The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

A wide-angle shot of the MaRS Centre, where the event was held.

I caught last night’s ICT Toronto gathering at the MaRS Centre, where ICT Toronto announced the release of their “cluster development strategy” paper — a plan to boost the competitiveness and standing of Accordion City’s information and communications technology sector over the next five years.

A close-up shot of the MaRS Centre entrance.

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It was easy to spot the DemoCamp gang — me, David, Jay, Sutha, Bryce, Mark — among the attendees, who numbered around 100. We were the only people there not in suits. It certainly looked as though we were there only people there who wrote code for a living. We made sure to mingle and found that most of the attendees seemed to be from the management side of various information and communications tech firms or from organizations that invested in them.

The riff-raff! From left to right: David Crow, Sutha Kamal, Jay Goldman.

While waiting for the presentations to begin, we talked about how we could get some of the “suits” in the room to attend some of the upcoming events like Mesh, DemoCamp or BarCamp. Would these events hold any interest for them? I suggested that we “sell” the idea of such events to them as some kind of “walk on the wild side” tour. “What Burning Man is to us, DemoCamp and BarCamp could be to them!”

David enjoys a drink; Jay prays that nobody mistakes him for a bike courier.

In addition to my notes below, Mark Kuznicki and Rob Hyndman have posted blog entries about the event as well. The Globe and Mail has an article on ICT canada titled Toronto Aims to be High-Tech Hub and we have yet to see if the National Post is going to take a break from their “Oil! Oil! Yeah, baby, we got the Prime Minister and the oil! Suck it, Eastern Canada!” binge long enough to notice.

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The strategy proposed by ICT Toronto boils down to these four points:

1. Increase collaboration between education, industry and government in the field of information and communications technologies.
2. Increase the profile of the information and communcations technology sector.
3. Increase the competetitiveness of our information and communications technology businesses.
4. Retain and attract information and communications technology businesses.

They presented an executive summary of the strategy paper after the presentations, and the full paper is now available for download [600K PDF].

A Couple of Videos of the Crowd

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Notes from the Speakers

Here are my notes from the presentation. The first speaker was Accordion City mayor David Miller, followed by three speakers from the ICT Toronto working group, followed by a question-and-answer session.

Mayor David Miller

• The MaRS Centre is a symbol of of what Toronto can do with technology,

  and by extension information technology.

• MaRS is the only research centre of its type located in a downtown

  location, and a prime one at that. It’s across the street from

  a world-class university across the street, some of the world’s best

  research hospitals just down the street, a short walk from the most

  respected financial institutions in the world, plus Toronto Hydro —

  who are setting up the city with WiFi across University avenue.

• We should be comparing ourselves to the world’s great cities.
• Toronto is a world leader in mining finance — our competitors are

  cities like London! We need to think of ourselves in the ICT cluster

  in the same way.

• On a business developement mission to New York City, Miller sold

  the virtues of Toronto to businesses there. Their responose at the

  end: “We didn’t know that about Toronto.” Toronto needs to sell itself

  better: “The only thing we haven’t done is tell our story.”

• Our goal: Make Toronto the 5th leading ICT sector in the world.

David Ticoll

His presentation: “Toronto’s ICT Industry in a Global Context”

Some statistics:

Canada’s workforce, c. 2001	15.4 million
Toronto’s workforce, c. 2001	2.4 million
Canada’s ICT and related workforce, c. 2001	580,000
Toronto’s ICT and related workforce, c. 2001	133,000
Service occupations facing global competition	80+
Affected workers in Canada	2.4 million
Affected workers in Toronto (guesstimate)	550,000
Canada’s world rank as exporter of business services in 1995	6
Canada’s world rank as exporter of business services in 2002	13

On Offshoring

• We’re not keeping up in the use of offshoring.
• It is both a problem and a competitive advantage
• If you offshore, you send away jobsm but if you don’t…
  • You don’t lower labour costs
  • You lose the ability to do certain things that would otherwise

    be prohibitively expensive

• Offshoring is a competitive challenge with ambiguity

On India

• Showed a photo of an oxcart in the middle of automobile

  traffic. The oxcart is delivering materials for the construction

  of a superhighway. That’s their challenge — their infrastructure for

  the infrastructure is a mix of modern and archaic.

