A 15th birthday is a good time to reflect on the traits of the mid-teen.

“Fifteen-year-old teens are pushing their parents to do more and more on their own, and they do not want to have to ask permission to do it,” writes Denise Witmer of About.com.

“They are often assertive to the point of pushing their limits too far,” she continues. “Independence is the name of the game for a 15-year-old, and they are going to try and grab as much of it as possible.”

As Communitech prepares for its sold-out 15th annual general meeting tonight, it’s tempting (and fun) to ponder the parallels – the growth spurts, the boundary-pushing, the lovable impatience – between our ever-evolving tech organization and the average adolescent.

It’s also a good time to check in with the parents – namely, the board chairs who have nurtured us along to this point – for some perspective on where we came from, where we’ve been and where we’re headed.

We caught up with four - Randy Fowlie, John Whitney, Tim Jackson and Gerry Remers - to find out what they had to say (and, unlike a typical 15-year-old, we actually listened):



RANDY FOWLIE (1997)

Q – What is your earliest recollection of talk of the need for a technology association in Waterloo Region, and what role did you play?

A – Before Communitech was formed there was that group of technology guys who had a little forum and got together. It finally got to the point where a group of people got together to try to become original founders and put some money towards getting it off the ground.

I was a partner at KPMG at that time, and ended up being part of that group of people.

Q – What interested you in getting involved with this initiative?

A – When I was at KPMG, I had a technology-oriented practice that I was building, so I had a lot of technology-oriented companies that were clients of mine; Mitra, Focus Automation, OpenText, Waterloo Maple (now Maplesoft), a bunch of other companies.

I had an interest in technology.

Q – When you think back 15 years to 1997, to the technology environment then, how does it compare with what you see on the ground here today?

A – Back then there were not as many mature companies around as there are now. I still think there could be more mature companies around right now.

Back then, OpenText wasn’t what it is; RIM certainly wasn’t what it is; Mitra was a relatively small company. So, there was a pocket of relatively small companies that were starting to grow; probably one of the leading ones at that time was MKS, actually, who were a little bigger than some of the other guys.

There were a lot of technology companies starting up; they just had not become mature companies yet.

Q – When you look at what we’ve achieved in 15 years, what do you think it says about how the next 15 might unfold?

A – I think that any time you can put together a cluster of companies that have similar characteristics, it’s more of an environment that can grow.

I think it would be nice if there were some more mature companies around here because it provides opportunities for people, if things don’t work out in one company, to move to another company. Without those kinds of opportunities, it makes it difficult to attract people to come here.

So, over the next 15 years, I think we’d be considered more successful if we had more companies that were $10 million to $50 million in revenue, that gave more opportunities to people to move back and forth between companies, create more opportunities for people to move from startup to grown-up companies.

Q – What do you think other tech communities can learn from the Communitech model?

A – I don’t know. It’s a lot of work, and it’s a lot of persistent effort.

If I look back, the organization has gone through different stages. When it first was formed, it was about trying to identify enough of a member base, and it was more about selling Communitech to those companies; to try to get them to join and stay on.

It’s a different organization now. It’s respected now; it’s recognized by provincial and government agencies. They come here.

So, what can other people learn? If you’ve got a small base of companies, and you’ve got some people who are willing to work fairly hard at it, then I think you can grow a technology association around it.

And, I think Communitech provides different things to different companies at different stages in their life.

Q – How did you come to be the first chair?

A – We were having the first meeting and somebody nominated me, around the table.

Q – What were the first meetings like?

A – They were about trying to figure out how to put together a database and develop a list of companies around here.

And there were debates about how you try to extend it down to Cambridge, over to Guelph; what was going to be the geographic area we tried to represent.

It was about trying to find those companies, and at that time, it was a lot of selling; it was a lot of trying to sell a concept to companies to join.

Q – What’s your involvement in the tech community these days?

A – I’m at a company called RDM Corporation right now.

