 It is now starting. All attendees are in listen-only mode. Good morning and welcome back to the Economic Development Webinar Series. My name is Susan Lowe. I'm with the Design, Coordination and Outreach Branch of the Ministry of Jobs, Trade and Technology. I'll be providing some technical support and moderation for today's webinar. I'm located in Victoria, BC on the unceded Coast Salish territory of the Lekwungen people that's the Esquimalt and Songhi's First Nations. I'm joined today by Steve Thompson, who will be our moderator. Steve hails from Ferney in the traditional territory of the Tanahan Nation. And our guests today are Robert Bell of the Intelligent Community Forum and Joe Sterling of Rainforest Strategies, and they'll each tell you a little bit about themselves when they begin. Before we go any further, I'm just going to review some housekeeping items. So the orange arrow, just looking at the control panel, the orange arrow lets you shrink go to webinar panel to the side of the screen. It automatically shrinks if you don't do anything for a while. So if your controls disappear in the middle of the webinar, don't panic. The orange microphone shows you that you're muted. You may get unmuted if we end up having some discussion later, but please keep it muted just by default, just in case. The blue box lets you expand the whole webinar interface to full screen and the little hand lets you raise your hand if we're going to be taking verbal questions. But there's many of you and only one of me. So the best way to raise a question is to enter a question in the box in your control panel that says, enter a question for staff. And we're going to be using that a little bit later as we do some interaction on this webinar. So stay with us. Finally, you have two options for connecting to audio via your computer over VoIP or by phoning in. If you click on the phone call radio button, it'll give you a phone number to call and then access code for this webinar and a personal identification number for you individually, which shows your name on my screen so I can see who you are. If you're joining us through the Instant Join web app, things look a little bit different for you and your audio controls are hidden in the gear section. So if that's what it looks like for you, there are your options. Today's session is being recorded. It will be capturing the audio portion and the screen recording of the session and the speaker slides and presentations are going to be collected up and shared later. It takes us about a week to get all of this together. So if you want to view this or past webinars, you can go to our website gov.bc.ca slash economic development and look under the BC ideas exchange for our past webinar recordings. Okay, let's get moving. Oh, one more thing. Sitting with me today, I have Alex Sashanuck, who has put together the 2018 local economic development and BC survey. Do you want to say a few words about it or shall I? Okay, so each year or every two years we go through this survey process and what we're looking at is how do different communities in BC structure and pursue their economic development activities what's going on in your community for economic development and what tools and resources are you going to find most helpful for your community. So the survey is open until Friday. So if you're waiting for the last minute, this is it. This is your turn to go and fill out the survey. Please let us know last time we had 400 respondents and we'd really love to have that again. The scuttle butt is the local elected officials are filling it out at great rates, but the economic development professionals are a little bit behind. We haven't got a pool going, but if you're an economic development professional, that's kind of a call to action to step it up and fill out the survey. Alrighty, today's session is Tech Dev 101. This is a continuation of our webinar series and it's also been part of our Tech Dev 101 workshops that have been delivered through the province since March this year. So Steve Thompson and his colleagues Beth Gallup and Cindy Pearson have delivered two webinars so far. You can watch them online from back in June and last month and Steve is back today to moderate a fascinating exploration of benchmarking and measuring your progress on something that's really quite intangible. Steve's going to do a great job of setting us up and introducing the concept. Before we get going, however, we want to ask a poll question. So this is how it's going to work. I'm going to set up a poll on your screen and you can come and you can vote on it or enter in the correct answer for you. What is the size of your community? We'd like to know who's out there and what size of community you're serving. If you serve multiple communities but you live in one, perhaps you can answer for that one, but if you don't work for a specific community, we actually have an option for you this time. So I'll just let that going. I had a question. Someone has figured out the ask a question of staff, which is fabulous. How many participants do we have on the webinar right now? We've got 27 who joined us. Usually we get about five or 10 late comers. So in terms of stats, we we often get about 75%, 60 to 75% of the people who have registered for the webinar actually come and the others are waiting to watch it online. So that's an idea of how many people we get participating. We welcome everyone, whether you work for the government or an agency, anyone who's interested in economic development. All right, so we've got most of our participants have answered the poll. So I'll close it and share that back so everyone can see the results. So on today's webinar we have, oops, I'm hiding things on myself here, 17% of our attendees are under 5000, 17% from 5000 to 15,000. Most people 42% are in communities, over 50,000 population, 17% of you are not serving a specific community. So thanks very much. I'll hide that and go back to my presentation here. I have one more question for you, which I'm going to actually have you answer in the questions box. I'd like to know what are you hoping to measure through benchmarking in your community? What I'll do is as you answer in the questions, Steve is going to do his introduction, and then I will share back some of the common responses that we saw before our guests come and do their talks. So if you can do me a favor and just write in one statement so I can sort of have a list of things that people have entered, that would be great. So