• Showed a photo of the Accenture campus in Mumbai. “There are about

  5,000 Accenture employees in Canada. There are 18,000 in India right

  now.” Accenture’s goal is to have 50,000 in India in 3 years.

• Accenture seems to follow a pattern. They recently bought a Wall

  Street firm, moved it to Toronto for about 6 months to make it

  operational, and then transported it to India.

• Offshoring will be a $110 billion industry by 2010
• India’s potential share, should they “stay the course”: $60 billion
• If India takes an “innovation” strategy, their potential share could

  be as high as $70 to $80 billion

• The Indian government is a very well-educated group who understand

  technology. India’s president is a rocket scientist…literally!

• They’re pushing for innovation; not just “predictable work”
• Promod

  Haque (Norwest Venture Partners) is working on a US/India

  joint arrangement to create a “Bell Labs” in India”

• The arrangement would be to do bleeding edge R&D with the US doing

  the “R” and India doing the “D”.

• The US would invest $500 billion
• India’s strengths:
  • Strong national strategy, with government and industry working

    together

  • Culture of winning
  • Continuous learning and questioning
  • Strategic thinking
  • Strong domestic industry
  • Articulate, knowledgable government leadership
• India’s weaknesses:
  • Infrastructure
  • Other emerging countries moving into the same business
• Things we need to ask:
  • What should go offshore to make our businesses more

    competitive?

  • How do these deals yield competitive gains?
  • How do we prepare our young people for the job landscape of the

    future? (It seems to favour well-rounded people over those with

    someone with a narrow skill set.)

  • What about geopolitical plays — such as the proposed US/India

    deal? This sort of thing isn’t on the radar of the federal

    government with their “5 priorities”.

• Things we need to do:
  • Embrace productivity-enhancing business investments
  • Foster domestic exportable knowledge-based services
  • Partner with government
  • Compete and constantly rethink strategy
  • Remember Andy Grove’s motto: “Only the paranoid survive”

Ron Friedman

• ICT Toronto is concetrating on these sectors:
  • Computer and telecommunications manufacturing
  • Software development
  • IT and telecom services
  • New media
• Toronto ICT stats:
  • 3rd largest ICT city in North America — only surpassed by

    the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City

  • 3300 ICT companies in the Toronto region
  • These companies have a total of 148000 employees
  • They generate $30 – 35 billion annually
  • They generate $6 billion in exports
  • ICT is the fifth largest employment category in Toronto
• There is a lack of political recognition of the importance of the

  ICT sector

• Toronto has a high level of entrepreneurship
• The vision: for Toronto be be recongized as one of top 5 ICT

  centres in the world by 2011

• The plan:
  • Establish ICT Toronto as a central point of contact for the

    world

  • Bring people together to do business
  • Link ICT and key economic centres
  • Build professional development centres and business mentoring

    services for the entrepreneurial community

  • Advocate for federal or provincial research institute

    in the Toronto region (Toronto lacks federal/prov-funded

    ICT research organizations

  • Ensure that TO’s wireless infrastructure is leading-edge

    internationally — assess future bandwidth and wireless needs

    and make sure that we have world-leading WiFi users to match

  • Implement an international marketing communications action plan

Frank Maw

• Canada:
  • Currently experiencing a bout of prosperity
  • But: there are unprecedented levels of displacement in labour —

    manfacturing, agricultural, forestry and fishing are going to

    emerging economies

• China graduates more engineers annually than all the North American

  engineering students and profesisonal engineers put together

• When it comes to information and computer technologies, Toronto is

  3rd in North America

• Among the qualities that make Toronto attractive to high-tech

  companies:

  • World-class universities
  • A rich city culture with lots to do and cultural diversity
  • A creative class and “bohemian charm”
• According to KPMG, Canada is the most competitive of the G8 nations
• Why did we set the goal to be in the top 5 tech cities in the world

  by 2011?

