 While starting, all attendees are in listen-only mode. Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to have you join us today for our Tech Dev 101 webinar. My name is Susan Malau. I'm with the Design Coordination Outreach Branch of the Ministry of Jobs, Trade, and Technology. And I'm providing technical support and moderating for today's webinar. I'm located in Victoria, BC, in the traditional territories of the Lekwungen people, namely the Songhees and Esquimals with Nations. There are two ways to connect to the audio for today's webinar. You've got your computer audio, so if you're headset or speakers, if you're finding that isn't working for you very well, you can switch to a phone call. And if you click on the radio button for phone call, then it'll give you a phone number to dial into and an access code for this webinar and a pin, which is unique to you, and that identifies you by name on the webinar system. A few other things about the webinar platform. That handy little orange arrow will hide and unhide the control panel for go-to webinar. It hides itself automatically if you're not using it. Don't panic. We haven't disappeared. You can also go full screen with that blue square, and the raise hands button lets you show me that you have a question to ask during one of the Q&A sessions. However, since there's many of you and few of me, if you would like to ask a question directly, then you can type it into that, enter a question for staff, and I'll be looking for those throughout the webinar. So today's, oh, I've got the wrong slides up. This is from last week. Today's webinar will be talking about the tech dev, the innovation ecosystem canvas. My apologies for not updating my slides from last week. We've got three great presenters who are going to be talking about the innovation ecosystem canvas, and they're coming to us from Bernie, BC. So I'm going to turn the presenter over to Steve and Cindy and Beth for our presentation. There, Steve. Thank you, Susan. We'll get our slides going here in just a second. And show my screen. Shall we run a poll while we're getting things set up? Let's do that, sure. OK, great. So the first thing I want to do, I want to ask a question of our audience. And this is an opportunity for you to interact with the webinar platform, which of the following best describes you when it comes to technology adoption? Technology adoption is when you start using new technologies and make it part of your life. You can click one of the radio buttons and let us know where you sit in terms of how you adopt technologies. Are you one of the first people? Do you wait till a few others adopt a new technology before you try it out? Do you tend to wait until a new technology is gone mainstream? Or are you one of the last people? So this is your opportunity to enter. I'm just going to wait. We've got about 26% of you have voted. I can keep track. We want to get a good voter turnout on this. There's about 20 people on the call today. We'll probably have a few more join us as we go along. I was one of the last people to adopt an iPhone, apparently, but I did have a Samsung before that. So I'm going to leave it open a little bit longer because we only have 42% voter turnout right now. I think we can do better than that. So if you are on the webinar and you're just listening, this is your chance to jump over to the webinar screen and check it out. We've got a poll up on the screen. I'm going to leave it open for a couple more seconds here and see what we get. Ah, here we go. We've got some more votes coming in. Thank you, everybody. All right. I'm going to close the poll in 10 seconds, and then I'll show the results so we can see where we're all sitting in terms of our technology adoption. All right, three, two, one. Here we go. We got the 89% voter turnout. I'm so happy. Here's where we got to. We've got 35%. A split, 35% and 35%. We have the bleeding edge first adopters and people who wait for a couple other people to adopt before they try it out. 24% tend to wait until the technology is mainstream before they try it out. And 6% are one of those people who appreciate tradition and adopt it once it's been well proven. So thank you, everyone, for participating in that. I'm going to turn things over now to Beth and Steve and Cindy. They can introduce themselves as well as deliver our presentation today. Thank you, Susan. Good morning, everybody. My name is Cindy Pearson. I'm the president and one of the principals of capacity consulting. And we're happy to be here in Ferney in the traditional territory of the Tanaha Nation. So before founding capacity here in Ferney three years ago, my partner, Steve and I, who you're going to meet shortly, I was the chief operating officer of the BC Technology Industry Association, which is now called BC Tech. And for almost 12 years in Vancouver and before that in leadership roles, both in Waterloo and Toronto. So I've been working in this sector now for, dare I say, about 20 years. You know, and one of the roles at capacity I served one of the roles that I'm serving at capacity right now is as a BC Regional Manager for Tech West Canada. Tech West Canada is a pan-western initiative that focuses on supporting BC technology, for me specifically, BC technology companies with their sales and investment activities at large international trade events. And one of the things that I've seen in my work across the country and through discussions with my colleagues across North America is that growing technology and innovation clusters take time. It's an evolutionary process and one that ultimately takes a few generations of companies for the cluster to really mature and to flourish. So to start us off today, I'd like to begin with a few slides on the case for supporting