Now, with a video editor and producer on board to help, I’m resuscitating portions of the video interviews as a complement to the technology and development side of The Groundbreakers. One of our first orders of business: make further use of last year’s interview footage.

In this short six minute video, five regional economic development leaders discuss what makes their region unique. Focusing on regional advantage, at the macro level, is straightforward enough. But, to me at least, how these points of difference are made is fascinating: specific, practical and strategic.

• Matthew Slotwinski is the CEO of the Sarnia-Lambton Economic Partnership.

• Michael Harris is the CEO of the Economic Development Corporation of New Haven.

• Malcolm Bruce was the CEO of Edmonton Global.

• Michelle Simms is the CEO of Advantage St. John’s.

• Bob Tresize is the CEO & President of Lansing Economic Area Partnership.

What ties these regions together is how deliberately they connect their local and regional assets into a continuous virtuous innovation cycle, focused on increasing the flow of regional knowledge, talent and capital. Some key takeaways:

• Combine inherited strengths with new research: Pair legacy refining, offshore engineering, or toolmaking with university labs to create industries competitors cannot easily replicate.

• Erase municipal and institutional silos: Pool municipal mandates and align college curricula directly with commercialization pipelines.

• Keep value circulating locally: Use housing affordability, workforce ladders, and recycled exit wealth so local growth funds the next generation of founders.

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About Sarnia Lambton Economic Partnership

Most regions chasing the clean economy try to build from scratch. In Sarnia-Lambton, Matthew Slotwinski and the Sarnia-Lambton Economic Partnership are proving that an industrial heartland can move faster by upgrading the heavy infrastructure it already owns.

Few communities hold a physical network like this: three of Ontario’s four refineries, the Dawn natural gas hub, and a chemical valley where one plant’s co-product pipes directly in as a neighbour’s feedstock. Surrounding farmland supplies corn stover and wheat straw, while a new oversized load corridor links local metal fabricators unobstructed to deep-water shipping on Lake Huron.

What turns heavy plumbing into an innovation pipeline is how local institutions share the steering wheel. Through the Innovation Bridge, the Economic Partnership, top-ranked research institution Lambton College, and the Western Sarnia-Lambton Research Park share boards and project pipelines. That coordination lets companies like Origin Materials prove a bio-concept at the college, pilot at Canada’s largest clean-tech incubator, and scale on an existing industrial brownfield site while local apprenticeship networks train the skilled trades.

By feeding agricultural waste into traditional refining value chains, Sarnia-Lambton is steadily transforming petrochemical dominance into Canada’s premier hybrid chemistry and clean hydrogen hub.

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About Economic Development Corporation of New Haven.

When a New Haven biotech firm like Halda Therapeutics lands a $3 billion acquisition, the traditional economic development playbook celebrates the exit. For Michael Harris at the Economic Development Corporation of New Haven, the real work is making sure a city of 134,000 turns those breakthroughs into neighborhood prosperity.

New Haven’s scientific density is extraordinary: the nation’s second-highest concentration of NIH funding, Yale’s quantum hardware labs, and Connecticut’s first $50.5 million Innovation Cluster Award. Yet the city pairs downtown wet labs and quantum testbeds with shared commercial kitchens, a 900-member makerspace, and a century-scale transformation of one of America’s busiest train stations.

Local institutions deliberately wire those assets together so residents can climb every rung of the ladder. While Yale and UConn collaborate through Quantum CT, Southern Connecticut State University and Gateway Community College run BioPath, training 3,000 students annually on industry equipment and placing public high schoolers in a dedicated classroom inside downtown BioLabs alongside commercial startups.

By placing quantum computing directly beside drug-discovery platforms while investing in housing and cultural entrepreneurs, New Haven is proving that a frontier innovation hub can also be an engine for inclusive local mobility.

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About Edmonton Global

International site selectors do not care about municipal boundaries; they care about critical mass. That blunt truth led 14 municipalities to form Edmonton Global, and as CEO Malcolm Bruce explains, pooling their strengths has already unlocked over $5 billion in new investment.

No single municipality held the whole puzzle. Surrounding counties house Canada’s largest petrochemical complex, massive fabrication yards, carbon-capture geology, and an international airport positioned on the shortest circumpolar and Pacific routes to Asia. The urban core supplies the brainpower: eight post-secondary institutions graduating 30,000 students a year, anchored by the University of Alberta’s Turing Award-winning AI pioneers and stem-cell researchers. Because builders built over 18,000 homes last year, keeping average prices near $400,000, 85% of those graduates stay.

By acting as one unified region, local leaders combine industrial fabrication with academic research. That is how an energy capital unexpectedly captured $500 million in life sciences, building Canada’s first large-scale antiviral and vaccine fill-finish facility alongside multibillion-dollar net-zero hydrogen projects.