I’m reasonably active; I sit on the board of OpenText so I always have connections and interactions at OpenText.

I interact differently now, personally, with Communitech. And so, I use Communitech as a network for me when I’m trying to get some things. But, it’s valuable for the employees I have in my company, for the peer-to-peer groups that they have.

I encourage the people in my company to join the peer-to-peer groups to get out and develop a network of people who might have experienced similar problems. It gives them opportunities to go out and talk to people to share ideas with and bounce ideas off when they’re trying to resolve problems.

 



JOHN WHITNEY (1997-2006)

Q – What were the conditions on the ground in the mid-to-late 1990s when talk of a Waterloo Region technology association first surfaced?

A – The tech sector was doing well, but RIM wasn’t the size it is; OpenText wasn’t the size it is, so it was still a burgeoning tech sector.

The vision was to bring these founding members together, to throw some money in, but when everyone got together, nobody really knew what we were going to do. It was ‘How do we make it easy for the tech sector to thrive in Waterloo Region?’

(Jim) Balsillie and (Tom) Jenkins and (Peter) Schwartz and all those people were supporters, so it got the attention of a lot of people, but I don’t think politicians took it seriously.

So, as an organization, the early years were all about membership; deciding who we want to be and what we’re going to do.

It’s cool to sort of look back and see the evolution of what’s happened and the presidents that we had; Vince Schiralli was the first guy, and he was a rah-rah kind of a guy. He wasn’t afraid to go and talk to anybody.

A lot of people joined just as a leap of faith; you know, ‘These 35 founding members can’t all be wrong, so maybe we’ll just join.’

Then, as we started getting membership, we had to start dealing with programs; what programs are we going to do and what are we going to give back to the membership?

And so, that was a little bit of Vince but that probably moved into Greg Barratt’s time as president.

As we would go back to renew the memberships, it was always interesting, because there were companies that said, ‘Well, we really aren’t using it.’ And we would say, ‘Well, that’s your own fault; we have these peer-to-peer programs and we have these speakers’ series and we have a lot of educational kinds of things.’

But how do you get them to renew their membership based on that?

So, certainly in the early years, getting people to continue on with membership was extremely important, so that’s where the program offering became such an important offering.

Q – What is your earliest recollection of the discussions that led up to the founding of Communitech? Were you part of the Atlas Group of tech leaders (Jim Balsillie, Tom Jenkins, Yvan Couture, Randall Howard, Jim Estill and others) who had been meeting for breakfasts?

A – I wasn’t part of the Atlas Group. I was aware of the Atlas Group and I knew the people in the Atlas Group.

Yvan Couture was kind of the guy who was really trying to bring the people together. He was a marketing guy, and he could see the vision.

He had a company, Taaz Communications, and I think he saw this growing sector and he was the cheerleader, and he started bringing these people together.

And when the Balsillies and the Jenkinses and the Schwartzes saw that vision, and they embraced it, it sort of helped that credibility, but of course, they weren’t the drivers. They endorsed it, but they were too busy with their businesses to really spend a lot of time.

But, as we started to develop credibility, people starting looking at it and saying, ‘Wow, what is this all about?’

As the RIMs and the OpenTexts and MKSs and Descartes continued to grow, people couldn’t help but look at Communitech as, ‘What does this organization do? They must be doing something right.’

So, probably the early-days success of Communitech had a lot to do with the success of the member companies, and that allowed it to flourish a little bit more.

One of the big wins was the funding for the infrastructure of the R + T Park.

University of Waterloo had those north campus lands forever, and they always wanted to do a research park over there.

They actually had found a company that was going to look at developing it, but that company all of a sudden said, ‘Whoa, there’s a lot of money of infrastructure that we need to put into here.’

So, Canada’s Technology Triangle (CTT), the region, the city, the university and Communitech sort of got together and said, ‘We need to go find money’ to take the services, to build the roads, and to build an incubator/accelerator centre, and that group was successful in raising $44 million.