I will turn things over to Steve now to do his presentation. Coming in, Steve. There we go, we've got it. Okay, of course the first thing to start, you know, just a reminder that all of the presenters today are consultants, so the opinions expressed in the workshop or in the seminar today are those of the presenters and may not reflect necessarily the policies and positions of the province of British Columbia. So as Susan mentioned, my name is Steve Thompson. I'm a principal with capacity consulting. We're based now in Fernie, British Columbia, snowy Fernie, British Columbia today. And my background is in working both with technology startups directly as a product manager, product development, early stage revenue generating activities, as well as working with enabling organizations, governments, non-profits, social enterprises and the like. I don't want to take up too much of the time. I just want to get us into the meat of the other two presenters. But as Susan mentioned, this is the third webinar we've done in the series and the final one for now. And it's tied to the Tech Dev 101 workshops that we've been delivering for the province. I thought that before we get into the meat of the day, we'll just give a quick recap and then talk a little bit about why we consider benchmarking. So if you haven't already, you can sign up to host a Tech Dev 101 workshop, a one-day workshop in your community. I think we've delivered nine so far and we have another seven or so to do. Within that, we've created an innovation ecosystem model. As all of these technology strategies and benchmarks tend to have very similar components of five common themes that I always saw. Access to capital, access to talent, access to markets, getting to markets, building your community and culture, and of course building your infrastructure and place making elements. So in our model, the innovation ecosystem canvas, we've called these components biomes and we use the BC coastal rainforest as a metaphor to explain how these various biomes interrelate and the types of positive feedback loops that we're hoping to create in each of the biomes so that we can grow our communities. A couple of weeks ago, we had a great webinar talking about building your community. We had a couple of great speakers, Rose Hoer from Nelson, talking about the amazing things that she's doing in Nelson or that is doing it being done in Nelson and how they're growing the community there. And we had Jim Gibson from Rainforest Alberta talking a lot about how they're building community and culture in the Alberta's technologies ecosystem. Coincidentally, these speakers kind of align with our speakers today. Nelson has followed a lot of SMART 21 criteria from the Intelligent Community Foundation while Rainforest Alberta is using the SCORE carding from Rainforest Strategies. I think Joel talked a little bit about that as well. So when it comes to why benchmarking, obviously we need to have objective measurements for our progress. And I always remind people that it takes at least two pieces of data to establish a trend. I mean, you need to know where you are today and where you want to be in the future so that you can drive that line. The key element here is that you get what you measure and that's both good and bad because to quote a Harvard business review that I think sums it up, human beings suggest behavior based on the metrics that they're held against. And anything you measure will impel a person to optimize his SCORE or her SCORE on that metric. And what you measure is what you'll get. And that can be both a good thing and a negative thing if we're not tracking or scoring the right measurements. There are several benchmarking tools available. We're going to feature two today with our speakers. Each benchmarking tool I find has a different focus. And so, you know, when I look at things, you know, different jurisdictions, I would probably choose a different tool depending on the project that I was working on. You want to pick the benchmarking tool that best aligns with the objectives that you're looking at. And you always want to be looking at some of these other benchmarks and reports because there are some interesting things where you can see some comparisons or they're comparing communities on a different set of issues and components than you might be looking at. So, a couple that I just want to touch on as an example. So, if we are always in a bigger city, you know, like Vancouver or Calgary and, you know, working to, you know, with the Municipal Lands Corp or some other entity that's more focused on urban planning, urban development, I'd probably be looking at, you know, assessing an innovation district. So, there's a great tool set that has come out from the BAS Initiative, which is being hosted at the Brookings Institute, a U.S. think tank. And so, if you're looking at innovation districts, there's some great things to look at there. Another great one, and this sort of started where many years ago, company Startup Genome was literally benchmarking Startup A against Startup B to say, you know, how does your startup compare to other startups in its field? And then they realized that there was some value in the aggregated data. So, they changed companies to, changed names to Compass and they, you'll see some reports out there with Mark Compass. And a good one here from 2015 that I encourage every Canadian to look at is the Waterloo Startup Ecosystem Report that they did. And then somewhere around 2016, 2017, they separated the Compass and Startup Genome again. And so, now you'll see it all under Startup Genome and Compass is a different company just focused on benchmarking individual companies and performance metrics. And then of course, there are, you know, kind of, you know, grow your own approaches. This is certainly not something that I recommend unless, you know, absolutely necessary. But this is an example of the Michigan Municipal League. They have, as part of their community development awards program, created a program, created an award in this case that measures eight assets, things like physical design, you know, walkability, culture, multiculturalism, transportation, green initiatives, entrepreneurship, technology, and education. But they're doing that within a, you know, a larger set of awards criteria. And with that, I'll take back to Susan and then we'll hand it over to Robert. Thanks, Steve. So, I'm not going to put my webcam back on. I'll just leave it on your screen. But we did