Supercluster leads charge
Kirk Penton - Nov 14, 2018 - Biz Releases

Photo: Kirk Penton

The goal of the recently created Digital Technology Supercluster, which is based in B.C., is to make Canada a leader instead of a follower.

“We have become consumers of other countries’ technologies,” Digital Technology Supercluster CEO Sue Paish said during a stop in Kelowna last week. “We are far more a consumer of technologies developed in Europe and the United States and soon to be Asia than we are the producer of technologies that others will buy from us.

“If you believe that the world and our societies are going to be founded on technologies, you want to be the seller, not the buyer. So that was part of the motivation around the Innovation Supercluster Initiative.”

The $950 million program, which came out of the 2016 federal budget, consists of five superclusters across the country that focus on a regionally familiar sector or industry.

Paish, who is a former lawyer and ex-Pharmasave CEO, assumed her role with the B.C.-based supercluster in May, and last week she spoke during the MacKay CEO Forums at Kelowna’s Innovation Centre to explain what her organization’s mission is and to provide motivation for the business leaders in attendance to get involved.

“We in British Columbia produce more startups than any other province in the country, and yet we have one of the worst records of scaling those startups from beyond 10 people to larger, even slightly bigger, small companies,” Paish said. “We need to turn that around.”

Companies were invited to join the digital technology supercluster on a pay-to-participate basis, and they lined up in droves. More than 400 companies and organizations are part of the supercluster, some of them paying as much as $5 million a year for the next five years. The goal is to make it easier for innovators and potential customers to “work closely together on research, development and demonstration activities that will lead to major commercial opportunities and boost productivity across industries, and to create jobs and drive economic growth.”

Paish mentioned a few examples that could come out of the digital technology supercluster, like a system that tracks every piece of lumber in the province for international buyers or one database that keeps genetic information so that patients don’t have to take a medical test repeatedly. She noted there are more than 100 data systems in the health industry, most of which are not connected.

“At the end of all of this we will have created products and platforms in technologies that will be marketed around the world,” Paish said. “When we get that health and genetics platform right, we already have customers lined up around the world.

“… This is not a research project. We do not fund primary research. We only fund collaborative projects of which research can be a component, but it must be applied. There must be an outcome of every project we look at. It either has to have a product, a platform, a service, the application of an existing technology or the creation of a new company—all of which will have a defined market, domestic or international.”


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