We would work with the bureaucrats, but when it came time for the politicians to embrace this, it only took one call to the senior technology leaders in this community – ‘We need to go to Ottawa two weeks Monday, and we need to pitch how important this is’ – and these guys, without a care, would be there.

They never said no; Balsillie, Jenkins, all those guys. And the politicians loved those guys because they were hiring people and spending money on R & D.

These guys would all of a sudden go into a meeting, whether it was the province or whether it was the feds, and all of us would go sit in the back row, and we’d just let them do their magic.

That was certainly a very, very big win for the community, and when you think about the Accelerator Centre and the graduates coming out of it and all of those kinds of things, it was probably even bigger than we ever thought it was going to be.

That showed us the power of the organization and the power of collaboration, as much as anything else.

All of a sudden, because of the success of Communitech, they’ve been able to branch out and do a whole lot of other things.

When you see the revenue difference between then and now – we couldn’t get over $1 million in revenue; we were, like, $500,000 or $600,000 – and now they’re raising money hand over fist, and the sky’s the limit.

When you put the Accelerator Centre and the Hub into it, they’ve really accelerated beyond what, in our wildest dreams, this could be.

Q – Did the group in 1997 imagine the kind of tech landscape we see today?

A – In our wildest dreams, probably not, but we really didn’t know. What we were trying to do was to let the technology companies and the technology leaders do what they do, and our job was trying to look after everything else.

Randy Fowlie was the first chair, and he had been with KPMG, and he was offered a job at Inscriber Technologies, so he had to resign from the board.

I remember we had a meeting saying, ‘Who’s going to be chairman?’ And somebody said, ‘Whitney, you can be chairman.’ And I said, ‘What’s a commercial realtor going to do as chairman of a local technology association?’

And they said I’ve got the link to the community; I’ve lived here, I knew the people, I knew my way around, I could get to the people.

So my comment to them was, absolutely I’ll do this, but when I need you guys, you better be there. And I would say unequivocally that every time we said ‘We need you guys there,’ they were always there.

From an organizational standpoint, that was huge, because they didn’t have to do the day-to-day things.

It wasn’t that they didn’t care about the community; they didn’t have the time to put into it, so knowing that their organization would take on the fight, or would take on the directional sort of information, was wonderful for them.

Q – In your day job as a realtor, you would have seen the effects of all this growth, too. What was that like?

A – The interesting part is, when you go back and you think about Greb shoes, Bauer skates, Kaufman Footwear, Electrohome, it seems that every recession that I lived through, we saw a bunch of brand names in the industrial manufacturing sector disappear.

As we started losing all of this manufacturing, I started realizing how important the tech sector and the advanced manufacturing sector were. Different jobs, different skill sets, but as a community, it was offering some hope and some growth potential.

We always knew how important the financial services sector was; the insurance and banks and investment companies and what have you. But the tech sector was a godsend for what we’ve got here.

For me, watching that sector ramp up was extremely important to sustain what we need to sustain in this community.

Q – When you look at what was accomplished over the past 15 years, what does it say about the next 15?

A – I look at the chairs, the board, the staff at Communitech, the passion and the vision that those people have, and it is boding unbelievably well for what’s going on here.

One of the things I think works for Communitech in a region the size that we are is that you know people who are in that sector, and you care about them; you want to see them succeed. There are a lot of people who will reach out to these people and help them.

That’s our hope, that we will see more RIMs and OpenTexts come out of here.

We’re a small enough community that I think we can embrace it, and we can help make a change.

Whether that’s individuals on the board or whether that’s companies, it’s a great organization. What do they get out of it? They get to watch these companies grow and prosper and hopefully stay within Waterloo Region and then create an employment base.

Q – What can other communities learn from what we’ve been able to accomplish here?


A – First of all, we’re the poster child. Where we’ve been able to take this to another level is the Hub, the Accelerator Centre, where we’re actually watching the evolution of these great ideas into great companies.