get a couple of responses to our question of what are you benchmarking. And we've got economic growth. One respondent is looking at benchmarking the community to get an understanding of the impact our society has on increasing tourism and economic development in our communities. Those numbers are crucial for applying for grants. And any of you who are in the position of applying for funding know how important metrics are. Another respondent is looking at progress in various city departments, particularly our planning department with building permits. And this morning I had a really interesting conversation with CUNY in the Fraser Valley that is actually looking at encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship by changing their home occupation bylaws, so what you can do in your home. So that's actually Maple Ridge if people want to look into that more. Sorry, I'm getting off topic. But what your planning department does has a big impact on your innovation ecosystem. And the final response is we're hoping to measure the increase in tech workers and companies in our city. So, thank you everyone who wrote in a response and I'll turn it back over to you, Steve. Great. And so our first presenter today is Robert Bell from, he's the co-founder for the Intelligent Community Forum and he heads up their research analysis and content development activities. So I'll hand it over to you, Robert, and tell us a little about yourself and about ICF. I am very happy to do that and it's a great privilege to be with you here today. I'm coming to you from New York but it gives me a chance to wish you all a good morning. We've ticked over into the afternoon here. And thank you Steve for that introduction. We started this work some 18 years ago working with communities around the world to try to understand why some of them succeed economically, socially, culturally, and why so many of them are getting left behind by a great wave of change. So that the core of what we do is actually an international award program but it's become a good deal more since then. So yeah, you're not going to work for me, right? Okay. Hang on a second. We're going to make the computer happy. So that's me and this is what we're going to talk about. What makes the SMART 21 so smart? SMART 21 is the semifinal stage of our annual award program in which we benchmark cities and metropolitan areas and counties on a wide variety of things. And so I'm going to step through our methodology for you kind of quickly to make sure that we all have time to gain what we want to say. So the SMART 21 process or the process that leads up to the SMART 21 starts with a questionnaire. It's questionnaire with 27 questions. We've spent a lot of time boiling it down to 27 questions because of course there's so much data you would like to collect. Which 21 are about numbers are quantitative and six are qualitative. They're storytelling which gives context to the numbers. And as I say, we've put a great deal of effort over the years into distilling down into what we hope are the fewest data points, meaningful measures of what's going on in communities, affecting their economy, affecting their society, and affecting their culture. And it's all based on a methodology that we developed while going back to 1999 actually that we now call the ICF message. It says that there's six fundamental things you need to look at, things you need to be working at in a community in order to be understood. So the first of these is the new infrastructure about digital age broadband. If you have it, if it's a robust, if it's cost competitive, you've got the road, you've got the highway, you've got the airport, you've got that economic development engine. They were all very used to seeing except now it's an invisible digital form. And if you don't have it, then you're off the highway, you've been bypassed, and so you need to do something to change that. The purpose of that is to power a workforce that's able to use knowledge to create value. In this digital age, increasingly, anyone who's not creating more value through what they know through the application of their mind and their experience to what they're doing, that person is not going to be successful economically. It was back in the 70s that the management consultant Peter Drucker predicted that it would become impossible to live in the middle class within 20 years if you just work with your hands and nothing else. And Guy, you're certainly prophetic, and that's the age we find ourselves. And so knowledge work is done using the new digital infrastructure of broadband. And the thing you're trying to do with all of that is to innovate. Robert Sowell is an economist who won the Nobel Prize for proving that 80% of all economic growth comes from the creation or the use of technology, of innovation in technology. And so if you're not participating in that in some way, whether it's using, adapting, or developing, you're left with 20% of economic growth, which doesn't sound like a very good sign for any of us. Those three things, broadband knowledge workforce and innovation in our model, are what gets you a digital economy. And I appreciate Steve's comment about the Brookings, I'm going to actually follow up that Brookings Innovation District, because that's obviously a very important part of what we do. But to make sure that these benefits actually stay in the community, that they benefit the people of your community as opposed to a distant shareholder, you need a great deal more. And we call it advocacy. We call advocacy as basically the creation of champions in your community who will convince everybody, who will be educated about what's required to adapt to this new world, and then become the leaders who forge a consensus in the community that change is necessary. Because we all hate change, it's where we start from, we all hate change. And we need to be guided into a future of really frankly, never ending change. And so in toasting communities work very hard on this intangible thing of advocacy. The same time they also look after their, the effects of having a very progressive, very aggressive digital economy, you're going to be leaving more people out, people who are already on the margins of your community, but will become increasingly so because they don't have digital skills. They don't have access, they don't understand why it even matters to them. And so intelligent communities reach out to try to prevent as much exclusion as they possibly can. And finally, sustainability