technology and innovation in your communities. There's several reasons why communities and particularly small and more rural communities might want to embrace technology and innovation. First, it's about maintaining the existing industries that you have in your communities. And whether your main industries are mining, forestry, agriculture, manufacturing, tourism, or even in the public sector, you want to make sure that those sectors, those industries, are efficient and resilient, as resilient as they can possibly be. Technology and innovation also helps with economic diversification. It provides well-paying jobs that can be done from anywhere. And when we look at bringing those sectors into our rural areas, we've got very livable communities. Here in BC, obviously, and in Canada, we're already starting to attract technology and knowledge workers seeking a work-life balance and sometimes a reduction in their costs of living when you compare larger urban centers. For communities that have lost their primary industry, such as, say, a local mine, embracing technology and innovation can play a pivotal role in the community's reinvention. And lastly, the use of technology and innovation can be valuable for enabling social innovation in your community. And that is enabling novel solutions to address systemic social or environmental issues. While much of our discussion today will be focused on growing companies and communities, we know that for some communities, many of your constituents want to simply remain the size that you are today, stay the course and not grow. But we also know that there are always competitive forces acting against our communities. We liken these competitive forces to a kayak or paddling against the waves. And to even stay where you are in a wave, you have to keep paddling forward. If you stop, you're going to be pushed up against the rocks. So to move forward, you have to paddle even harder. So what we like to say is, opting out is not an option. You just have to keep paddling. When we look at the technology, when we look at technology as a sector, an industry sector in British Columbia, we see it as one of the fastest growing sectors in the economy, in our economy particularly and typically outpacing our provincial GDP output. And according to BC stats, there's over 10,000 technology companies in the province today. And those companies collectively employ over 115,000 workers. But the interesting thing is that we also know that there are over 30,000 sole entrepreneurs in this sector. And those are everything from freelancers to consultants and entrepreneurs who may already be working from their homes in your communities. The technology industry is increasingly export focused with revenues exceeding $26 billion annually. BC's technology industry sector continues to grow mature with an increasing number of larger companies who are establishing their head offices and key areas of the province. Now, scale is important to the industry and to the companies within that industry. And one of their most important requirements is access to skilled talent. As such, technology companies are often found in urban environments where the workforce is more likely readily available. Right now with our 10,000 companies in British Columbia, we know that over 70% of those companies are in Vancouver. In Vancouver, I should say Vancouver and the lower mainland and 16% on the island, predominantly Victoria and 8% in Kelowna. Now, that said, the great livability of many of our communities and the emergence of collaborative technologies that allows workers to work remotely, we're now seeing a good next tier of tech communities starting to emerge. You know, some examples of emerging next tier communities include Nanaimo and the Mid-It Island corridor, Camloops and a central Kootenai corridor from Roslyn to Nelson. The emergence of these corridors is significant for smaller communities, because on their own, they often don't have the sufficient population base to support the technology companies needs in their area. But being adjacent to a larger community, they can still grow and thrive. The corridors are typically defined by the various river valleys in the province and the natural transportation routes and markets that they create. We often talk about the technology sector as a vertical sector. And however, it's important to think about technology horizontally as well as an enabler of the industries in which we've built our communities, including public and non-profit sectors. We need to ensure that our current employers and community anchors are using innovation to improve their productivity, their efficacy and their resilience. And some questions that you might ask yourself as you think about your community is, you know, how can technology and innovation help organizations within your own backyard to be more productive? How can your local businesses adapt to transforming and adopting technology in their industries? And how can web technologies improve access to new markets or maybe create distribution channels for companies in your community? And lastly, how can technology help your local government to improve their service delivery while increasing citizen engagement? Now, before we look to the attraction of tech startups as the answer to economic diversification, let's first consider technology as an enabler of the industries that are already in our communities. First, let's build a culture of innovation in our communities. One that improves the community's livability and increases its economic resiliency. For many communities, economic development is first focused on availability of thriving forests, fertile land and or rich rocks. This has traditionally been our focus. But for technology and innovation, the focus