About Advantage St. John’s

Operating in the harsh waters of the North Atlantic requires engineering that few places on earth can match. As Michelle Simms of Advantage St. John’s explains, solving extreme offshore oil and marine challenges over three decades gave the region the technical foundation to build a globally competitive innovation economy.

Today, that specialized know-how sits alongside a strategic eastern seaboard location, a 97% clean hydroelectric grid, and deep talent pipelines from Memorial University and the College of the North Atlantic. Rather than competing off the side of their desks, three municipalities formed Advantage St. John’s and convened 40 partners, from the port and airport to university incubators, around a single regional strategy.

Crucially, local actors keep wealth circulating at home. When financial-crime pioneer Verafin—born in Memorial’s Genesis incubator—was acquired by Nasdaq for $2.75 billion USD, employee stock ownership turned local staff into angel investors, while a $1 million gift to Genesis now hands new startups $25,000 checks on arrival. That reinvestment loop is propelling the St. John’s metro from resource reliance into a $1 billion-plus venture hub spanning ocean tech, software, and aerospace and defence.

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About Lansing Economic Area Partnership

Google co-founder Larry Page grew up in greater Lansing, and for Bob Tresize of the Lansing Economic Area Partnership (LEAP), the mission is making sure the next Larry Page never has to leave. Across three counties and half a million people, Lansing is wiring frontier research directly into a century-old manufacturing base.

Few mid-sized regions hold this mix of assets: Michigan State University’s top-ranked nuclear physics program and Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, two major health systems, America’s second-ranked technical community college, and deep-soil farmland just fifteen minutes from downtown.

LEAP’s 80 public and private partners connect those assets with early-stage capital through the MSU Foundation’s Conquer Accelerator and Red Cedar Ventures, alongside the state-backed Trek Small Business Hub. Crucially, they treat childcare, affordable housing, and arts—even funding a city Poet Laureate—as core economic infrastructure that sparks unexpected collaborations.

By pairing nuclear physicists and clinicians with skilled toolmakers who can physically build the product, Lansing is transforming from a traditional auto town into a homegrown MedTech, AgTech, and particle-accelerator powerhouse.

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~

On September 18th, Lethbridge County, Alberta, and The Groundbreakers, based in Toronto, hosted a virtual media scrum. Portions of the event have already been posted to my Substack, and we received superb television coverage from CTV, Global, and Bridge City News. What’s been missing is edited coverage of the full event.

If you are in economic development, government, business, or academia you’ll find this short video useful. Creating the conditions necessary for economic growth, innovation and resilience is immensely important and, frankly, there’s no time to wait. With all that’s happening — tariffs, new trade alliances, AI transformation — none of us can afford to wait months to get the data needed to act, or pay heavily for that information when those resources can be dedicated much more productively to actually getting things done.

We can do a diagnostic now with a group of stakeholders, follow the recommendations, and then a year from now run that diagnostic again to track changes over time. It’s quite powerful to have a measurable way of understanding the impacts we can have and how we actually drive economic development forward.”

— Trevor Lewington, Director of Growth & Engagement, Lethbridge County

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Video Chapter Index

• 00:05 – 01:47 | The Municipal Challenge: Trevor Lewington introduces Lethbridge County’s economic development goals and the rural-urban ecosystem divide.

• 01:47 – 05:48 | Platform Demo: Ian Barker outlines the mission behind The Groundbreakers and demonstrates the Ecosystem Navigator’s heat maps and reporting engine.

• 05:48 – 06:48 | Origin Story: How a Substack focused on peripheral innovation evolved into an end-to-end SaaS diagnostic tool.

• 06:48 – 08:11 | Why Lethbridge County Partnered: Replacing six-figure legacy reports with real-time feedback loops.

• 08:11 – 09:48 | AI in Economic Development: Distinguishing generic LLM content from human-powered local data processing.

• 09:48 – 11:17 | The Regional Ecosystem Vision: Viewing polytechnics, Indigenous groups, and neighbouring towns as an interconnected regional network.

