Building a High-tech powerhouse. City business and academic leaders have teamed up on $1M strategy to retool how we make our living Ray Turchansky and Paul Marck, Journal Business Writers The Edmonton Journal Thursday 18 January 2001 Ed Kaiser, The Journal / Research and development manager Glen Fitzpatrick at Micralyne Inc., holds up a microtechnology device, illustrating the direction in which the city's economy is going to move.Over the next half-decade, Edmonton must invest its energy and wealth into an economy of the future, dominated by bio-medicine, engineering, advanced manufacturing, micro-technology, and information media, says one of the key architects of an ambitious economic blueprint for the region unveiled Wednesday. "Our costs are low and we have a big income stream from energy resources -- that's Edmonton's advantage. The window is available for us to assure Edmonton of a future as . . . a growth economy," says Jim Edwards, president of Economic Development Edmonton, which spearheaded the far-reaching Greater Edmonton Competitiveness Strategy. There is a detailed game plan for retooling Edmonton's $30-billion, largely blue-collar economy into a high-tech powerhouse over the next several decades. The plan is the culmination of almost a year's worth of discussion, involving 1,200 business leaders, academics and city planners from the Edmonton area split into eight working groups and 24 "action teams." On Wednesday, Edwards and co-chair Glen Rainbird, president of TRLabs, announced a checklist of common initiatives for future economic growth to 800 business leaders at the Shaw Conference Centre. The key proposals include creating a world-class life-sciences centre, taking rapid advantage of the provincial government's high-speed Internet program, plus starting up a centre for research, development and commercialization of microsystems technology. The $1-million Competitiveness Strategy was conducted by James Gollub of ICF Consulting of San Francisco. The private sector has already contributed more than $400,000 in cash and services to monitor and run the project, which now enters the implementation phase. "If you don't change behaviour, it doesn't matter what you put in books," said Gollub. Edwards and Rainbird said that by pulling together Edmonton businesses, research organizations and education institutions to develop the strategy, the project has already created powerful networks that will spawn new opportunities. Harvey Sheydwasser, president of Logican Technologies in Edmonton, admitted the project has "a lot of skeptics." But he said many Edmonton businesses don't have a choice. "The reality is, unless we adopt a global position, we won't have any customers," Sheydwasser said. "We (Logican) have grown from 72 employees to 400, and right now we're looking to put in a chip-component lab in Edmonton to manufacture resistors and capacitors. Nobody cares where it comes from as long as it's a good product." "Whether it's 90 degrees or 45 degrees, I believe this has the potential to turn us," said TRLabs' Rainbird. "This has given a group of people some raison d'etre." The Strategy follows similar economic blueprints conducted in many cities, including Ottawa and California's Orange County. But Gollub said that quarterly economic assessments and performance reports on groups of related industries -- called clusters -- will provide a report card on progress in Edmonton. "Cities that are really proactive do these things. It's a must," said Louis Theriault of the Conference Board of Canada, which forecast Wednesday that Ottawa-Hull, Edmonton and Toronto will lead Canadian cities in gross domestic product growth in 2001. Edmonton's is pegged at 4.3 per cent. "You want to know where your competitive advantages are, where the focus is and where you want to invest your energy." The major initiatives announced will bolster the role of EDE and pump up activity at the University of Alberta, which is viewed as a key engine of Edmonton's emerging high-tech economy. U of A president Rod Fraser referred to microsystems, the manufacturing of tiny sensors and insulators, as "the third wave of technology," following biotechnology and information technology. "The microsystem flagship will accelerate Greater Edmonton's ability to harness and apply its existing capabilities," Fraser said. "The flagship has economic goals of developing R & D revenue for the system, increasing the number of startups, attracting new producers and suppliers, and enhancing the productivity." Linda Humphreys, executive director of the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research, said a life-sciences centre would allow projects like the Edmonton Protocol on diabetes to blossom. "By establishing a world-class institute focused on life science, we will reap the benefits of better health and economic growth," Humphreys said. "A development of this proposed magnitude and vision is sure to attract industry to our region." Gollub said Edmonton businesses are in the enviable position of being poised to take advantage of the Supernet, an Alberta government project to bring high-speed Internet to schools, hospitals and municipal offices. "We must be more aggressive and innovative than ever before," Sheydwasser said. "It means that we control the technology to the clusters. "Our only choice is to be first, to create and manage a required common serviceable high-speed telecommunications highway." |