and the key resource is people. So investing in our people, providing education and mentoring and real work experience creates a renewable resource that will support and sustain our communities. We tend to envision the tech innovator as some socially awkward genius who's ferreting away alone in their basement or their garage in one day. After toiling day and night, they have a singular aha moment. And before you know it, they're the next Bill Gates or Elon Musk. The reality is that a good idea needs a team to take it to market. And those people require a diverse set of skills. Technology is a team sport. So we have to make sure that we have that diversity within our communities. You know, not unlike any other business or industry cycles happen. You know, there's economic downturns. We have technologies that run their course and companies that get acquired. But what makes the technology sector different from other sectors or industries is its resiliency. So for example, let's use a mine as an example. If a mine closes today, mill workers don't typically start a new mine or a new mill the next day. But when a technology company closes, it's typical for the workers to band together, leverage what they know and learned, and launch a new business within days or weeks of the original company's closure. And we know that these closures are traumatic, but they're also very valuable. It kick starts the next cycle of growth. It's like we like to compare it to a nurse log in our forests because we know that it's the fallen trees that come to the resources for new trees. And as a community leader, as community leaders, our role in our communities is to ensure that when these closures happen, and they inevitably will, that the workers in your community have a reason to stay in your community. And to reinvest locally in the next round of companies in your community. Now on this note, I'm going to turn it over to Steve who's going to talk about the innovation ecosystem. Steve, take it away. Great. Thank you, Cindy, and thank you to everyone for joining us today. As Cindy mentioned, my name is Steve Thompson and with Cindy, I'm one of the principals of capacity consulting here at Ferney. I come to the technology industry both as a technology product manager and product developer, as well as an industry researcher and public policy consultant. My consulting practice is often split between startup technology companies and the enabling organizations who support them. Organizations such as governments, social enterprises, and nonprofit associations. In total, I've now been working in and around the technology industry for over 20 years. The innovation ecosystem model is something that I first drafted over 10 years ago, probably out of frustration more than anything else. I've read and worked on various technology industry strategy documents, and I found these strategies often had many of the same components in them. Yet they still failed to convey the interrelatedness and the interdependence between the various elements. So common to most strategies are the following agreements, access to capital, access to talent, access to markets, the community's infrastructure like broadband access, and a community and culture that supports innovation and the willingness to take risk. These elements are all typically bundled as four or five components, and the names vary for those components and elements, but they include streams, themes, thrusts, pipelines. And to me, all of these names imparted a sense that the ingredients were discreet and that they're not interconnected, and this is a mistake that we were making. So in the innovation ecosystem, we call these components BIOMS, and BIOMS work together to create the complete ecosystem. The inspiration for our model is BC's coastal temperate rainforest, and anyone who's walked through an old gulf rainforest knows that they're very special places. Somehow, even the air feels different in the rainforest. And the rainforest itself is comprised of several BIOMS. Typically, these BIOMS are viewed in layers from the soil layer to the understory to the canopy and to the emergent layer, which touches the sky hundreds of feet up. And while these BIOMS are independent to a degree, each BIOM is teeming with its own variety of life forms, and yet each layer works in concert with the others layers to create this unique and self-sustaining ecosystem. And the rainforest on whole feels both wild and chaotic, yet at the same time, it's very organized and predictable. And to me, this is what an economy thriving on technology and innovation should feel like. It should feel like an environment that is wild and chaotic with its own life forms and a diversity of life forms. Yet with this certain structure and predictability that exists in the background, we really look at it. And that's why we use the analogy of the rainforest for the innovation ecosystem. The ecosystem model, like a number of other models, consists of five BIOMS, which aligns the main strategy components that I previously got like. So I've got capital, talent, infrastructure and place making, community and cultural support, and external connections. As it is an ecosystem, our objective is to build it in balance. If we put too much focus on one part of the ecosystem or not enough focus on another part of the ecosystem, we can put the whole system out of balance, and we miss the results that we're trying to produce as economic developers. You'll note that we've developed this ecosystem in blocks. And we've done this so that these blocks allow you to break up the various BIOMS into smaller and smaller component pieces, depending on the level of granularity that you need as you examine the various actors, programs, and policies in your ecosystem. In