Thank you.
Good morning. Bonjour.
My name is Christa Dickenson. I am the president and CEO of Interactive Ontario, a non-profit non-partisan trade association representing over 340 companies in Ontario's interactive digital media industry. Our members produce a variety of interactive digital media, including e-learning, video games, mobile games, augmented reality, and virtual reality, as well as social media content. Most of those members are small to medium-sized companies.
Thank you for your invitation to come and talk about cultural hubs and the way in which the government can help them to develop.
Many members of Interactive Ontario have benefited from cultural centres, both formal and informal, as they were starting out. We would be happy to share their experiences and our ideas on what could be done to better support cultural entrepreneurs in the realm of interactive digital media.
IO is here to talk not as either an organizer of a cultural hub or as a potential future applicant but as a trade organization that would like to see the creation of more cultural hubs that can provide the necessary services to help IO members and IDM companies across the country grow from individual creators to small start-ups to, ultimately, bigger creative industries with their own premises. IDM companies in Ontario are primarily small businesses, with 88% of companies actually having 20 or fewer full-time equivalent employees. That first stage of growth from one or two individuals to a small start-up with ongoing production is probably the hardest and is in most need of support.
The IDM industry in Ontario contributed $1.4 billion to the GDP in 2015. With support, that contribution could very easily grow. Perhaps more importantly, support at the early stage of a cultural entrepreneur's career can help to diversify the industry and encourage more people from underserved segments of the population, such as women, indigenous people, visible minorities, and the neurodiverse, to put their good ideas to work in their own company.
I first would like to talk about the different kinds of hubs that exist today. The traditional cultural hub is like the Centre for Social Innovation, known as CSI, or 401 Richmond, both in Toronto. They are shared workspaces for artists, cultural producers, social innovators, and entrepreneurs, which also offer community-use space, exhibitions, and programming to assist both the tenants and members of the community. They're incredibly useful workspaces—and in fact IO itself regularly rents meeting spaces in CSIs—but they target very specific kinds of art workers as tenants.
On the other hand, there are the tech start-up spaces for collaboration and support of new and emerging technology companies. MaRS Discovery District, Communitech, and Ryerson's DMZ or Digital Media Zone are examples of spaces that offer shared workspaces and entrepreneurial support specifically to tech start-ups. There is little community engagement, but they do offer programming and networking for their tenants and support in accessing the marketplace.
Now, IO's members are interactive digital media producers, and they tend to straddle both the cultural space and the technology start-up world, so they do not fit well in either one of those spaces. They create a cultural product like video games or mobile games, so they don't fit into the tech start-up community. For example, MaRS specifically supports four sectors: energy and environment, finance and commerce, health, and work and learning. As entrepreneurs, they don't necessarily fit within the community as a traditional cultural hub. As an example, the CSI mandate is to support those who want to change the world. So I ask you: the latest Angry Birds isn't likely to change the world, is it?
For this reason, IO would like to see the development of a third kind of cultural hub, which we think fits the expanded definition of cultural hubs contained in the Creative Canada report, where it references the next generation of creative entrepreneurs in small businesses and start-ups. It would combine the cultural focus of the more traditional cultural hub with entrepreneurial support of the tech start-up hubs, and it would offer collaboration opportunities between cultural industries.
As an aside, I heard GamePlay Space present to you last Tuesday, and I think they're a great hub space for the gaming community, but we are advocating for spaces that would support a wider cross-section of cultural industries.
The interactive digital media industry would need the following resources in any cultural hub. That means secure, high-speed broadband available both as Wi-Fi and dedicated lines; small group work spaces that are soundproof and facilitate collaborative work; presentation and boardroom spaces; access to non-arts professionals such as accountants, lawyers, financial advisors, marketing advisors, HR consultants, and the list goes on; access to non-IDM arts professionals such as graphic designers, illustrators, animators, and screenwriters; ongoing training and mentorship opportunities; shared equipment such as presentation or demonstration equipment; shared equipment and technology to support collaborative work with other locations, i.e., live-streaming and virtual conference facilities like the one I'm in right now; space for playtesters from the community; and 24-7 access.
There are also aspects to a successful cultural hub that are difficult to quantify. A location such as a renovated warehouse, a Victorian office space, or some other architecturally unique space fosters a creative environment. IDM creators would also welcome flexibility over the work environment so that, for example, programmers could create dark workspaces to better see their code. IO members would also like to see a cultural hub open to a wide variety of cultural industries to support collaboration and to foster a creative environment they would feel comfortable in. Opportunities to engage with the public to showcase their work or playtest while in development—