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Whenever I get bogged down with T.M.I. (too much information), I remind myself that Progress magazine's purpose is simple. It is about the three ingredients for prosperity that Atlantica needs more of: people, capital culture, and innovation. You can't really develop one without the other two. My challenge, as Elizabeth Taylor's sixth husband understood too well, is to make it interesting.
Let's start with people. I first met Dean MacDonald in 1997 when he was at Cable Atlantic and St. John's was gearing up to host an international IT deal-making conference. The event was a great success, largely because of his leadership as chair. He has matured into a fine example of the street-smart 40-something business leader who is going to pick up where the aging boomers leave off. Fearless, experienced, and a smooth talker fluent in boardroom lingo, MacDonald knows how to do a deal. So it's no surprise that he'd be gutsy enough to leave a high-profile job as Ted Rogers' COO to become an owner-operator of a struggling regional cable company called Persona. He also is pumped about the future of his home province, and he's not afraid to say what he thinks about anything. You won't read a better interview this year than the one John DeMont prepared for us on page 36.
So, we need more people like Dean MacDonald. But how else do we develop a capital culture and what, exactly, do we mean by that? Take my advice and read this whole magazine in order, concluding with John Hanrahan's essay on page 55. In the second and final half of a history lesson that he started in last year's October issue, John puts our tortured economic past into perspective and explains why we're playing catch-up now.
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The good news: more and more pieces of the puzzle are starting to fall into place. For example, Nova Scotia now offers a capital pool program as an alternative route to accessing public markets. Kevin Yarr explains how it works on page 25.
The third element for creating prosperity is exemplified by the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation. A few years ago, that province discovered and then plugged a crucial gap in its innovation cycle by providing early stage financing for start-up companies with an innovative product with strong market potential. The program includes mentoring as well as financing, and under the leadership of CEO Barry Black and chair Warren McKenzie, NBIF is bringing some real horsepower to its emerging entrepreneurial class, many of whom are found in the labs of the province's universities. In our next issue, we will look at the economic impact of commercializing university-based research. But I bet it's less well known that collaborative applied research projects are also going on in our region's community colleges. On page 60 we offer a roundup of some of the most interesting examples. Such partnerships between the colleges and the private sector are very commercially focused, often precipitated by an industry need to find a solution to a problem or improve a product or service. Look at the close links that Holland College's Culinary Institute has developed with the food-and-agriculture industry on P.E.I. It is so inundated with opportunities to partner with industry that it needs more capacity. In other words, the innovation is there in spades, it just needs more facilities for testing (capital) and scientists (people). Starting to get the picture? |