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Full Transcript

[01:00:00:05 - 01:01:47:19]

Trevor Lewington, Director, Growth & Engagement, Lethbridge County

Okay, well good morning everyone and thank you for joining us this morning for this scrum. Appreciate everyone’s time. We know you’re all busy. I think you all know me, but Trevor Lewington, Director of Growth and Engagement with Lethbridge County. And so I think all of you are familiar, you know, I’ve certainly talked to you all before, I think about the rich innovation ecosystem that we have here in southern Alberta. But where it can be a challenge for a municipality like Lethbridge County is how some of those things come together and how they fit with some of the urban areas that are within the county, some of our hamlets within the county, and frankly how rural residents, rural Albertans, can connect with those resources that are often based in an urban center. So part of the work we were doing was trying to better understand the ecosystem that lives in and around Lethbridge County, find ways that we could map that, measure that, track that, and really have a deeper understanding of how it fits together. So enter Ian Barker and his the work he’s doing with the Groundbreakers ecosystem navigator, which is a unique platform that allows me to gather intelligence and insight from stakeholders inside and impacted around the county and really get some concrete recommendations, some concrete learnings about how to best support those business stakeholders. I think it gives the county a way to measure effectiveness over time. Ian will talk about that, but you know, we can do a diagnostic now with a group of stakeholders. We can take action, we can follow the recommendations that are created in the tools report, and then a year from now I can run that diagnostic again and track changes over time. And so I do think that’s quite powerful to have a measurable way of understanding the impacts we can have and how we actually drive economic development forward. So with that, I’ll hand it over to Ian to give you an overview of who he is, what the ecosystem navigator tool is, and give you a quick demo. And then again, we’ll answer your questions.

No ChatGPT insights are going to be as powerful and precise as insights people can provide based on their experience. But what AI can do in this case is bring that together, shed a light on it, and organize it in a way that I might not be able to do myself.”

— Trevor Lewington, Director of Growth & Engagement, Lethbridge County

[01:01:47:19 - 01:05:48:14]

Ian Barker, Editor & Founder, The Groundbreakers

My name is Ian Barker. I’m the editor and founder of the Groundbreakers. The context for the Groundbreakers is pretty straightforward. We’re all aware of the effects of tariffs, the effects of trade and new trade alliances. We’re aware of the effect of artificial intelligence and how everything is transforming. And there’s this genuine question of how do the non-Silicon Valley places of the world actually respond to these really challenging times and challenging circumstances. And the answer to this is always, well, give me more information and then organize this information in a way in which I can actually have an impact and have a chance to make a difference.

That is the technology that I actually developed, which is called the Ecosystem Navigator. The concept here is to ask structured questions around strategy and around economics of people who know a local region and then find a way of generating a report that allows us to conduct some in-depth analysis. And again, let’s just make one thing clear here that when we ask structured, strategic and economic questions of people who know an area, what we end up getting is insight from those experts that we couldn’t otherwise get. To actually get this information in a structured way is incredibly useful because it directs our time.

And what we found from talking to Trevor and to others who’ve used the platform is that this process, which on the surface looks relatively simple, actually yields a tremendous benefit. What I’m actually getting is very targeted, very direct feedback about areas and opportunities that I can take advantage of. In the case of the work that we’ve done with Lethbridge County, we’ve uncovered a number of clear areas of opportunity. This is not to say that they weren’t the things that would be on the radar already. This is not something in which we’re reinventing the wheel or what have you. What this is doing, however, is saying, all right, now, if we ask all the experts in the area the same questions and we ask very pertinent questions around strategy and around economics, we’re going to get very directed, very organized feedback that we can make tremendous use from. And months, frankly, can be taken off the schedule here. So the key here is that I have the chance to save myself tremendous time by getting great information from people who know a region.

I don’t want to talk to Toronto, and I don’t want to talk to Boston, and I don’t want to talk to Silicon Valley. I want to talk to my market... local places that are aggressively pursuing change.

Ian Barker, Editor & Founder, The Groundbreakers

What we’re looking at here in this particular slide is the aggregated feedback from a different place, not Lethbridge County, for the purposes of showing you how some of the results of the platform can generate. We’ve organized it at what I would call a virtuous innovation cycle, which is simply an easy way of thinking about how do I organize the feedback that I’ve gotten in such a way that I can visualize the movement of knowledge, of talent, and of capital within an area with an eye to making it more effective. Here, we can see here in what I call, it’s just a simple heat map, is variance. I asked the same question of different places within the same region, and I see differences here. And I can act on that variance by picking up the phone and organizing a meeting. I can find different ways that I can go about doing it. In the online product, when I do this, and actually give them the very specific set of recommendations themselves, so I actually have something immediate and tangible to act upon. Now, I wanted to show you what a sample report looks like, because everybody’s given the same types of questions. There are 15 questions covering five strategic categories, and then organized in this virtuous innovation cycle concept. So an example here, I’ve done myself for for Timmons. And when I’m going through the questions, it produces in moments, a report that I can actually act upon. It organizes information, as you can see here, in what I’ve called the virtuous innovation cycle, which is again, simply the movement of knowledge, capital and talent within a given region, and then spits out a series of recommendations here that I can actually begin to act on. And what’s cool about this, and one of the things that I’m actually very, very excited by, is when we organize this and put out a group diagnostic, asking the same questions of people within a region, and I start getting those responses in, it happens in real time, and I can actually begin to act very quickly. So months can be taken off the planning schedule, I can direct my resources towards what needs to get done, as opposed to supposing or hoping. I hope I’ve covered the landscape relatively well there. If anybody’s got any questions, I’m quite happy to take them.