It’s a tough thing to replicate, because it’s not like you can follow a recipe and then all of a sudden you have a successful technology association.

There’s a lot of luck, there’s a lot of timing, there’s a lot of the right people, there’s developing enough critical mass so that you can convince the politicians.

If you go back a lot of years, I think there were politicians who figured, ‘Well, here’s another one of those great ideas that are going to flash and then die.’

Well, it hasn’t, and it’s only gotten better, and my feeling is that anybody who’s involved in seeing Communitech grow, they have a passion, and it’s a community passion, it’s an entrepreneurial passion.

There’s more to it than just, ‘I’m going to do this to sort of put my good time in.’

If people don’t have that passion and commitment, I’m not sure it happens. We’ve been lucky that we haven’t lost that dream, and somebody’s always kept that Communitech flame burning.

If you didn’t have that, it would falter or it would become quite small.

When people renew their membership in Communitech, maybe they or their staff aren’t getting a lot out of it, but they know what it’s doing for the community and they want to support it in whatever way they can.

Back in the days when I was there, if I made a call to somebody because we needed help or I needed a favour or something like that, nobody turned us down.

They were always willing to do their bit, take on a fight, speak to somebody about making something better.

It was great, and it still is.

The other part of the success is, the tentacles have grown out into the community, and the politicians embrace it, the bureaucrats embrace it. They want to be part of that growing new world that’s out there.

Q – How important was it that this was led by entrepreneurs and not hatched by bureaucrats or an economic development department?

A – That was everything. That’s the sustainability of it.

I think the vision has continued to zig-zag, and it’s evolving. If we said, ‘What’s it going to look like in 10 years,’ I’m not sure I could say what it’s going to look like in 10 years. It’s going to go with the ebb and flow, which is the right way for the organization to go.

 



TIM JACKSON (2006-2009)

Q – When did you first become aware of Communitech and its mission?

A – In 1998, I came to the community to be CFO at what became PixStream. I had joined some friends of mine.

Communitech was of huge value to me because of peer-to-peer networking. And so, Vince Schiralli (Communitech’s first president) asked me if I would join the CFO peer-to-peer networking group.

For me, being new to the community, it was an opportunity to meet CFOs of other tech companies, so when I had questions about how to deal with certain things, like SR&ED tax credits and the like, I now had people in the community to go to and get my questions answered; to put faces to names and with whom I could network.

So that was my first exposure to Communitech. It was hugely valuable to me.

I got involved and started going to different events and the like, and ultimately, Greg Barratt (Communitech’s second president) asked me if I would join the board. I then, as you know, became chair.

I made some comments at the 10th anniversary AGM, where I spoke about the evolution of Communitech, and I talked about how Vince got it going. Vince was hired by those founding companies, and Greg then took Communitech through its formative stages.

What Greg did was build a solid organization that became sustainable, and so he then gave it the platform on which to take some risks and try new things, and that’s when the reins were passed to Iain Klugman (current president and CEO).

So, I give Greg huge credit for building a sustainable organization that was then able to go and grow, and that’s in large part because of the foundation Greg put together.

That’s what I talked about at the 10th anniversary event.

Q – What do you make of what Communitech has become in its first 15 years?

A – Obviously it’s grown; it’s much more than a trade association. I think it’s part of something that other communities look to as an example, and governments look to to see how they can learn from what’s going on in the community.

I think the other thing that’s happened from a tech culture standpoint is that the community has done an incredible job of being a diverse tech economy.

I look at what happened in the crash of 2000-2001, where the Kanata-Ottawa area was decimated because they were all in telecom and networking. I think one of the things that makes our region so resilient is the fact it’s an extremely diverse tech economy.

So, while individual sectors may have their ups and downs, collectively as a sector we do just fine.

And obviously, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t issues from time to time, but we’re not dependent on any one particular sector. So, we’ve got wireless, we’ve got software, we’ve got hardware, we’ve got networking, we’ve got medical imaging.

