Thank you, and thank you for inviting me to speak here today. My name is Sue Paish. I am the CEO of Canada's Digital Technology Supercluster.
Like many Canadians, you may be asking, “Who are you? What do you do? How do you do it, and why should we care?”
I'm going to answer those questions in a moment, but first I want to start to talk to you about why I'm part of this organization.
I am the proud mother of three amazing young women. For the past 35-plus years that I've been in the business community, everything I have done is to build a better Canada for my children and all of their friends, which in today's connected world includes hopefully your children as well.
As chair of the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade in 2010, and for the past two years as the chair of the Business Council of British Columbia, I have seen data on Canada's declining competitiveness. I wondered whether we were doing enough to address our society's most pressing issues, issues such as climate change, sustainable health care, the competitiveness of our economy and being able to scale companies emerging from our vibrant technology and other sectors. To me, it did not seem that we were getting Canada ready for an increasingly complex and competitive world.
The notion of an entirely new approach to innovation caught my attention. The more I looked into it, the more I concluded that this is gutsy stuff. I decided I was going to see what I could do to test this program and its potential, so here I am, 22 months in the role, and I can tell you that I see the potential of the program.
For example, Protein Industries group, out of the prairies, uses technology to make Canada a leading source for plant protein. The Next Generation Manufacturing group in Ontario will build manufacturing capabilities using technology such as advanced robotics and 3D printing. The scale ai company will bring retail, transportation and other sectors together to build intelligent supply chains through AI and robotics. The Ocean Supercluster is focused on capturing the big opportunities from our oceans.
But returning back to the digital supercluster, who are we? We are a member-based not-for-profit organization composed of over 450 organizations representing some of Canada's brightest minds and names in health, communications, technology development, natural resources, research and industrial manufacturing. We are solving some of industry's and society's biggest problems through a collaborative innovation model the likes of which this country has not seen before.
Here are a few examples.
What if we could use data to speed up the time it takes to identify and locate major weather events such as forest fires, and reduce their impact? Perhaps we could even get to the point where we can forecast where and when these events might happen through data collected by Canadian-built earth observation satellites.
What if we could build an integrated data platform to collect, secure and leverage data on the health of our freshwater resources and use this data to better protect the health of our lakes, rivers and streams? This is something that we do not do now in a country with tens of thousands of these water bodies.
What if we could reduce the diagnosis time for malignant melanoma from six months to a matter of days? One in six Canadians will get this disease in their lifetime right now. Your survival rate over the period of six months goes from 85% to 15%, but It takes you six months to get an appointment to see a dermatologist for diagnosis.
These are just three of the 21 examples of the problems we are solving through the projects we have selected to date so far.
How do we do this? This is where it gets interesting.
We start with identifying the big problems, the problems that need solving to build a better Canada and to improve the strength and resilience of our economy. Next we bring disparate organizations together to discuss potential solutions. This is not generally how Canadian industry solves problems. Generally if there's a problem, a single organization or two get together and try to solve the problem. If they don't have the talent or the tools they need, they go and buy it. That's not what we do.
We bring together small entrepreneurial companies, researchers, large enterprises and medium-sized organizations and invite them to explore potential solutions to these problems. As they do this, we have seen that solutions emerge that are different from and better than any single organization could do on its own. This is collaborative innovation.
It's exciting to see this level of activity and the results that we're delivering in less than two years. We've received over 100 expressions of interest and we've invited 36 teams to submit formal proposals over three competitive project calls that we have launched since summer 2018. We have many more in development.
What's equally exciting is what we did not expect, and that is the benefits that flow from ideas that we did not advance and the benefits from interactions that come from the work that this organization does by bringing different organizations together.
Consider Finger Food Advanced Technology Group in Port Coquitlam, B.C. If Mr. Julian were here, I would point to him. It's just down the street from his riding.
Finger Food was part of a team that submitted a proposal in 2018. We did not select that proposal; however, as a result of the relationship built during the development of the proposal, there was a ripple effect, including a new partnership with Enbridge, as well as other companies. This prompted the opening of an office in Calgary for Finger Food where they now project hiring an additional 200 people by 2023. It's exciting to see that what we do is becoming a material, fundamental element in creating a new culture of innovation that is spawning new ways for organizations, small and medium, to grow and succeed.
There's DNAstack from Toronto. Since joining the supercluster, this company's Toronto office has doubled in size, growing from eight to 16 employees and with a 50% jump in revenue forecast for this year.
Vancouver-based MetaOptima, which raised $8.6 million in series A funding in 2018, has now grown to more than 70 employees since joining the supercluster.
We're launching competitive calls for projects approximately every six months. Our fourth call for projects is slated for this summer, so the next time I am here, I look forward to sharing the success stories with you.
Projects selected to date have budgets totalling $65 million, 60% of which is from industry and partners. Half of this investment is from small and medium-sized enterprises. SMEs make up 52% of our project participants, and we're just getting started.
Our real-world successes and failures have calmed my personal apprehension about this program and this policy. I can see the stunning potential of the entire innovation supercluster initiative, and in particular what we are doing in our innovation supercluster organization in British Columbia.
I started telling you that everything I do in my life I do to build a better country for my kids and all of their friends as well as my granddaughter. I am both proud and determined to tell you that this initiative is part of filling my obligation to my children and yours.
Thank you. I'd be happy to take your questions.