Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good morning. My name is Bill Tam, and I have the honour and privilege of serving as the president and CEO of the BC Technology Industry Association. I'm pleased to make the presentation today to the committee.
Perhaps I can start with a little bit of background on the technology industry in British Columbia. It really has become over the last decade a transformative force in the B.C. economy. It spans the diverse sectors of digital media; life sciences; wireless, information, and communications technology; and clean technology. The B.C. technology industry has become integral and vital to virtually every sector, and is part of what we see as the future prosperity of the province.
Within British Columbia, I think one of the aspects we get to capitalize on is just the wealth of talent, diversity of the companies themselves, world-class universities, and experienced entrepreneurs, all with the goal of building and growing globally competitive companies.
Over the past 20 years, the technology industry has grown from $4 billion in revenue to now about $20 billion in revenue, so about five times over that period. At the same time, the number of people who work in the sector has blossomed from 30,000 people to now about 90,000, which places us among the largest employment groups in the province. In fact, if you total up the number of jobs in the oil and gas, mining, and forestry industries in B.C., actually more people work in technology than all of those industries combined. That's allowed us to be one of the fastest-growing sectors in terms of job creation. Over the past decade we've been able to grow our share of B.C.'s exports from 5% to now 10%.
A lot of this plays to the strong underpinnings that we benefit from in the rise of the sector. Obviously, here in Canada we benefit from consistently being ranked by the World Bank as one of the most favourable environments to start a business. At the same time, we're particularly proud of the fact that British Columbia is what we consider to be a hub for start-ups. A nation-leading 3.7% of those who are in our working population characterize themselves as working in a start-up. Equally important is the fact that the metropolitan Vancouver region was identified among the top 10 start-up ecosystems in the world in 2012. We consistently rank very high on the charts in terms of livability, sustainability, and just the environment it takes to build emerging companies.
We also benefit from a number of favourable business climate and competitive factors. These include competitive taxation rates, government-supported R and D programs, and I think one of the first angel tax credit programs in the country, which has worked particularly well in supporting the emergence of new and upstart companies.
Now, one of the aspects we recognize is that the strength of entrepreneurship also has potentially a downside—namely, that within our industry set we have an overabundance of what we would characterize as small and very small companies. In fact, here in B.C. only 3.5% of all companies have more than 50 employees. That's in the technology sector. Nearly 70% of all the companies employ fewer than four people.
We often refer to this as a “growth gap”. Fundamentally, it's a growth gap in that we have an imbalance in what we consider to be the innovation continuum of small, medium, and large enterprises. We don't have nearly enough medium and larger companies. What this represents is a persistent drag in terms of the ability to scale the industry as a whole.
Supporting the growth of tech companies and building an increasingly robust ecosystem and competitive framework is one of the things we're committed to doing. We recently published our four-point plan for growing the B.C. tech industry, which highlighted the importance of continued strategic investments to elevate and accelerate the rate of growth for tech companies in B.C. and address some of the critical issues around access to capital, expanding and developing the talent base, expanding the access to customers and markets, and building company capacity overall.
Maybe I can take a moment just to speak a little bit about the B.C. technology association and some of the things we've been involved with. Over the past 20 years, we have been established as a non-profit organization funded by members to really accelerate the growth, development, and advancement of technology companies located in British Columbia.
Our mission is quite simple. It's to help companies grow and build world-class organizations and to really make B.C. the best place to grow a tech company.
Over that period of time we've had the opportunity to link various aspects of the ecosystem, connecting entrepreneurs, small and mid-sized enterprises, large companies, post-secondary institutions and universities, government agencies, venture capital firms, and service providers, all of which provide linkages across this vast ecosystem. Our membership spans all five key sectors including the information and communications technology sector, the wireless sector, life sciences, digital media, and clean tech. It includes companies from start-up to very large, and everything in between. In all, our member companies constitute and comprise about two-thirds of all the employees who work in the technology sector in British Columbia.
Our guiding principles are quite simple. We're here to help accelerate the growth of companies, to build a sense of community and common will to strengthen the B.C. tech ecosystem and to make sure that we can forge linkages and connect companies to opportunities, customers, and markets where they exist. In so doing, what we try to do is harness the entrepreneurial ingenuity and culture that does exist here in British Columbia. We focus on how we can help accelerate the growth of tech companies through the creation of more mid-sized and fast-growing companies that are globally competitive.
In 2010 we actually introduced our centre for growth incubator program, which was specifically designed to support the accelerated growth of companies by tying together mentors, coaches, resources, and the vehicles to help companies grow faster. Since 2010 we've had over 1,000 companies that have engaged in the program. We've provided more than 11,000 hours of support and coaching to them, and overall, these companies that we've worked with over the past three years have generated over $118 million in new revenue and investments and created over 400 new jobs.
Most importantly, it has been a program that has yielded significant benefits to the B.C. tech ecosystem. We have noticed that the BCTIA companies that are engaged in this program have grown proportionately faster and have a better survival rate. In fact, their survival rate is over 94% and they have grown, on average, three to five times faster than their peers.
Recently we undertook an initiative, which is led by a consortium of some of the biggest technology companies in British Columbia, to establish an innovation hub in British Columbia, essentially what we would constitute as a living lab for accelerated growth, and to facilitate a new set of anchors across the key technology sectors of information technology, digital media, life sciences, clean tech, and wireless.
We believe that the concept of hubs is a well-proven concept. The hubs enable a fluid exchange of ideas, capital, partnerships, market access, and the education that is vital to allowing companies to succeed. Our vision is to help to foster that through results-oriented connectivity and to connect that across similar centres across the country and across the world.
We've had the benefit—as BCTIA partnered with many of the trade organizations here provincially, municipally, and also federally—of a partnership with the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development. We've worked very closely with the Trade and Invest B.C. folks, Industry Canada, Western Economic Diversification Canada, the Vancouver Economic Commission, the Metro Vancouver region, the City of Surrey economic development office, and many other organizations over the years. We believe that the realization of an innovation hub will actually serve as a catalyst to draw more attention to Vancouver, British Columbia, and Canada, by demonstrating our prowess and ability to garner globally competitive companies.
Perhaps turning the page a little bit and specifically looking at the Canada-European Union comprehensive economic and trade agreement, we see that as a really positive signal in a few different ways. First of all, its notion to remove over 99% of the imported and exported tariffs on goods would allow greater access to services and investment. For the B.C. tech industry as a whole, this is a huge opportunity.
It's worth noting that within the context of our export activity, our export activity for technology products and services more than doubled in the period from 1999 to 2009, growing from just a 6.5% share to almost a 15% share.
One of the key benefits we see is improved market access for the B.C. services sector, which incorporates professional services, environmental services, information technology services, and software, because over that same period from 1999-2009 we saw that the services piece was by far and away the largest growth area. Technology services now account for nearly a third of all B.C. exports in the services regime. That's the technology representation.
We believe that the agreement will benefit our tech industry in the four following ways.
First of all, as I mentioned, CETA offers preferential access to the EU services market. We—