is our sixth criteria. And there's two sides to that. One is sustainability of course is something we all need to work on because we all need to be able to breathe and to drink water and to feed ourselves. And that's going to get harder and harder in the future if we don't get sufficient attention to this. But also sustainability is a, is a uniter of communities over and over again, we see communities engaging in projects that bring people together around sustainability. It's a driver of quality of life. And it's a driver of economic growth because sustainability is going to be an amazingly large industry in the next 10 or 20 years. So that's the framework. And I went into it only just so that what I'm about to show you next actually makes some kind of sense. Then each one of these things that produces a growth cycle, and we've seen this again all around the world over and over again, communities that work on all these things kick themselves out of stagnation and get themselves to growth. What we measure when we have to benchmark them of course is constrained. We can't ask as many questions as we'd like to. But in broadband we ask about competition. How many competing providers do you have and what type are they? Because that's a really good proxy for how cost effective and powerful your, your digital infrastructure is, the more competition, the lower your prices are likely to be and the better the service. Availability, which is basically in the cable business, cable TV business is called home is passed, right? Premises passed. What percentage of your population actually has access to meaningful broadband, not just a 3G mobile, but the actual broadband at a decent speed. What percentage of your, of all those premises are actually subscribing to that broadband service. Three obviously key indicators of this. And then in this, in this area as well and all the others, we do ask that, that storytelling question. We want communities to help us about a project that they're doing to promote either the better availability of broadband, the better adoption of broadband, greater competition. And what we're looking for is to find out, have they identified a problem, a gap, a concern, and are they doing something effective to try to solve it? And so we want to hear that story to put that context. Second one, knowledge workforce. We ask again, questions in four areas. One of them is about the technology you have in schools, not because tech in schools by itself means all that much, but because when it's done well, it transforms education for the better and it creates that generation of digital natives who are going to be the leaders in the next economy. This is something that we've come to recently, but have come to recently realize how important it is. The history of education in certainly my country, the U.S. and Canada in so many places is about silos. We have an elementary school and we have secondary school and we have community colleges and technical schools and universities. And they've always tended to operate in their own silos as though they didn't connect to much else. And most importantly, they never really connected to the base of future employers who are going to ultimately be where their students end up someday, hopefully if they stay in the area. Well, there's tremendous benefit to be gained by actually connecting those things, breaking open the silos, and getting schools to collaborate, getting secondary schools to work with community colleges on joint programming, on universities with universities and joint programming, bringing employers that are important to your sector into the classroom, into the program, coining the young people that are growing up in your community with the opportunities that are available in your community. And amazing things happen when this is done properly. Fundamental infrastructure access to higher education. I mean, not every place is going to have a university. Not every place is going to have a technical school or community college, but you have one nearby perhaps. Or if you don't, what are you doing to try to bring that education digitally into your community? Without that kind of access, obviously you're starting far, far behind the starting line of everybody else. And then again, we've asked, we have questions about a number of things that you currently have, and then we want to know, what are you doing today to try to fix the problems you have, fix the gap? What is your knowledge workforce project that addresses that missing piece that's going to get you to a true knowledge-based economy? Number three is innovation. And if there's something that's difficult to measure, I think this probably is top of the list. It's a big, big, big word. Probably not a very well understood word in many ways, but we have some very specific things we look for. First and foremost is something that I think comes as a bit of a surprise to most leaders of cities in the mid-sized to small range, which is, do you have an innovation policy? And the answer, of course, for so many cities is what? Because we've got policies for all the things that we know how to do, but innovation. Well, okay, in the future, communities of any size, whether you've got 5,000 people or you've got 50,000 or 500,000 or 5 million people, you're going to have to think through what their policies around innovation are so that they can get a piece of that 80% of economic growth. We'll go down a list of specific innovation programs you have. And again, this is something you'll see in bookings or any of these other programs, makerspaces, hackathons, incubators, accelerators, how do they tie together? How well do they work together? Where's money available for things? At the same time, we also look at the public sector side, because we find over and over again in intelligent communities, the government points the way, it leads the way by example, it creates digital services that meet the needs of residents and organizations, and in particular makes that a community the kind of place that a built digital native will want to live, will want to stay, will refuse to live. Waterloo, the Waterloo case study was mentioned earlier by Steve. One of my favorite stories about Waterloo is when they had their big meltdown of Blackberry, what would normally happen is all their engineers would leave town, but instead all the engineers stayed in town because they wanted to. It was the place they wanted to live. And Google and Facebook and all the technology