We just have that broad, broad spectrum.

The other piece that does tie into it is the fact that we have this incredible university.

Ten years ago, when Andrew Abouchar and I were trying to decide where to set up Tech Capital Partners, we decided to do it in Waterloo in large part because of the intellectual property policy at the University of Waterloo.

And so, having a university that attracts commercially oriented researchers because of its intellectual property policy, I think, has huge, huge benefits to the community.

It’s clearly a community that takes care of itself, in terms of the CEOs of tech companies who help mentor the next generation, as to their vice-presidents and other C-level execs.

Q – What does Communitech’s success suggest about the next 15 years?

A – I think the future is bright. The level of startup activity is encouraging and bodes well. I do think the biggest barrier is access to capital and I think it will require government incentive (like happened in Israel and the US) to kick start the investment activity. There is no region better positioned than ours to capitalize when that happens.

Having just come back from speaking at a conference in Hong Kong to a crowd primarily made up of folks from the East and Australia, the level of interest in what we are doing in Waterloo is incredible. Sometimes it takes others to remind us of how special our region is.

 



GERRY REMERS (co-chair with JOHN KEATING, 2009-2012)

Q – When did you first become aware of Communitech and its mission?

A – It’s funny because we had been on the scene here for many, many years prior to Christie, as Electrohome, and I’ve been here since ’94. But, to tell you the truth, Communitech really didn’t enter my radar screen until about 2005, so it took quite a while for us to have a bit of an intersect.

Christie ended up growing, and that was the time in which we ended up starting to scale up, and in a sense be much more successful. So, we were in a growth spurt and we were looking at innovative ideas around the extension of cinema.

At the time I was looking at lean manufacturing strategies and reorganizing the factory to be more lean, and looking at innovative business models all around.

But the fact of the matter was, the business was on a steep growth curve, and prior to something like that happening, you tend to be very internally focused in terms of needing to be more successful.

When we started being more successful, I was able to start looking at the community and saying, ‘What’s going on in the community, and what can we do as Christie to improve our brand profile in the community?’

Part of that involved basically giving something back to the community in terms of arts and culture, making some donations of projection equipment, but part of it also involved recognizing that there was a high-tech community here that we really needed to be a part of.

We’d started hiring really dramatically, and so the hiring pool tended to be local, tended to be University of Waterloo engineers, and a lot of people were still saying, ‘Christie who?’ in the early 2000s.

There was a concerted effort on our part to increase our profile, and I thought as part of that, both in terms of giving back to the community but also in terms of raising our profile, it would help if I joined the board.

So, I joined the board in 2005 and was on it until early this year. I resigned in January this year with my health issues. I was 50 per cent through the last year of co-chairing with John Keating.

The interesting thing is, when I joined in 2005, the board would meet in the Accelerator Centre in Waterloo, and it was very Waterloo-centric, I felt.

It was really about a year and a half to two years later that Iain (Klugman) and I started talking about – and I’m sure he was having these conversations with other board members and other people as well – but we were starting to talk about clusters, and whether we could develop more of a focus on digital media.

And I’m sure Tom Jenkins was having similar conversations.

But Iain and I talked about it, and I felt we could develop more of a digital media cluster here in town, given that we were obviously involved in digital in a big way, and others were as well; Christie more from a hardware standpoint, others more from a software standpoint.

So, Iain and I were looking for funding to create digital media clusters. People came up and said ‘You know, there’s this CECR granting program that’s doling out millions of dollars to worthwhile projects’ so Iain and I said ‘Let’s travel to Ottawa.’

We did, with Avvey (Peters), and we made a pitch to the CECR people to pick up $10 million to set up a digital media cluster in Kitchener-Waterloo.

That initiative at the time failed, although a digital media cluster out in BC did get funded. It was funded only shortly thereafter – and I guess we were very close to making it – but the group that made the decision not to fund us at that time I don’t think really understood what the potential was here in Kitchener-Waterloo.

