Thank you for having me.
My presentation is entitled “A Digital Highland”. The first half is about me, and the second half is recommendations.
I'm the CEO of Project Whitecard in Winnipeg. Project Whitecard is a company that's been around for eight years. We specialize in creating learning games for children, so you may not have seen our games but your kids have seen them.
We did a project with the Canadian Space Agency and Julie Payette, which went to over one million kids. We have just completed a project depicting the International Space Station with Chris Hadfield that went to over one million kids.
We are now funded by the Canada Media Fund to work on a new brand, working in conjunction with NASA to create a worldwide project called Starlite.
We have investment from the Canada Media Fund, the Manitoba tax credits, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation.
We're an overnight success, but eight years in the making. We're quite happy to be developing our own brand now. It's wonderful to be in that place.
Why did I choose to do games? I was actually at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for four years and decided I should do something that would change people and maybe make them smarter. I researched and when I looked at UNESCO results on the direct impact of mathematics on the gross domestic product, I found that perhaps I could use technology to make people smarter.
Did you know that the average Canadian child spends over 40 hours a week in front of screens? That's a stat from Active Healthy Kids Canada. Maybe we could find a way to make that more meaningful.
Our goal is simply to revolutionize learning with new and more intelligent technology as we work on this learning project. With the MacArthur Foundation, NASA, and the Canada Media Fund, we are trying to implement a digital badging system that will give accreditation across the board to science standards that kids acquire while they play these games. It is possible. We want to inspire both students and adults to create a better tomorrow through science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
What do I see a digital highland as being? Yes, it would be a northern Silicon Valley model. We would like to revolutionize accreditation for IT professionals and young learners across Canada. For Canada in general now, I think we should look at improving the national communication between IT leaders and start-ups.
We should maintain or increase funding envelopes such as the Canada Media Fund. I found out just before I left for this trip that we were accepted into the Canada Media Fund accelerator program with an accelerator program in Winnipeg called LaunchPad. That is fantastic and will help us go to market. We should facilitate career opportunities for accelerator programs and mentors.
In the video game industry, just as an example, CMF now has eight, and now nine with one in Winnipeg, of these accelerator programs they are supporting. It's very important in establishing our own brand for the first time, we realize that we now need to re-emphasize our efforts and our intellectual efforts on how we are going to align this product to market.
I applied to the Canada Media Fund for three years in a row—hundreds and hundreds of pages, maybe over 1,000 pages of applications—before we were accepted. Maybe more emphasis on the actual alignment with the market....
Regarding accreditation, many of the people I hire come directly out of working on this technology themselves. They're just good at it.
I spent three months, thanks to a Canadian program, in Silicon Valley on an accelerator called Plug and Play. I think David had a small part in that. I think he was in the room when I won that, down at GDC.
Quite often, people there who have successful IPs, who make billions of dollars on Dropbox or Facebook, have just come out of a university environment. The provenance of higher learning is moving to social communities of digital literacy, but we don't really have a way of tracking who knows what.
Part of the project I'm doing with the MacArthur Foundation is simply to acknowledge people's skill levels in that region.
It's a question of do we need better standards? Do we need better peer recognition?
Project Whitecard delivers a program in serious games at the University of Winnipeg. It's a full-time certificate program. We're also proud of that.
Mentorship should be sustained, local, and connected to venture capital. The example I gave you was Plug and Play in Palo Alto. There will also be Plug and Play in Calgary, and LaunchPad in Winnipeg.
What can the government do?
The role of trade commissioners should evolve to be aware of the broad spectrum of activities as we try to create start-ups. Remove the barriers to start-ups on RFPs, government and otherwise. Responses of 100 pages are too large. I competed with 180 companies for the NASA project and we won. The response was 15 pages long, and a presentation. We won that, so that's good. We were able to compete with the biggest companies in the world on that project.
Simultaneously, connect educational leaders and entrepreneurs in the IT sector.
Increase the digital fund envelopes. Why? It hones us. Smaller companies, like my company which has 10 to 20 individuals at any given time, and is moving to 100 individuals, were honed over the last three years because there was the competitive environment with the Canada Media Fund where everyone across Canada can compete. It wasn't easy, but we picked up the skills we needed.
In summary, breed 100-plus more Canadian start-ups every year. We already know what a digital highland is, right? We know that a nearby university or college with evolved programs in business and IT, together with a local accelerator program and business capital, combined with legislation, is what a digital highland is and that's what Canada can be.
Many start-ups leaving the nest means more will flourish, more jobs, and Canadian leadership in the world.
Thank you.