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Page last modified 17:30, 15 Jun 2009 by David Hawkins
TVO AgendaCamp Wiki: Ontario's Changing Economy > Waterloo > Can (Should) We Combine the Strengths of Ontario's Tech Communities?
Can (Should) We Combine the Strengths of Ontario's Tech Communities?From $1Table of contentsNo headersProposed by: Tony P. Today Waterloo walks tall in technology, with RIM and OpenText leading. Yesterday it was Ottawa, with Nortel and JDS. Toronto is vast and amorphous, overshadowing Markham and Mississauga. All are struggling for recognition in an extremely fast-paced world of knowledge industries, no longer just information technologies, but imagination technologies embracing all of the future from health and medicine to food, clean energy and even space, the final frontier.
Ontario is their common extension and the Ontario tech commons embraces all, is non-threatening to any and, with its stretch and size and strength, is inherently more stable and has great potential for branding, international marketing and improving connection and collaboration among all the tech clusters from Ottawa (even Cornwall) to London (even Windsor).
Companies in Ontario tech, spanning the software, photonics, wireless, cleantech, digital media, life sciences, and microelectronics sectors, employ more than 250,000 people. There are dozens of universities and colleges in the commons.
Ontario Tech should be for Canada what Silicon Valley is for the United States -- a magnet for tech dreams and money.
Ontario wants to promote its knowledge sector. This is an idea that can inspire cooperation, collaboration and collective action to help bootstrap the tech startup community.
Concern: That there is significant duplication of economic development activities between competing regions within Ontario that would be better served by co-operation Comments: Aren't we already doing a fair amount of collaboration? Ontario Minister of Research and Innovation (MRI) John Wilkinson participated in the discussion and responded to several questions from Tony and Doug M. about co-operation between communities. Questions covered recent MRI reports, intellectual property, health informatics and research accountability in a distributed context.
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