companies in the world came to Waterloo and open offices. That's that's a perfect outcome that you can get. And then lastly, we want to know what you're doing in innovation. We call the innovation triangle that connection of business government and institutions that drives innovation and keeps the results of the community. Tell us what gap you're feeling. Number four, advocacy, this again difficult human thing, we want to know of course what's your strategy, do you have a strategy to bring your community together? Tell us about it, show us how far you've gotten in developing that strategy. Is somebody accountable for carrying it out? What tools and techniques are you using to engage citizens, to engage organizations, to engage your leaders in this process so that everybody's voice gets heard? How effectively are you communicating the new benefits of your community, not just the fact that we have good transportation and clean water and good power, the new advantages that are attractive to digital companies? And what's your project? What's your project to fill the gap? Digital equality, this is a really it's a really interesting topic. I guess that obviously a lot more time on all of these things, but you've got the problem of bringing citizens online. And so everybody knows, of course, we're going to go to our library, we're going to set up Wi-Fi hot spots. What we're going to do other things, we're also going to go out to the community. We're going to have tech fairs and competitions. We're going to create community champions to turn to their neighbors and say, well, here's why this is really important and to show them something that is a benefit to them today on that strange thing called a computer or a tablet. We also look at the issue of business adoption. One of the tough facts of life is that small to mid-sized businesses are the backbone of every local economy. And they are also the slowest adopters of the technologies that could help them become more profitable and grow faster. And so we ask about programs to assess their digital readiness programs to train them in digital readiness programs, let them come and play with the technology and find out what it does. These are very valuable strategies. And then again, that project, you know, what where are you today? And then what are you doing today to prepare for a better tomorrow? How do you kind of fill your gap with a project right now? And lastly, sustainability. Of course, we ask about metrics. What are the metrics you're tracking? Because as Steve said, if you're not measuring it, you certainly are not managing it. And so that's a fundamental thing. What are your policies for sustainability? How much of it is just something we talk about because it makes us feel good? And how much of it translates into actual policy and action on the ground? In particular, we're interested in policies that are not just about, you know, putting down a better kind of paint on your roads to mark the lanes or about putting in solar cells or windmills or improving your sanitation. We're interested in projects that efforts that bring the community together around the issue of sustainability because everybody cares about the place called home. It's the most important place in the world. And so we look for communities that are taking sustainability agenda and not just doing it to make the place better, but doing it involving the community deeply and making the place better. So those are the six axes, if you will, on which we ask questions. Those are the topics, the questions we ask. Above all of this, there is an overarching question, which is why? Why do you do this? Well, for us, you know, one of the whys can be that you want to be named as one of our smart 21 intelligent communities of the year, which this year we're going to be naming in Hamilton, Ontario on the 25th of October, as well as online. So if you want to find out, you can go to intelligentcommunity.org on that day and you'll find out. And from that, we name a subset of them as the top seven intelligent communities. We put them through another evaluation process, which is kind of labor intensive for them, but they all tell us it's of immense value. And one of those is chosen every year and we're doing it in June of this year in New York City to be our intelligent community of the year to take the place of a community called ESPO, which is outside Helsinki in the nation of Finland. So that could be one reason you do all of that, but it's not really the reason. And it's not the reason that we care about. The reason we care about is that going through this process makes a very large contribution to future proofing this place called home, the place that matters most. It's about creating a competitive local economy that creates inclusive prosperity for as many people as possible and genuine wealth for the most successful because that drives the community forward. Regarding my creating a skilled workforce that matches the changing needs of employers and creates new businesses in the process all the time. Innovative businesses, institutions and government that drive growth and attract talent, expanding economic and social opportunity for all your citizens, not just for the lucky few. And creating a really widespread engagement in building a better future. I think if you look at that bullet point list, you've just described the nirvana of community development and benchmarking is the place it starts, but it's certainly not the place it ends. So thank you very much for allowing me this time and I look forward to hearing our next presentation or answering any questions that may arise. All right, I believe we are. We have time for questions now. I'm going to see if I can mute the person who has their phone ringing. So if anyone has any questions for Robert about this, you can answer that. You can enter them into the ask a question to staff button or box on your go to webinar control panel. We can also take a few minutes to think about it and we'll have time for questions at the end as well. So I believe we're over to Joe next. So Steve, do you have anything you want to add in the in the intermission here? No, I was just going to introduce Joe if there's no no questions at this point. Not yet. So go ahead. Great. So our next presenter is Joe Sterling. Joe is the General Manager of Rainforest Strategies at Consultancy that's putting into practice the ideas propagated in a book called The Rainforest and and it's a great a great book and a great read and