It was shortly thereafter that people came through the back door and told us, ‘You guys need to apply again next year.’

And Tom Jenkins at the time also was involved with setting up the Stratford Campus of the University of Waterloo, the digital media cluster in Stratford, and he very much helped us.

We went together the following year to Ottawa to make another pitch, a combined pitch. And this time, the difference – and I think this difference sat well with the people doing the evaluation – this time the pitch was to create a national cluster, a national network of digital media clusters, and so the thinking was Stratford, Kitchener, and then we would combine other elements across Canada.

And this now had more of a national appeal to it than simply focusing on Southern Ontario.

And, of course, we got our $10 million, five of which was directed towards the Communitech cluster here in town, and five towards setting up the cluster in Stratford, which was actually under the umbrella of the Canadian Digital Media Network.

So the other five really set up the CDMN, being run by Tom and the CDMN board, which I joined as well, and that group was charged with setting up these relationships with all the digital media clusters across the country.

Iain and we then took the $5 million and started conceptualizing what we could do with it in terms of the Hub in downtown Kitchener.

And Iain was quite brilliant in going to the Ontario government and picking up closer to $20 million in terms of a grant, and that really allowed us to develop the Hub.

The amounts from the national government were significant, but they were really not sufficient to set up what we ended up setting up in downtown Kitchener.

So, the activity of the group under Iain, and the lobbying he did for funding from the Ontario government, and putting in the Hub here in Kitchener, really allowed us to scale up in a very dramatic way.

I guess what I’ve seen, then, in that time period is, moving from a group in the Accelerator Centre in Waterloo that was mentoring a smaller number of companies to the group that we have today, which seems to have accelerated its activities and its involvement, and certainly seems to have assisted in the growth of a lot of small companies, if you just look at the growth curve of the number of companies that are involved with Communitech.

Then, the number of companies mentored through Communitech and the Accelerator Centre, through the executive-in-residence program, has burgeoned as well; the number of startups has increased.

I’ve seen, really, a huge expansion of activity, in my opinion, on the part of Communitech, and its footprint, as a result, has increased dramatically as well, and really put Kitchener-Waterloo on the map, not just in Canada but in North America, as kind of a paradigm example of how to do a technology cluster.

So, I think what we saw in the early part was vision from the foundation in the late 1990s and early 2000s, focusing on getting the technology companies together and providing a forum for communication and sharing ideas and the different groups, the peer-to-peer groups for example, those were big things when I joined.

What we saw originally was more an attempt to link the different high-tech companies together and to find common cause, and once that got rolling, there was a recognition that Canada, as a country, needed to nurture more new business, needed to nurture entrepreneurial startups.

I think Communitech recognized that, so that there was much more of a shift of strategy, not so much moving away from, but moving away from the sole focus of bringing companies together to share ideas and issues and have common cause in terms of economic and political and legal types of issues with whatever level of government; to say what can we do to nurture more companies and be a positive force in creating new companies?

Q – When you look at what this tech sector has achieved in 15 years, what does it tell you about how the next 15 years might unfold?

A – I would say that if the growth that we’ve seen in the last 15 years is extrapolated out, we would really be the next Silicon Valley, to tell you the truth, because I’ve seen in a sense some exponential elements of growth in terms of new business startups.

I think the issue now for the community is actually to assist some of these companies to grow beyond the startup phase into sort of the medium-sized company stage, along the lines of Miovision, for example.

I don’t think we’ve seen enough growth of that type of size of company.

So, it’s wonderful that we have a lot of startups, but we have to also examine what’s stopping these startups from moving into that next phase of moving out of the Hub, for example; of getting set up and starting to hire more people.

Are there issues in terms of capital? Are there issues in terms of mentoring these companies? Are their product ideas skewed, or focused on too small a market? It’s possible that they’re not global enough; that they’re not thinking big enough.

