a drop of 5 to 20 per cent of global GDP and make large swaths of the Earth’s surface uninhabitable.

Tony Blair is positioning the UK as a global leader in the efforts to deal with climate change, and has signed on Al Gore as a special advisor to the government.

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I don’t want to be all doom and gloom, but I do want to highlight a couple of important economic indicators for the future.

Talk of a real estate bubble, it’s bursting and the potential economic fallout will be front and centre for the next while. The real estate bubble, the US current account and trade deficits, consumer debt and consumer spending patterns and high energy prices are all conspiring to put the North American (and global) economy into a high-risk situation. Brush up on your Tipping Point.

Meanwhile, the auto industry is in dire straights for the foreseeable future. When Dieter Zetsche, Chairman of DaimlerChrysler states that it is impossible to profitably make subcompacts in North America, watch out for continued recalibration of the trade economics of advanced manufacturing up the food chain. This is just the beginning of a larger trend, not a short-term blip.

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