and coincidentally the Rainforest book and in our Rainforest methodology both have a common nexus in that they came out of work that was done originally in San Diego with and led by the University of California San Diego and their Global Connect program. Many years ago Global Connect came up and assisted us in Vancouver or in British Columbia with our then technology strategy and which we evolved into the the innovation ecosystem and at the same time a further evolution led to this Rainforest book. So with that Joe, tell us a bunch of stuff and methodology. Good morning everybody and Joe Sterling here. I'm speaking to you from Grand Junction, Colorado where it is sunny on the on the fellow in the middle there. Rainforest Strategies is a group that has been doing work in the innovation space from the combination of design topics to community development, economic development for many many years across a broad swath of client types and as Steve mentioned the one of the books that started the conversation was the Rainforest, A Secret to Building the Next Silicon Valley by Victor Wang and Greg Horowitz who was the fellow from the University of San Diego or University of California at San Diego. The Rainforest scorecard that was produced by my colleagues Henry Doss and Alistair Brett we'll talk about quite a bit in in a moment here. The key thing that I'd want to mention is that the the oops let me back up the the and this I think makes a nice compliment to what Robert was addressing is that the the principles here we find anyway in practice they work across large and small populations having had quite a lot of experience myself and doing this work in rural areas as well as in major cities it's important that the that the material be easily translatable into those different kinds of settings and the the angle that we approach this topic from is more specifically about innovation and innovation ecosystem which might take place in a specific company or a non-profit or an educational setting or a government setting or as is as is the case in our work in Alberta it may take place across the an entire province and the the concepts that we use are derived from observation of course in places like Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv and Austin Texas and and other places around the world in Vancouver and so on plus our experience of doing the work to build on what Robert said about you know why why bother why go through all this the notion of course is to be economically socially and environment environmentally sustaining and what is that has always been the goal what is different in the 21st century is the is the tempo the pace and so velocity becomes really really critical whereas it is it wasn't in the age that I grew up in and so we think about you know human potential sustainability as Robert spoke about and as he also mentioned prosperity and capacity for more innovation and to be able to do it faster so this is just to reinforce the message that he was suggesting the other piece here that I think is so important to bring up is that it is easy to read about places like Silicon Valley or you know big cities like New York or big cities like Toronto or places like Waterloo and say well how can I compare myself to them and the ultimate answer has to be we're talking about British Columbia and wherever people live in British Columbia and as you start to build the digital infrastructure the broadband infrastructure that means that wherever people live they can participate in this economic growth that is inbound and as we know British Columbia is not all big cities it is a lot of smaller places that have unique skills talents resources histories local cultures geography and so on and so the name of the game is how do we apply these principles in a unique setting that you have so speaking about you know how do we even approach that today I want to address the what of this which for this conversation the piece that we'll look into is measuring both the assets of your innovation ecosystem but also the culture and I understand that you had that had been touched on last week we'll look at the as you do that measurement it is also subjective which for the engineers in this audience or the demographers in this audience or the economists in the audience it's very frustrating but we'll adjust how how do you how do you attend to that the the question of where do you begin we'll look into the difference between trying to impose tools and things like this from the top down compared to growing it from the bottom up and then of course the question of who do we benchmark against and is that even useful that is super important and and then lastly the the we'll return back to the why of it which we touched on a moment ago so first I'd like to just say that assessing and improving innovation ecosystems is fuzzy it seems like magic it's like pulling a rabbit out of a hat and the reality is once you get a methodology an approach to it it really isn't that magical though it worked that we did and you can read this later but we modeled our approach after the Baldrige quality award and the the methodology there and so we're applying continuous improvement concepts and methods which are very familiar to managers and and innovators that at institutional and government levels but they're also easily digestible at the level of entrepreneurs and individual groups in the case of Alberta we have effectively made made our way through steps one through four and are in second and secondary and tertiary cycles because this is a continuous improvement mindset as Robert mentioned this is something that is a never-ending process of change and so mastery of that is critical and it's it's accelerating so being able to do it quickly and having it baked into the annual cycles and ways of working at different levels very very important and that speaks to your municipal policies and agency policies and so on so I want to make a distinction here about the the range of things that one can measure and attend to and also outline a pothole that often happens it is very common historically when economic development agencies or universities or local governments want to spur innovation or they want to see more economic development they will focus on the hardware side of this conversation the assets and they're easy to count they're easy to see you can throw money at something and you get a beautiful incubator building or a big campus or you develop a policy or you say we've got x number