Fly over Atlantic Canada and you see the ocean, coastlines, forests, farms, and lakes, as well ascities and towns. Zoom in on many of the communities and you will find a constellation of universities, colleges, and government labs run by the National Research Council and other agencies—the highest per capita concentration in the country. This abundance of natural wealth and brainpower is the nexus of the region’s “research-and-discovery” economy. It is a quiet sceneon the surface, without the bombast of a gold rush or the smoke and fire of iron and steel.

Yet once a science or technology firm has become a household word, we tend to forget its humble origins. The founders of Yahoo! got their start in a trailer behind the engineering buildings at Stanford University in California. Ditto for Google, star of that big shiny IPO.

As the pages of this magazine reveal, the variety of basic and applied research in Atlantic Canada is astounding: software for teaching music remotely, advances in neuroscience and genomics, functional foods, networked supercomputers, wireless systems labs, occupational health and safety, research into climate change, soil remediation, biofilms, even into how teachers teach. The list goes on. Equally promising are the links with private sector companies such as 3M Canada and Pfizer, for example, in sectors from pharmaceuticals to ocean engineering.

What is new in Atlantic Canada is an increasing awareness that R&D can bond with smart management and risk financing to create new products and services that can change the world. The creation of intellectual property leads to revenues, profits, the creation of shareholder wealth, and spinoffs that lead to more spinoffs. You get the idea.

As economist Lester Thurow of MIT wrote in Building Wealth, the surest bet you can make in a

modern economy is to invest in research and development. There is no standard formula for turning R&D into gold, but it is all based on merging business skills with the creation of new intellectual property. The key is an ability to harness human ingenuity and to work with the resources at hand. That is why oceans research is big in Atlantic Canada and why biotech has so much potential.

As Thurow pointed out, R&D alone won’t do it: 15th century China had most of the inventions needed for the industrial revolution, but for a host of social and commercial reasons it fell short. Neither will wealth alone; modern Switzerland is a prosperous and educated society butit is not a hot bed of innovation.

Atlantic Canada is finding its own formula. It is blessed with a well-educated population and a plethora of research centres set against a backdrop of natural resources that are the envy of much of the world.

The final piece of the puzzle is aggressive entrepreneurs who can link promising research with financingand a sense of market potential. These individuals can come from anywhere. Seafood king John Risley’s Clearwater Fine Foods partnered with the Bedford Institute of Oceanography to map the ocean floor and invested in lobster research at the Atlantic Veterinary College. Sometimes scientists morph into entrepreneurs: former NASA researcher Marlon Lewis founded the marine instrument firm Satlantic, and biologist Warwick Kimmins launched ImmunoVaccine Technologies.

Are you looking for the next breakthrough in cancer treatment or the next high-tech IPO? Then check out Atlantic Canada, an emerging economy that is attracting brains and capital. It’s brewing that elusive potion—the new, new thing.

— DAVID HOLT