Sharing high-tech secrets
Posted Sep 21, 2010 06:22:48 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The Region of Waterloo has become a “tech teacher” to provinces and nations envious of our progress.
A handful of local entrepreneurs have just returned from British Columbia where they were part of a meeting with BC’s version of Communitech. Tim Jackson, CEO of Waterloo’s Accelerator Centre, tells 570 News the goal was for us to provide guidance to the British Columbia Technology Industry Association (BCTIA). The BCTIA had previously paid a visit to our region.
But Jackson says BC is just the beginning.
“We’ve had a delegation from Saudi Arabia that has asked a couple of us to go visit them to help them with entrepreneurship,” Jackson says. “We’ve got a delegation from Kenya coming in November and they’ve asked us to put a proposal together to go over to Africa and help them.”
Jackson says the trips also provide an opportunity for those involved in our tech sector to learn from what others are doing. In British Columbia, for example, they’ve created what’s called an “Angel Tax Credit.”
The program encourages investors to get involved early on in a tech company’s growth, with the tax credit providing incentive. Jackson sees such a program as an ideal way of getting more people to invest in and support entrepreneurs.
“We can learn from everybody, whether it’s Silicon Valley, whether it’s (the) Boston area, whether it’s Vancouver,” lists Jackson. “There’s always something to pick up from others around the world.”
Jackson sees no signs of a high tech slowdown. Instead, he points out, the definition of high tech is becoming blurred. Research in Motion, for example, may be a high tech company but it’s also a manufacturer.
“We use that broad ‘high tech’ description to really talk, in some cases, about just the way some of our traditional businesses are changing,” Jackson explains. “I think there’s still lots and lots of room for growth.”
That growth is fostered by a mentoring system that is both formal and informal, according to Jackson. And it’s for that very reason that you can’t just “bottle up” what we have in Waterloo Region and transfer it to another part of the world in hopes it will also work there.
“We have a situation in this community where everyone helps each other,” Jackson says. “And one of the nice things about tech is that the companies tend to be exporters, so it’s not as if everyone is competing against each other for local business.”
Over and above that, Jackson refers to what he calls an “ecosystem” for entrepreneurship that simply cannot be duplicated elsewhere. And for the creation of that, Jackson spreads around the credit. He cites our commercially-oriented university, the Accelerator Centre that helps early-stage entrepreneurs, and the large public companies like RIM, Open Text and Com Dev that help to put Waterloo Region on the map as just some of the factors fostering that ecosystem.