this next slide, you'll see that we've added even more detail to the ecosystem. For instance, in this case, we've broken out the capital BIOM into smaller blocks to discuss the capital components required in each stage of commercialization. We've also split the infrastructure BIOM to break out the community place making, as well as anchor industries and organization. And this allows you to start inventorying the assets that you are already having in your community. So what we want you to do is ultimately take this canvas and make it your own. Every community is a little bit unique, and we want to give you the flexibility to mold and adapt it to your needs. Within each BIOM, our objective as economic developers is to create feedback loops. You want to create an ecosystem that is both ensuring and is continually growing. And over time, the feedback loops should begin to get larger and stronger, propelling a greater amount of growth within the BIOM with less need for external input. An example of the types of successful feedback loops that we want to encourage within this ecosystem are things like wealth creation. We want to see proceeds from acquisitions or exits being reinvested into the next generation of startups. We want to see a maturing management, managers exiting from successful companies and bringing their expertise to the next generation of startups. A common term you'll hear in this regard is serial entrepreneur, and that's someone who isn't content to have just done it once. They start a company, they exit, they start another company, they exit, and hopefully they start another company and exit again. And people, we also want to see mentorship. People who have been mentored in the past, going on to share their knowledge and expertise as mentors to others. And lastly, we want to see things like research sponsorship. We want to see mature companies in our environment investing in research at BC's post-secondary institutions to foster this next generation of technology leaders and technology transfer opportunities in the province. And to give an example of how these feedback loops do occur frequently in nature, but often their connections are not obvious. And frankly, I think as a team, we were surprised to learn that salmon are one of the key suppliers of nutrients to the coastal trade temperate rainforest. And the question we ask is, well, how does a fish feed a tree? And in this case, salmon reared in the freshwater mountain streams of the rainforest, go off to the ocean to feed and grow, and then return years later to spawn and die. And in the process, they leave behind all of the nutrients that they collected over their lifetime, and they contribute these nutrients to supporting the various life forms that exist in the rainforest. And in doing so, they encourage new growth. And in this case, the salmon is the start-up. We need a lot of hatchlings to get some out to sea, to get some to return, and ultimately to feed our rainforest. So lastly, in this next slide, you'll see that we've added several more breakouts to the canvas. And this detailed canvas is one that we typically print out very large, say three feet by four feet in size, and we post to the wall in our one-day workshops. And when you look at this detailed canvas, we see a strong talent biome in the middle that encourages a continuum of science and technology education from kindergarten to grade 12 and through to graduate research. You'll see that we've even included pre-K education because it's never too early to inspire children with things like the great natural environment that surrounds us here in Canada and particularly in B.C. The talent biome should also support lifelong learning activities so the talent in the ecosystem can grow and adapt over time as technologies change and as the people grow themselves and change. The talent biome also needs to have efficient immigration system that attracts highly skilled workers to B.C. and Canada. And this system needs to ensure that these new Canadians are effectively integrated into our communities. There needs to be a robust capital biome that ensures that there's adequate capital available to grow our companies in each stage of their life cycle. If a company misses a life-stage because there isn't financing available, then its growth is going to be halted in the stage proceeding. We also need to see a number of incentives for taking risk and for investing in research and development. And we're fortunate here in B.C. and Canada to have some great incentives available in those areas. There needs to be a robust... The capital biome needs to provide a supportive environment across the commercialization continuum. And this ranges from pure and applied research, typically of post-secondary institutions and research institutes, to product development, pre-commercialization, and early-stage commercialization activities, and ultimately to scaling and growing our companies. The capital biome should also support a healthy environment for exits, providing mechanisms for capital to be returned to shareholders for reinvestment into new companies and projects. Underpinning the innovation ecosystem, there should be a supportive community infrastructure. At a bare minimum, this infrastructure needs to include the elements required for knowledge workers to work productively in the community, things like broadband internet, and airport with good connections to international markets, and an effective transportation systems for moving goods and people around your region. Ideally, the community infrastructure should also include learning infrastructure, such as academic institutions and research institutions, for encouraging research, development, and successful commercialization. And it needs to have catalytic