This is one of the things we hear about Silicon Valley entrepreneurs versus Canadian entrepreneurs; that Canadian entrepreneurs just don’t think big, and that they kind of hold themselves back and think, ‘Oh, gee, I can’t do that; I can’t be that.’

To some extent, we need to figure out how to get people to think big, to get the venture capital people in to help fund the growth past the $25,000 or $50,000 investments we’re doing for HYPERDRIVE and some of these other initiatives where we’re helping smaller companies gestate a product idea, and say ‘Okay, what does it take to move to the next level of growth; to say now, instead of having five to 10 employees, I’m going to grow to 40 or 50 employees.’

What’s stopping us from making that next jump?

And, to tell you the truth, I haven’t been following it very closely in the last little while, but that seems to me to be the opportunity over the next 15 years, and I think we’re seeing a few examples of that.

There will always be some that will grow from nothing into something very large, but we still haven’t seen that here locally, other than RIM, which had this exponential growth.

Desire2Learn is a good example, and Miovision next to that. But beyond that, I mean, OpenText has been around and has grown through acquisitions, but I’m thinking of companies that have started in the last 10 to 15 years that have now gone past the small size to ‘hey, we’re serious.’

Q – I guess we can take some encouragement from the fact so many young entrepreneurs are willing to jump in and start companies these days, rather than go to work for a larger company.

A – You know, you’re absolutely right and I think that’s fascinating. There seems to be a greater willingness to be entrepreneurial.

From a societal position, what are the causes that are leading to greater levels of entrepreneurialism?

I think partly, these individuals see that there’s an opportunity, and I think there has been a greater recognition on the part of politicians and parents and others that we can make a difference; that the opportunity is there.

I think there’s been a much greater focus on encouraging students coming out of university not to take it for granted that they will have employment for life in a large company.

So, it’s sort of being pushed back onto them, ‘Listen, you know, you can find the spark within yourself to create a company, to create an idea.’

There are other programs, like Shad Valley for example, that also encourage this.

I was chair of Shad for a number of years and on the board of Shad as well. They’ve captured a level below university level, the higher high school level ages, and they’ve encouraged these very talented individuals to be entrepreneurial. They have a program in the summer together at a university, 50 kids, 25 male and 25 female, and they have a major project that they have to work on.

And this type of programming, putting people together and talking to them about what’s possible, certainly encourages their entrepreneurial zeal.

The other thing that I think encourages it is the diversity of the current population that we have at the universities and here in town. People are coming from a lot of foreign countries as immigrants into Canada, and they actually do have a different set of expectations and not expect that everything’s going to be handed to them. For example; they don’t expect that after having come from eastern Europe, the Middle East, South America, that they’re going to be offered more than they were offered in their home countries. So I think the type of person that is coming is more of a risk-taker.

So, you see some of these societal influences and some of the programming in the education sector encouraging people to be more entrepreneurial. I’m very supportive of those types of programs, and I do think that’s exactly the kind of mindset that it takes for Canada to continue to be successful economically moving forward.

I’m frustrated in that there are so many people who are, in a sense, dependent on the large corporations – I’m thinking of the car companies; automotive, blue-collar workers – where I don’t think we have the formula right here in Canada.

The formula, to me, to be successful, means that you have to have research and product management. In other words, I see the product visionaries as being the people that are key to driving the rest of the business, and to the extent that we’re only focused on manufacturing without having the visionary people behind that that are saying ‘This is the R and D we need to be doing; these are the consumer needs you need to be meeting”, I think those key decisions are always going to be made elsewhere, outside of Canada, and that’s not a good thing.

So the other part of being entrepreneurial is being an innovator. Whether it’s a product innovation or a service innovation, an entrepreneur is an innovator.

The innovator isn’t the person who’s going to be working on an assembly line.

Q – What do you think other communities can learn from the Communitech model?

A – There’s the example, first of all, that it can be done.

Then, if you look at the growth in Kitchener-Waterloo over the last 10 to 15 years, from really not having a tech community that was recognized, we now have one that seems to be recognized in North America as a model.

