TORONTO – Canadians need to dream big and to promote their achievements in order for pioneering companies to successfully attract capital investment that in turn will help the country build an innovation economy. That was the message from a panel of industry experts who spoke Wednesday morning at the Canadian Telecom Summit in Toronto.
“We need to thump our chest. We need to own the podium for the next version of the economy,” said John Weigelt, national technology officer for Microsoft Canada. “We need to put out that goal and promote that goal so that funding can come here.”
Canadians overall are very humble, said Chris Hodgson, sector lead, multichannel solutions, Google Canada. “We have a significant chunk of the technical leaders in Canada in this room, and I think we could all do a better job of identifying people who are doing good jobs and holding them up as heroes and representatives of what we aspire to be like.”
Hodgson said innovative cultures are ones that are risk-seeking, as opposed to risk-averse. “In order to truly innovate, I think we have to play to win… we have to go from being on the defensive to being on the offence,” he added. “For me, that’s clearly a long-term solution, to change the culture and shift our culture to be more risk-seeking and to be more innovative.”
Joan Vogelesang, president and CEO of Montreal-based Toon Boom Animation, said there is a mindset in Canada that needs to be overcome and it starts with the education of young people. “We need to get into the schools and make entrepreneurship something that’s attractive,” she said. “If you speak to many students today, their great desire is to go into the public service…We’re building a society where it seems more attractive to just kind of coast and go for the pension.”
In her sector, the digital content production industry, has thousands of jobs available without people available to fill the jobs. “This comes down to a fundamental disconnect in the educational policy. Within our schools they don’t want to teach the technological piece. They want to still teach in a very purist sense,” Vogelesang said. “You cannot do anything today without being technologically savvy. So one of the things I’m trying to push with the polytechniques and the universities is that they have to accept that technology is part of absolutely everything the youngsters are doing, and they’re not job-prepared if they don’t do that.”
In the last year, Google has had difficulty finding people in Canada with the skills it needs to fill jobs, added Hodgson. As a result, Google has either internally transferred employees to Canada from other countries or recruited outside people from other countries.
Vogelesang said her company has had to do the same thing. “So that is a scary problem. We need to make sure that we’re vocal about the fact we need this conversion within the education system,” she said.
Access to capital and tax incentives are two key factors in enabling emerging Canadian companies to grow and compete in the global economy, added Tracey Jennings, Canadian leader of technology, information, communication and entertainment at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Canada does have research and development incentives in place that help to encourage activity at the front-end of technological development, Jennings said. However, she said Canada needs to follow the example of other countries that have introduced incentives focused on retaining intellectual property within their countries, such as the “patent box” tax incentive of Luxembourg and the United Kingdom. The patent box incentive allows income derived from patented products to be either tax-exempt or taxed at a lower rate than other corporate income.
“I think it’s time for Canada to look at how we can actually spur, help and support our companies as they move to expand globally,” she added.
Ron Styles (pictured), president and CEO of SaskTel, said it’s important to create a technological infrastructure in Canada that supports companies and industries in every part of the country, such as northern Saskatchewan. “Their problem isn’t that they don’t have ideas (about how to be innovative). They don’t have the connectivity,” he said.
Only about 50-to-60% of the available wireless spectrum in Canada is actually being deployed, because companies with spectrum licences in rural and remote areas are generally not using it. “My view is the issue in future is going to be about deployment,” said Styles. “You’ve got to force deployment to non-urban areas. It’s an enabler for all those industries that are out there.”
Photo by Michael Tomaszewski