placemaking, including shared spaces, like coworking spaces or maker spaces, technology accelerators, and even technology parks for larger communities. Supporting these three main levels Supporting these three main layers of talent, capital, and infrastructure are a supportive community and culture for innovation on one side and connections to other communities and markets on the other side. Connections to these other communities, whether they be simply connections to markets for products, or other connections to communities for attracting talent and capital, are very important. I think particularly more so for smaller communities who don't have the size, the courage to go along. A lot of our communities don't have the breadth and depth of venture capital or angel capital required to grow our companies. And so we have to reach out to those larger markets where it's more prevalent. And lastly, the ecosystem's culture of innovation needs to create and support an environment where people are encouraged to innovate and to take risks. The culture should be a collaborative environment that welcomes diversity. It celebrates risk taking both wins and fails and encourages peer learning and sharing between members of the community. And with that, we'll take a short break for another poll question before proceeding with Beth and a deeper dive on the various biomes. Susan? All right, we've got another poll question coming up here. Let me just get this going here. So if you have paused or are looking at something else, I want you to come back to the screen. I'm going to launch this poll right now and get a sense of how do you think technology and innovation can benefit your community the most? So to take a moment to read through the options we've got, improving the strength of existing industry sectors, diversifying your local economy, being the focus of community revitalization efforts, enabling social innovation in your community, or improving local government processes and citizen engagement. So diversifying them. This is a choose one. So you have to think really hard about which one you think will benefit the most. It's kind of a challenging choice. There's a lot of different benefits to innovation. And yes, sometimes they overlap. So we've got just over 52% voter turnout and it's on its way up. I like to see that. They're all very civically minded people. Voter turnout is important, even in our webinar poll. I'm going to leave the poll open for another 15, well, 10 seconds here. It's starting to creep up over 50% voter turnout. So we'll take a look. And right now we have a pretty clear winner. So I'm going to post the poll and share the results. So the winner hands down was diversifying the local economy with new types of jobs. With 71% of our audience, our voting audience, and 21% improving the strength of existing industry sectors. And 7% are interested because it will help them improve local government processes and citizen engagement. I will hide the poll now and turn it back over to you guys. Okay, thanks. And thank you for participating in the poll. It's interesting to see the results for sure. My name is Beth Gallup. I wear a number of different hats. You could say I'm a good player in the gig economy. I mentor early stage technology entrepreneurs for New Ventures BC, helping them find markets for their products, services, and ideas. I also teach entrepreneurship at College of the Rockies. And I own my own marketing and communication consulting company. I'm also one of the people that Steve mentioned that fits into the category of serial entrepreneur. I've started, founded, and exited a number of different businesses. So what I'm going to start with is going a little bit deeper into all the different biomes that Steve just introduced. So we're going to start with a small technology lesson for me. And we're going to start with the talent biome. So you'll remember from looking at the innovation ecosystem canvas that it's in the vital center. And that it encompasses all stages and ages of life and runs from formal education right through to alternate learning. So one of the places that a lot of alternate learning takes place often overlooked are community libraries. I know, for example, the Invermere Library has a 3D printer, not a typical thing that you would think about for a library. And I know I've got a good friend who's a local librarian and she's digitally connected provincially, nationally, and often even globally. She regularly goes into schools to teach research literacy right from K to grade 12. So a real often overlooked asset in many communities as a part of your learning infrastructure. Traditionally, the thinking about talent has been very much on the STEM education. One of the things that personally really excites me about the way innovation and technology is moving is that arts and STEAM education is becoming more and more important. Really, arts is really a great source of innovation and creativity. So as Steve mentioned, one of the really significant parts of a healthy innovation ecosystem are feedback loops. And talent attraction is crucial. It works, one person comes, they're welcomed by the community and they bring another friend. I often have relied on this in my own businesses. In fact, I would actually say that the welcome that a community extends to newcomers is key to recruiting efforts. Positive word of mouth really makes a difference, especially in tech dev, because it grows through networks rather than traditional corporate hierarchies or traditional ways of doing business. And another interesting aspect of tech attraction that I see and play in our community is grandparents moving back as another source of talent attractions. Certainly work for Stevenson, who... That wasn't the first