The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper. This column was originally published in the Financial Post Magazine on December 1, 2009.

No. Of Companies: 70, R&D Jobs: 350, Production Jobs: 7,000

The Aluminium industry cluster in the Saguenay-Lac St. Jean region of Quebec, about 200 kilometres northeast of Quebec City, is a success story born of adversity. The first seeds were sown at a 1984 provincial economic summit when Alcan (now Rio Tinto Alcan, or RTA), a key employer and the region’s primary aluminium producer, announced plans for job cuts. New technology and the need to reduce costs left it no choice.

Rather than surrender, local entrepreneurs, civic leaders and Alcan itself hit upon a critical job-creation strategy — build upon Alcan’s massive presence and technical expertise by establishing companies to pursue value-added secondary and tertiary aluminium-related opportunities. Within two years, a $10-million venture capital fund had been established — with $5 million coming directly from Alcan — and the diversification had begun. Twenty-five years and several waves of private-sector, university and government-backed incentives and investments later, more than 70 spin-off companies, employing more than 7,000 workers — making everything from specialized heavy equipment to tubing and other fabricated products to world-class casting technologies for domestic and international markets — call the “Aluminium Valley” home.

While every firm is unique, the story of Mecfor Inc., based in Chicoutimi, is representative of the region’s evolution and the ways in which the cluster concept can foster success. Founded as a small forestry services firm in 1987 and later absorbed as an operating unit within a larger, local engineering and consulting firm, Mecfor took aim at the aluminium business in the late 1990s. Read the rest of this entry »

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper. This column was originally published in the Financial Post Magazine on December 1, 2009.

Economic shifts and recession have brought innovation cluster theory to the forefront. Will it deliver? Entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and governments are saying, ‘yes’

It was the little conference that could.

On a cloudy day this past June, a tight group of technology nerds met in Stratford, Ont., to discuss their ambitious new digital media plan. What started as a small meeting of minds mushroomed to 1,000 delegates as momentum gathered. “It surprised us, it snowballed,” organizer Tom Jenkins, executive chairman and chief strategy officer of Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont.-based Open Text Corp., would later comment. Whether motivated by fear over where the economic crisis was taking the country, or simply the chance to hobnob with Canada’s top innovation executives like Michael Lazaridis, president and co-chief executive officer of Research in Motion, the conference ended on a high with a proclamation from above: the gurus — Jenkins and Lazaridis — decreed that this pastoral town (known mostly for its annual Shakespeare festival) would be transformed into Canada’s new digital media centre. Just as they had built nearby Kitchener-Waterloo into a vibrant hub for information and communication (ICT) technologies, they now planned to reshape Stratford, starting with the construction of the proposed Stratford Institute, a digital media innovation centre to be housed at the University of Waterloo.

It was as if the local dream team were channelling fiction by positing: “If we build it, they will come.” Only in this case the “they” are entrepreneurs, and the “field of dreams” a vibrant new industry to help drive the faltering economy in southern Ontario. Even the chosen leader of the project, Ian Wilson, a 66-year old retired librarian and archivist who has never written a line of code, is an unlikely saviour. But he has a vision that the new technology push into interactive digital media will be driven by creativity not just algebra. “[Firms like Open Text] know that the future means they need employees that have both the creativity of an artist and the knowledge of technology,” says Wilson, the former chief librarian and archivist of Canada, who embraced a Sisyphean task of digitizing all national publications. Read the rest of this entry »