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Last week's webinar HERE and the survey HERE served to introduce the topic of economic resilience and recovery including highlights of last fall's assessment and discussion of what's working, what's not, and changes underway. This THURSDAY's 4pm MT webinar HERE will feature a moderator and presenters who have current and real-life experience with innovation and the growth and sale of Canadian SMEs, each with a story to tell about their experience and lessons learned.
Webinar - Is the Innovation Ecosystem effective?
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MODERATOR
 Peter Kinkaide is the CEO of the Raintree Group of Companies. Peter oversees Raintree Financial Solutions, Raintree Wealth Management and Raintree Corporate Finance. He joined Raintree Financial Solutions in 2012 as the Managing Director of the Corporate Finance division Peter is also the founder and President of Women & Wealth Inc, a not-for-profit focused on increasing the profile of International Women’s Day with a focus on gender equality, inspiration and empowerment of all forms. Peter graduated with distinction from the University of Alberta with a Bachelor of Commerce degree and earned the Chartered Financial Analyst designation in 2006. He is also a registered Advising Representative (Portfolio Manager) with Raintree Wealth Management
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PRESENTERS
 Dr. Amit Monga has over 20 years of investment banking, venture capital, start-up and corporate governance experience in the technology, media, telecom, and life sciences sectors. Most recently, he was Managing Director, Technology and Innovation, Global Investment Banking, at one of Canada's largest bank-owned investment banks. In this role, he worked with companies operating in the software, hardware, IT services, space hardware and communications sectors globally. Amit was the co-founder of HigherMarkets, Inc. a cloud-based procurement platform and marketplace for University and Colleges. Headquartered in San Francisco, HigherMarkets was acquired by SciQuest (NASDAQ: SQI). SciQuest was taken private by Accel-KKR in June 2016 and rebranded as Jaggaer. Dr. Monga is a member of the External Project Advisory Panel of Ontario Centres of Excellence. He has previously served on the Innovation Council at Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and the boards of both the Canadian Medical Foundation and Alberta Innovates Technology Futures. He regularly presents on the topics of venture capital, private equity, and M&A. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Alberta where his research focused on solving complex reliability-based design problems using genetic algorithms.
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 Laurie Schultz is President & CEO of Galvanize. She is responsible for leading the transformation of Galvanize's global business by mobilizing talent toward category disruption and high, double digit revenue growth. On the sale of Galvanize to Diligent for $1B USD in February 2021 Laurie Schultz became Canada’s first female CEO to lead a technology company to unicorn status. Laurie’s success with Galvanize, culminates her 30 years of technology-related experience spanning the personal finance, small business accounting, ERP, CRM, and GRC categories with organizations including Sage, Intuit, KPMG, and TELUS. For that, she has received multiple leadership awards, including 2019 EY Entrepreneur of the Year - Pacific Region (Technology), 2019 Business in Vancouver’s (BIV’s) CEO of the Year, WXN Canada’s Most Powerful Women Top 100 (Hall of Fame - 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019), the 2015 Gold Stevie® Award for North America’s Female Executive of the Year, the YWCA's 2015 "Women of Distinction" award, BIV’s 2014 "Women of Influence" award, and Minerva Foundation's 2013 "Excellence in Leadership" award. Laurie holds an MBA and a Bachelor of Commerce degree, both from University of Alberta and currently acts as a Director with the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade, and Allocadia.
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AUDIENCE DISCUSSION and Q&A
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EDITORIAL
The so called "innovation ecosystem" is essential to the successful commercialization of innovation. Canada's "systems" are relatively new and as such can hardly or fairly be judged on results/ effectiveness in helping SMEs survive, grow and stay.
The feature elements of innovation ecosystems as we have know them across Canada are largely supported by governments: research universities and technical colleges, grant's and tax credits, publicly funded accelerators and incubators. Extensive government involvement has also served to increase expectations on government as responsible/ accountable. But...