reason. It wasn't the first reason, but it gives them a good reason to stay. So again, thinking about talent attraction from all ages, because particularly people that may be at a more mature state in their career can act as mentors for people that are just starting out. So retention, very much another successful feedback loop, really wanting to see people staying and moving between local companies. So one of my favorite stories about talent retention comes out of Boulder, Colorado, where there's a number of different innovative companies. And one company had been working really hard to bring in an investor from outside the community, and they had a good meeting. And at the end of the meeting, they said to the investor, well, do you want to come or are going to go to a wake? And of course, the investor said, sure. Well, what's the backstory? And it turned out that they're doing a startup that the guys that had started it up were probably three or four months into their business when they really figured out that their business model wasn't going to work. So instead of morning the failure, they just immediately decided that they should shut down and do something else. But they were so confident in the fact that they could retain the talent that here they are bringing this outside investor in to just say, we're going to fail fast, we're going to move on. And the upside of the story was within eight weeks, all of those workers were absorbed back into other startups in the community. So a really wonderful explanation of how retalent retention can work in your community. So then there's also peer learning. And in my community recently, a student did this junior high school fair project on robotic tree planters. And someone that I met through New Ventures BC was a volunteer judge. He's an engineer who's working on his own distributed furniture production startup using open source designs at CNC machines. And so you can see that despite our difference in ages, we're all learning together as peers. We're exploring together what will work, how it works as technology starts to touch every sector from tree planning to furniture designs to business models built on the idea of a creative commons. So as Steve mentioned, the learning infrastructure is a really important part of an innovation ecosystem. It's crucial to the health of your talent biome and involves schools as well as thinking out of the typical school box. So an example of the kinds of things that you can do to support your own learning infrastructure, for example, would be to do something like starting a local chapter of kids learning code or ladies learning code. There's a number of different ways that you can get engaged in the learning infrastructure right from early childhood through to different kinds of co-op placements, internships and apprenticeships. So some of the local implications of thinking about your talent biome that the partnerships are really important. Community livability is really important for talent attraction and retention. It makes a big difference if people want to stay because of the quality of life. You can and need to engage citizens of all ages in your ecosystem. And there are a number of different rules that are outside of just the traditional tech roles. There's job opportunities for all kinds of skilled workers who have appreciation for tech and innovation. So next we're going to move on to the culture, community and culture biome. And you can see that we've chosen red here just really to emphasize the importance of community and culture. It's the sunshine, if you will, that gives the ecosystem its energy. The importance of community and culture is really underscored by an organization in Alberta called Brain Forest, Alberta. And they're founded by some successful entrepreneurs that really want to foster innovation in their communities. And they've used a social contract to really emphasize the vitality of culture to supporting innovation. If you're curious, you can just google Brain Forest Strategies and take a look at the social contract yourself. It's quite interesting reading. So when you're thinking about community and culture, thinking about you want to culture, think about cultural fit, what works with your community's history, with your location, and with your existing strengths? You want to find out what makes you unique and what's your unique value proposition. Just like every business needs a unique value proposition to succeed, communities need to know what their unique value proposition is. You want to focus on technologies and organizations that fit your community's core values. So ideas grow through relationships. So innovation rarely happens in isolation. Instead, it really happens through intersections. You can play a part by connecting people, introducing people, supporting different startups, collaborating together, and funding. And the funding and investing, especially in us in at the early stages, it makes a real difference of people in your community are supporting you. So innovation happens when communities are embracing change. Value differences are welcoming and inclusive, creating conditions that promote trust that's really essential and often overlooked. It's great to think big. As we talked about earlier in the examples, accepting failure is a natural part of the process and growing networks and external connections. I feel like we've missed some slides. No? No? No? Okay. So some of the local implications. We've just touched on the idea of celebrating successes, acknowledging the value of taking risks, fostering entrepreneurship, and something that we haven't touched on to date here would be really trying to create business-friendly rules and regulations. That's very much in the power of local governments