  • To create large and growing stream of jobs for our kids and

    grandkids

  • Generate incremental tax revenue at the local, provincial and

    federal levels

  • To boost other business segments
  • Because ICT is a market segment with “currency”
  • To improve our quality of life and standard of living
• We won’t compete on cost, but quality
• There needs to be political will at all 3 levels of government

Points Raised During the Q & A Session

• There are about 40,000 people in Canada who are doing

  “nearshoring” work

• We haven’t done an assessment of what Canada’s real assets are
• The big ICT challenge: finding good, affordable management
• Our strength: initial innovation – pre-commoditization
• Structural problem in canadian ICT industry — large and medium sized players are foreign-owned, which makes it hard for the presdient of a Canadian branch office to promote Canada
• Toronto’s current ranking in world — “Embarrassingly, we don’t know”. We know that we’re number 3 in North America, but don’t know the world ranking. Currently looking into that.
• Areas for early attention:
  • Fusion between financial industry / IT
  • Digital media world — partnered with San Francisco — creating centres of excellence
• ICT accounts for 42% of R&D spending in the private sector but only 2% of R&D spending at Canada’s universities.

Only moments after finishing my blog entry covering 5 high-tech gatherings taking place here next month, I went to the kitchen to grab a drink when I spotted the front page of the Business section in today’s Toronto Star. The headline reads: Boost infotech in GTA: Report.

It turns out that Toronto has the third-largest information and computer technology (ICT) workforce in North America, after San Francisco and New York and accounts for CDN$35 billion (US$31 billion) in sales each year.

(For those of you not from around here, GTA means “Greater Toronto Area”. “Toronto” is a popular nickname for Accordion City.)

Here’s an excerpt:

If it hopes to keep up with New York and San Francisco, the Toronto area’s hodgepodge information and communications technology sector needs to band together and hype its brand around the globe or risk watching smaller markets surge ahead.

That’s the thrust of a new report, spearheaded by the City of Toronto and due out today, that diagnoses an industry employing 148,000 at 3,300 area firms but that is geographically spread out, too loosely affiliated and lacking the kind of unified voice that could get politicians’ attention.

“Toronto’s ICT sector does not enjoy the recognition of such internationally recognized locales as Silicon Valley, Austin, Boston or Bangalore,” the report says. “This inevitably puts Toronto at a disadvantage with respect to attracting foreign and domestic investment. …The whole is currently less than the sum of its parts.”

The 110-page report on what is the third-largest such cluster in North America makes many suggestions, calls for the formation of an umbrella organization of stakeholders to better promote the industry, and urges them to preach the cause to policy makers who ignore the industry.

The report urges that by 2011, we should:

• Move from third place in North America in terms of company growth and investment and take one of the two top spots
• Increase investment in ICT research in the region by 25%
• Increase ICT sales and employment by 20%
• Attract 5 new multinational firms to the region

Problems to be overcome include:

• Government and investor preoccupation with “darlings” such as biotech and nanotech, whose economic impact is “negligible”
• The governmental perception that Toronto is an economic “fat cat” (not true; Toronto carries the province and helps to carry the country)
• Competing with “China Inc.” (or perhaps the “BRIC” countries — Brazil/Russia/India/China)
• The scattered nature of Toronto ICT firms — maybe there needs to be an organization representing us that provides a central point of contact

I like to think that those of us who’ve been pushing to get the tech community together for gatherings to meet each other and share ideas are doing our part to help meet the objectives in this report. I also think it’s something that we should discuss at our gatherings — I’m going to have to get my paws on a copy of the report.

Update

Ah-hah! Here’s where copies of the report are available!