Good afternoon.
Thank you very much for the invitation to speak.
The B.C. Innovation Council is a creature of the Government of British Columbia. We are a crown agency under the Ministry of Advanced Education and we live in three specific areas. We operate in the talent space, so looking at the people side of the science and tech industry; we look at the innovation side; and we look at the commercialization side. I'll go through those in quick order.
In the talent space, the province--not unlike most other jurisdictions in the western world--is facing a huge crisis on the people side of the science and tech industry. We have about 9,000 openings in British Columbia in the science and tech space. We have 67,000 kids in grade 11, we have 41,000 kids in grade 1. Whether or not we manage to get all of those 41,000 into science and tech is, of course, a major challenge. Consequently, as we start looking at this the solution is going to be partly homegrown, but it will also have to be grown from outside of Canada. That's one of the issues we're focusing on.
The second issue we're focusing on is the innovation space, where we're trying to encourage kids at different ages to get involved in innovation, not just high marks. We've run a number of things along the lines of encouraging more science fairs and the like in the schools, to encourage them at an earlier age into science and technology careers. As you go up through the system, we award in every high school a scholarship for the most innovative kid to go into university; it's not necessarily the kid with the highest marks.
As we go through the university system we spend a fair bit of time doing match-ups between the different faculties. So we do a lot of the silo-busting of what is normally difficult to do in many environments, which is to mix up the science student from UBC with the business student from SFU to work on a joint business plan to win a particular scholarship--and we're seeing a lot of success--so that science students understand that there is such a thing as price and market and all of those horrible things, and on the other side, the business students understand the implications of what is there in the minds of the scientists.
On the commercialization side we have a number of initiatives that range around the province, where we have nine regional councils. We partly fund the UILOs at the universities and colleges, and we spend a fair bit of time trying to work with these organizations to get as much volume through the system as we possibly can. We look at what we refer to as the garage stream as well as the university stream. And we say “garage stream” in honour of Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard, not in terms of anything derogatory.
With the idea that we are trying to create an environment, we're using a variety of virtual boards, mentors, etc., to push a number of companies through, using things like the New Ventures BC business plan competition, to graduate as many organizations as we can from a business plan point of view. And then we have a funding mechanism where they can then, as graduates, apply for either a proof-of-concept or a prototype fund where they can go to take their innovation to the next level.
A key observation on our part is that the tolerance for pain or risk amongst angels and venture capitalists is getting less, and the time from when the innovators run out of money from friends, fools, and family until they hit the venture capital side or the angels is getting broader. The ability to fill that gap is what's going to be critical for us to draw the volume of businesses that we'll ultimately need to be part of the knowledge economy as the western world moves away from manufacturing and the like.
I'll end my remarks there, and I'd be happy to answer questions in the second round.
Thank you.