and it makes a huge difference to communities where they know that they'll be supported or to business startups when they know they'll be supported by things like zoning rules and regulations. And the other part of that would be to lead by example. So as a local government, to be able to embrace new technologies and to be that very important first customer for businesses in your communities. So next we'll touch on the funding biome. Encouraging adequate funding for research and for all stages of companies' life cycle from pre-commercialization to sales to early adopters, growth and expansion, and the way that companies are moving up the bell curve and then at maturity, wanting to see companies reinvesting both in research and in early stage ventures. And in this final in particular, as Steve mentioned, you really need a healthy feedback loop for your ecosystem to grow. I see this all the time and with my work with early stage entrepreneurs. It's really, really significantly important that they can get that funding to move from the early stage to the growth and expansion stage. That's often where a lot of really great ideas and new ventures die is in that stage. So really significant part of trying to support the ecosystem in your community is really thinking about how you can be involved in helping that funding happen. When we do these workshops, this is often a place where we see that communities have a hard time identifying assets. One of the things that people have come to identify are the mature companies in their community who are or mature entrepreneurs or serial entrepreneurs in their community who are really keen to reinvest. And you might look for those people, even among new immigrants who are retirees who've been successful. I've seen that at work in a couple of different communities where just an individual entrepreneur will come in who's accident and becomes really interested in supporting some different things that are happening in their communities. So companies typically need funding or capital ejections at different stages. And the sources of those vary. Starting with friends and family, really important first step. And then moving from up the scale once they get into early stage and expansion, needing angel investors, venture capital investors, and strategic investors who can bring expertise as well or connections to markets as well as just simply money. It's not uncommon to start with the idea of an exit. So a number of my new startups might say, well, our business plan would be to be acquired in five years. It's normal in technology development because it's high risk, high reward. And investors want to know that they will get return on our investment within a reasonable period of time. It's not typically the long patient capital that you might see, for example, in commercial real estate development where people will make an investment and expect that it could return in 15, 20 years. In the technology development, people are really looking for, I'm taking a risk, I'm funding a number of different companies. One or two of them will succeed and when they succeed, I want to see them succeed very well. So that's just something in terms of managing the expectations of in your community of bringing in this kind of development. It's quite normal that there are cycles. So investors fund people, not ideas. It's, as I mentioned, when you're managing risk, if you look at a great idea with a mediocre team, you're less likely to take that risk. Whereas you know that sufficient capital can help you hire good teams. That's why in our innovation ecosystem, you'll remember that we located the talent biome where it is. So it touches the capital funding biome at every stage of the pipeline. So recently I had the opportunity to camp in a mature rainforest and I was there in the support of understory and I could really see the significance of the undergrowth and the nurse logs to the vibrant life above me. And in our model, the support of undergrowth takes physical form in both busy buildings and in empty spaces. And it grows usually from a community's anchor industries, which in BC we've often seen are typically resource-based. So recently we facilitated a TechDev 101 workshop in Port Alberni. And it turns out that the community has got an incredible asset. If I remember correctly, they've got almost 100 empty spaces. In their downtown area. Now I said asset and not liability in that that community's got a real opportunity to create an innovation district. We know that proximity of people is important for the cross-pollination of ideas and to foster collaborations. As I said before, innovation does not grow in isolation. So thinking about that, what are the redevelopable spaces in your community? Are there shared spaces like the former jam factory in Nelson that's now converted into a co-working space that bring people together? And it's pretty fun actually to work together with other people who are collaborating or finding opportunities to collaborate on different ideas. I like the idea of shared kitchens. There's a shared kitchen in Cranbrook, for example, where I'm sure there's all kinds of interesting things going on. Digital media labs, art studios, different maker spaces and fab labs. So really thinking in your own community, what are the places that you have in your downtown core, in outdated malls, in empty industrial buildings where you can bring people together to innovate? So another really significant part of your supportive understory are your traditional places and traditional place making, residential and commercial real estate. So housing is crucial. We see that a lot here and we hear about it in a number of the communities that we go into needs to be affordable, available, and accommodate