Mature systems are more self-sustaining featuring private financing, managers and mentors experienced in M&As, and a fluid and healthy inter-relationship between its components and networks of entrepreneurs and financiers, marketing and engineering, universities and industry, arts/business and science/technology, and the public AND private sectors.
We've assessed the systems in Canada and certainly in Alberta as simply "immature" - overly reliant on government in contrast to mature innovation ecosystems found elsewhere in California and Texas, Massachusetts and North Carolina.
While the resources and infrastructure supporting Canada's innovation ecosystems may be in place - a credit to government, the private processes of vision and leadership including managerial experience have been viewed as weak and inadequate. Recently however, Canada's "systems" appear to showing signs of becoming more self-sustaining:
- Pools of private capital are popping up with banks noting savings accumulated during Covid finding their way to finance local enterprise
- Angels and local Innovations are attracting further off-shore investment
- Mergers and acquisitions of domestic SMEs are on the increase with Branch offices of US firms locating within our borders
- Mentors and managers with accumulated experience are staying the course
- Local talent is staying put, stemming the brain drain of innovators and frustrated entrepreneurs
- Research centers are more engaged, encouraging and introducing innovators and innovations to a market thirsting for the next big thing in: cleantech, materials, agri-foods, logistics, electrification, digitization, AI, personalized healthcare, and business processes.
Stay-tuned- Thursday's webinar HERE and the survey HERE may confirm or not what we only suspect and hope for - the recovery of our economies AND the real contributions of a mature innovation ecosystem.
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The FUTURE
Policy Advice
HERE
TD Bank's CEO told shareholders...
"Key sectors such as the environment, technology, digital and artificial intelligence are going to create many opportunities, and we must work together to seize them and equip our people to thrive. After all, highly skilled talent is the competitive advantage of any economy."
Scaling-up Accelerators
HERE
Alberta
Agrifoods
HERE
Lab-grown meat
Education
HERE
Curriculum debate
Fusion
HERE
Update
UNCERTAINTIES
Managing Change
HERE
Release the Parking Brake
Certifying Investors
HERE
A good idea?
Biodiversity
HERE
Restoration Options
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COMMENTS
Canada's angel investing landscape is changing. Patrick Lor tells a cautionary tale when he speaks to my MBA students. Patrick Lor joined Bruce Livingstone and another friend to develop iStockphoto.com back in the early 2000s and sold it to Getty Images in 2006 for $50MM. He was quite happy as a nouveau riche individual until 2-3 years later when Getty Images offered him the position of returning to run the firm (I believe Bruce stayed for the first 2-3 years and then left). As part of the package offered to Pat, Getty included stock options which now valued the firm at 40x what they had paid. As the Managing Partner at Panache, Pat now beats the drum, “Tell me how you’re going to drive the value of your venture to $1B.” I don’t know many folks who have exited their ventures, but the ones that I do know seem to be quite engaged with the Creative Destruction Lab of the Rockies as mentors/investors for the new round(s) of innovators. Thank you Phillip Davidson
Economic Recovery - the role of government. What approach should government use to help resuscitate the economy? I'm with those who view the default position that big government is bad and that it's power needs to constantly be reined in. That leaves govt as an infrastructure provider and an enabler for the private sector to recover, thus what can it do in both those areas. Simply redistributing wealth is at best a short term solution to ensure short term survival of the private sector, but certainly not a long term strategy. Breaking up large businesses has had a checkered past, as breaking up power companies has largely been disastrous, while breaking up telcos has been a huge win...though the implementation of new technologies may have had as much to do with that win as the actual breakup. Industries without market protections tend to get bigger while small competitors grow organically beneath them until the big guys implode and the small guys take over, thus do we need govts to intercede at all? I'd sure like to govt doing what it can to foster private sector investment and provide infrastructure to help the private sector vs more public sector spending as big healthcare and big education (K-12 unions and post secondary professionals) are exceptionally fat and happy, and absolutely resistant to change. Thank you Charlie Meredith
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