I think communities would have to look to see whether locally they have the leadership and the vision on the part of local leaders, like we had in the ‘90s with Jim and Tom and Yvan, to bring people together.

They would have to look at their own specific set of circumstances and say, ‘To what extent does the Kitchener-Waterloo model fit our set of circumstances here,’ and to a greater or lesser extent, it’s going to fit.

If you’re talking about a community that has no tech, you’re not going to create a tech cluster.

And so, to me, what’s important is looking at the thinking behind the setting up of a tech cluster here.

Here, we have the benefit of the universities; we have the benefit of some very large institutions, as well.

We have history, in terms of the barn-building history, the willingness to co-operate and to work together to create something.

So I think business leaders here have, in a sense, always had that kind of vision.

We also have a sense of community here that’s hard to re-create.

So, I look at it and say it’ll take business leaders and visionaries to imagine what is possible in a different community, looking at the underlying elements that ended up gestating Communitech and making Communitech successful here, and seeing, to what extent would they apply here?

I don’t think you can take the Communitech model as a sort of cookie cutter and just stamp it across other communities without thinking, does it really apply?

Q – During your tenure as Communitech’s board co-chair with John Keating, what did you learn that you didn’t know going in?

A – Well, as chairs at the time, John and I sort of presided over this period of growth, so the issue that I think we both had and that we faced from the board was this question about whether we were growing too quickly, and were we going to lose touch with our normal constituents as a result of this growth.

The other part of it that was of concern was, to what extent had we made commitments to the governments, both the federal and provincial governments, that we would or would not be able to meet.

So there was a set of concerns on both sides.

So there definitely was a need to manage this set of expectations on the part of the regular board members, some of whom would not have, let’s say, been involved at an executive level with some of the thinking around developing a cluster, moving into starting the executives-in-residence program, and focusing on meeting the national and provincial mandates.

There was a little bit of tension there, and John and I worked through that and we looked at reviewing the results on an annual basis in terms of our commitments and our mandates.

We tried to ensure that the growth was controlled growth as opposed to unbridled growth, especially in terms of infrastructure and spending, with a bit of a concern towards what happens when the money runs out. When the gravy train ends at a certain point in time, are we going to be more self-sufficient? Are we going to have new sources of revenue? Are we going to have the ability to go back to the governments, and on what basis will we go to them and say we would like to extend funding?

So, in terms of learning, John and I certainly learned that there is an art, I think, to the political element; to being involved politically. I think that’s something that I personally had underestimated.

I think Iain does an excellent job and I think the leadership of Communitech does an excellent job, with having Avvey in Ottawa.

Also, I and Christie benefited from our close affiliation with Communitech, because Communitech informed us and other local high-tech companies about their next-generation job funds, for example.

We were a $20-million beneficiary of that grant, just as Agfa was, I think, a $30-million beneficiary, and other companies certainly were; Sandvine was a beneficiary.

I personally recognize that companies can benefit from, I guess, playing the political game, and being good at playing the political game.

I think Communitech demonstrated to other communities in Ontario that if you play the game well, you end up getting an inordinate percentage of the benefits.

And frankly, these NextGen job funds benefited the region more than they benefited us.

Q – Anything else you’d like to say as Communitech heads into the future?

A – What I’m really excited about is what I call a new horizon of possibilities. With the support of all these smaller startups, I think it just has unlimited possibilities, and the question is, what can we do to nurture those to the next level, to take those businesses to the next level?

What I love about the Hub in particular is the level of excitement and activity that you see going on.

You know, we put the cave in, for example; a Christie cave, and then I see the Reality Cave people coming in and making use of that facility.

I see lots of tours going through and using that.

Although it specifically isn’t just taking businesses, it’s part of an overall attraction, I think, and it plays the political game a little bit, because it allows the politicians and others to come in and show some software and some hardware play in the digital domain and the visual environment domain that is unique and is interesting.

I’d like to certainly see more of that going forward.