digital nomads. So people who may just be coming into your community for short periods of time, who can bring their knowledge, their networks, and their expertise in to support that again for local governments, really looking at how are we creating those conditions where that kind of thing can happen, particularly also too with commercial real estate that your zoning is keeping up with new ways of doing things. I was just reading, you know, really interesting reading, some industrial and commercial zoning regulations. And I noticed that they were great for things like drive-in movie theaters, but they hadn't really thought about things like how do we enable work, live spaces in the same area. So anchor industries and organizations are often a significant place where technology can grow. You can see the picture here is the smelter in trail. So that's an old anchor industry that's given a tremendous expertise to the community in heavy metals. Their location close to the border has also led to their ability to innovate so that almost all the battery recycling for the U.S. Army is happening in trail. It's a legacy of their anchor industry. And they've also got a really cool fab lab that's really grown again from their positioning themselves as metal tech alley. It's very unique to their community. It's a source of their unique value proposition. So the soil layer is another significant part of the ecosystem. It's sorry, tongue tied. It's broadband internet, reliable power and regional transportation. Last week we had the opportunity to go to the launch of a new technology center that was located in empty sawmill. And one of the investors, Brian Fry, said that electricity was a big part of the decision to locate there. He said because of the old mill there's a lot of electricity here and when you're trying to run data centers, especially the type of processing that they're talking about, we need a lot of power. And then he went on to say the next part of the Columbia basin, the next part of it is that there's the Columbia basin trust fiber in the valley. So he said we've got a fiber optic network that's unparalleled. So their decision, the soil layer that this new technology center can grow in was very much related to that basic infrastructure of internet, reliable power and regional transportation. So if on one side of the ecosystem we've got the culture and community as the sunshine, then your external connections are the rain. And I like to talk about things like tourism being a gateway drug to many of our communities because we're so blessed with the natural environment and also to really vital importance connections to export markets. So just before I turn it over to Steve to talk about how to use the innovation ecosystem in your community, I just wanted to check in with our facilitator and see if there are any questions. Susan? Hi there, sorry about that. We don't have questions yet, but this would be a good time for anyone who's listening to call and wants to ask a question. We're actually just about almost out of time here. So we said we'd let them go back to their other questions and go back to their other lives at 11 a.m. Yep, absolutely. Yeah. So yes, we will be sharing a copy of the presentation. That will be provided with the recording. It takes us about a week to get the recording and the presentation up onto the website. So be a little bit patient and we'll get that up as soon as we can. Are there any other questions about how to use this or thoughts that came up from any of our audience members about how this could apply to their community? It is the sort of thing that you're probably going to want to come back and watch this recording again. I'm also going to point out for people that we do have the innovation ecosystem canvas as a handout which you can download from within the GoToWebinar platform. It'll be shared there and slightly under your audio selections there should be a line or a tab of those handouts and you can download it from there and you can scale that so that it's big enough to put on your wall and play with post-it notes. So with no more questions coming in and we're almost at our time we've got someone wants to share something with the presenters so Danielle, what I'm going to do is I'm actually you haven't got a pin entered so I'm unfortunately not able to unmute you can share with us but if you would like to send an email what I'll do is I will put you can send it to economicdevelopmentatgov.vc.ca and we'll pass that on to the presenters so as we're not able to okay we'll do excellent I love this we've got a communication going on here I'm just going to take back the presenter controls I want to tell you guys a little bit about our upcoming webinars and then we're done we have two more things coming on June 28th we've got a webinar on the BC ideas these are stories from around the province on workforce development so we'll be featuring the Vernon area workforce development round table and one other which will be a surprise if you haven't been getting our webinar invitations and you want to find out about things as they happen go to this handy little link it's short unfortunately you can't click on this but hopefully you can write it down while I'm talking about it and this will make sure you're on our invitation list and find out about the webinars we usually send things out about two or three weeks before a webinar and sometimes we put a little extra info in there sounds like we're having a fire drill here so unfortunately we're just about finished what I'm going to do is wrap things up and you'll be getting a link to the feedback survey and you can fill that out thank you very much everyone it's 11 o'clock this is perfect timing thank you everybody thank you thank you the webinar