of dollars available for these different levels of startup financing and that's relatively easy to do it's easy to count it's most many cases something you can walk up to and touch and so it's very satisfying and there are there are 100 stories of places that say well we did all of that we put all that in but then nothing came out of it and so they it's sort of like well we bought the computer but we didn't know that we had to have software to make it do anything and so this notion of the culture and how do you grow the grow this and actually animate it is a matter of having the right software and that is the recipe and it needs to be in the right proportions in order for the whole thing to work a couple of key points that we find is that in order to create a more innovative state in a system a an environment where the where the innovation is like popcorn it's happening rapidly but while somewhat randomly and surreptitiously it is happening that takes diversity that diversity of ways of being thinking approaches ideas and so on and of course that generates friction social friction and then you have to have elements that dissipate the social friction so we all want to work together and that includes things like extra extra rational motivations social trust which you may have heard of the rainforest social contract which they've done a beautiful job of rolling out in Alberta and engaging and and the advocacy for that's been very very good having the what we call the rules of the rainforest which is basically a set of ethical and values and behavioral guidelines that are the type that tend to generate innovative behaviors and groups and then how those rules get expressed so this in any kind of benchmarking any kind of measurement that you do you have to account for both the hardware side and the soft side both the assets and the culture so that's just and you'll find this explained in depth in the rainforest book but I wanted to just make this a quick overview to that so the rainforest book was developed and published in 2012 and was very very well received we knew at that time that we had a great concept but we didn't have a framework for actually rolling it out and doing the metrics work and to create a continuous improvement effort as Steve said in the intro you know you get what you measure for and so what is it that we observe that you need to have if you want innovative states whether that's in a single entity a single company or a non-profit or a government department or an agency or if that's at the level of a city or a region and so we've broken it down to six categories that we find and these attributes operate in concert they reinforce each other in certain ways and they can also and in some very counterintuitive ways thwart each other depending on on their condition so leadership which takes many forms frameworks infrastructures and policy policies resources which is of course financial resources but also information and physical settings and so on activities and engagement how do we engage role models who are the individuals that are that we all recognize as a role model in this thing called being innovative and in many ways entrepreneurial is almost synonymous with innovation here but that we start start splitting hairs but for the purposes of our economic development conversation we can think of innovation and entrepreneurism as connected at the hip although it's not always the case and then lastly is culture which has to do with our traditions the way we are around here and not to mention what we what we award people for and what we punish people for so in developing the rainforest scorecard and rolling it out it was developed in two two basic forms one was the short form and at the bottom of the screen you'll see a url where you can download this for free and it's there for you to use and and play with the rainforest scorecard was developed with two levels of engagement in mind the first level was the short form which you might think of as the executive summary or the the you know it's the quick and dirty set of concepts that we can use to start a conversation with and enough to get us going it's informal it's easy it's quick and it has intuitive notions that are there to play with the long form is the second half of the scorecard book and that really is the in-depth breakdown of each of the elements that are addressed in the short form and it's a balance of qualitative and quantitative inquiry and it's specific enough for policy design it is specific enough for deep dives into improvements in major programs all kinds of things like that so that one is much more disciplined and usually it comes into play when people are working initiatives that come out of the short form but it can also be the you might say the recipe book for a deep dive for an entire institution so once we gather the I don't have enough time to go into all the detail of how this works but once we gather information most commonly we do it online have people fill out the short form which as I mentioned takes about 20 minutes if you spend more than a half hour on it you're working way too hard then the question becomes how do you visualize the results so that we can have a meaningful conversation about it and see the whole system of metrics as a health snapshot if you will and what we have here we developed something called a rainforest radar which arrays the six attributes around the circle and gives them gives us a way to plot the scores and each activity that we do engages people both in in doing the assessment then visualizing it then we have them talk about it and compare their scores and the important thing to keep in mind about this is that this is a contact sport this is a process of being together rubbing elbows engaging about what do these things mean you're talking about leadership or what about leadership and what about resources isn't that just money or what about frameworks and how do your frameworks in your organization compared to the ones that I have in mind and the beauty of the experiential learning processes that we designed to go with the assessment is that it creates these conversations and it and the visualization tools enable people to see different patterns and then have meaningful conversations about it unlike just counting the assets which are critical to have but unlike counting the assets when you want to change the culture and engage people in doing something about this you have to give them ways to be together physically be together in dialogue look at patterns together and knock about the various linguistics and definitions so that they begin to come to common understanding of those things and the photos that we've been showing you here these are from a couple in the previous slide from global innovation summit we conducted in Silicon Valley is our first testing others here are from El Paso Texas where we had a bilingual room of Spanish English American Mexican nationals working on their border region and of course we've done these same kinds of projects in across Alberta just to very quickly give you an idea what the more engineering form of this looks like here we have this is from Alberta immersion number three which was a blend of Calgary and Edmonton folks mostly Calgary and the each of the questions of the short form are arrayed here with the number of response you know what the score was and then what the percentage of total is and at the bottom you can see what they're for this category what their group said was you know collectively what they felt was the score potential for them and this one happens to be about 60 participants and here's how it averages out then we array these scores across the the radar here and we can begin to see a shape emerge this pentagram or a hexagram and we've gone back and forth with the question of well how much detail does it actually let me back up how much detail does it actually require to get a meaningful conversation and when we initially did this we used all kinds of statistical analyses and so on and fundamentally it was good enough if it was a ballpark because the you know it in this particular case it's obvious that the leadership one is strong it's weaker than role models and it turns out that that is statistically valid as a as a pattern which I explain a little later or another another time but we can see that there's room to grow and in a moment I'll show you the comparison between Edmonton and Calgary and how they've changed but the notion here is that it gives you enough to go on to have a meaningful conversation a really important thing when you're starting this especially if you're in a relatively small setting is well where on earth do you start and is this something that an economic development agency can just roll into town and lay out and it's been our experience that the answer is no this to Robert's conversation about advocacy advocacy has to begin you have to find the advocate before you roll out the program and in here we have Brad Zumwalt and Alberta we've got James Kirstead up in Edmonton this one here is Ricky Mora in El Paso Juarez Kathy Swain El Paso Juarez and the thing that we find is that it's it's frankly more important to worry about not who to invite but to make sure that nobody's getting left out or nobody wasn't invited so I always worry much more about who's not showing up yet and so that's a key point about that so with regard to role models and how do you benchmark and is that even useful the key thing I want to say here is that here we have in the case of Calgary they've gone through four cycles from September 2016 through March of 2018 and you can see that their measures change in each subsequent reassessment they were reassessed every six months and they've been running initiatives internally and we can see that their scores generally speaking have been growing and that the balance of their scores is increasing and pro tip here balanced is better than bigger so if I had a choice between a balance set of scores and just you know one really big one balance statistically correlates with higher innovation states and the chills for you to cut you off we're running up against the hour so I know Susan needs to close off here so if you could quickly wrap up yep I'm there great very good thanks so the Edmonton one the key thing here about benchmarking in comparison is that Edmonton is different than Calgary their scores are different the environment's different and so the shape of their the shape of their their radar is different and it is and they will go at their own pace just as all of you in British Columbia and different parts of it will go at your own pace and you'll start out in different place so it's a key thing there lastly in wrapping up how do we approach this once we have some sense of what's cooking we as we've been talking about we measure we facilitate processes to move culture leadership and strategy along provide education and coaching and gradually move our way across this terrain and that is it for me so thank you very much great thank you and Joe that's that's really appreciated and Susan do you want to take it back and finish us up sure thank you I know that we had a couple of people who submitted questions for Robert and I expect there might be a few coming in for Joe as well before we wrap up here well I'll say is that we have your questions and we know who asked them and so we will forward those off to those presenters and they can follow up with you through writing and they may also be able to send something back to me and then I can post it on the past webinars page so that those questions can get asked before we drop off the webinar and just got a couple of announcements here are upcoming sessions October 16th we have social enterprises in local economic development and then November 6th we'll be looking at supporting business succession in your community and that's really about what you can do as an economic development professional to make sure that your community has the resources and the connections in place to help the entrepreneurs or business owners get their business ready for transition and get it actually transferred to a new owner so that will be a really useful presentation I think and of course there's more coming up into December and within about a month we'll be announcing our spring sessions so if you have any ideas for webinars by all means send them over to me at economicdevelopment.gov.bc.ca Most of you got this on the email list so I don't need to belabor that point but I do want to ask people to complete the feedback survey that will be popping up or coming in your email after the webinar and remember you can go and look at the recording online and share it with your friends so thank you very much to Joe and Robert for joining us from around North America and Steve for being a great moderator and pulling all of this amazing knowledge together so I want to say thank you very much and I will see you all on the next webinar have a great day