Tools like this democratize access to information. Typically, this would be a large consulting report. You’d pay tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to reach conclusions that this software can give me much faster... No one knows your market better than the people living and working and operating businesses in it.”

— Trevor Lewington, Director of Growth & Engagement, Lethbridge County

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[01:05:48:14 - 01:05:54:19]

Media Member

My question really is just how this sort of came to be, and when did this actually first start?

[01:05:54:19 - 01:06:48:15]

Ian Barker, Editor & Founder, The Groundbreakers

I would say early spring is when Trevor and I first began chatting about this. I have been running The Groundbreakers now for a few years, but I started it as purely as a Substack, talking to local innovation experts. I’m really interested, right? How do the non-Silicon Valley places of the world respond in a world of tremendous change when it really looks like all the capital and all the talent is flowing down to Silicon Valley and other large centers? Well, what is the response? And then the reality is that every single place is unique and actually does have things that it can do. Around December of last year, I realized that I might be better utilized myself, actually developing my own platform. And this is now an end-to-end SaaS that covers how to build a diagnostic, the diagnostic itself, the reports, group reports, full analytics, e-commerce platform, sharing content, the whole bit from soup to nuts is in there now.

[01:06:48:15 - 01:06:54:03]

Media Member

Why was Lethbridge County kind of the right partner, right time kind of situation?

[01:06:54:03 - 01:07:15:13]

Speaker 2

From my perspective, I don’t want to talk to Toronto, and I don’t want to talk to Boston, and I don’t want to talk to Silicon Valley. I want to talk to my market. My market is the Valley places of the world. I’m looking for places that are aggressively pursuing change, that want to make circumstances better for their constituents. And so that was the genesis of reaching out to Trevor.

[01:07:15:13 - 01:07:21:12]

Media Member

Maybe Trevor, just for you as well, just what maybe benefits have we seen since the spring with this partnership?

[01:07:21:12 - 01:08:11:10]

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Trevor Lewington, Director, Growth & Engagement, Lethbridge County

Yeah, many. So I mean, the tools like this give sort of democratize access to information. So typically, this would be a large consulting report. You’d pay tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to reach conclusions that this software can give me much faster and powered by, as Ian said, feedback from people locally that are completing the survey. No one knows your market better than the people living and working and operating businesses in it. And so that’s what this does, is aggregates that information, aggregates that feedback so that as a municipality, we can define policy, we can make change that’s actually going to enable business. And so it’s a very precise tool. It’s a very efficient tool. I think it’s the speed and the cost effectiveness, which really appealed to us. And so we were quite happy to partner on how to how do we continue to develop it and be a part of it and learn from it. So it’s been a great partnership for us.

[01:08:11:10 - 01:08:21:03]

Media Member

Yeah, hi. The question for Trevor, actually, can you just describe like how artificial intelligence has just changed the landscape of how business is done in the region?

[01:08:21:03 - 01:09:48:05]

Trevor Lewington, Director, Growth & Engagement, Lethbridge County

Yeah, I mean, obviously, artificial intelligence is a very broad category of things and includes so many different aspects. I think what we’re seeing, though, is businesses understanding there are many tools out there to be leveraged. But now we’re getting into more and more dedicated, more precise tools. So the Groundbreakers ecosystem navigation tool is a great example of content knowledge that’s only available in the local economy. Like no AI tool is going to be able to interview people without sort of a platform like this and setting surveys to people that trust me because they got the feeling for me. No, no chat. GBT insights are going to be as powerful and precise as insights people can provide based on their experience. But what AI can do in this case is bring that together and perhaps shed a light on it or categorize it or organize it in a way that I might not be able to do myself. And I think that’s what businesses are unlocking is AI is a tool. It doesn’t replace the intellect of the creativity and the innovation that resides in all of our brains. But unlock new things that does accelerate opportunities. And so I think businesses, to your point, are discovering many, many different ways of using AI. And heaven forbid, even local government can be innovative and leverage AI to do things more efficiently and differently. And so I think it’s a great example of this is an AI powered platform, but it relies heavily on the insights that come from real humans. But it’s a platform that wouldn’t exist probably without being enabled by AI. It wouldn’t be effective or efficient without that sort of background machinery.

[01:09:48:05 - 01:09:54:02]

Media Member

For Ian, are there still areas that could be fine tuned? And there’s still areas left for growth this time?

[01:09:54:02 - 01:11:12:02]

Ian Barker, Editor & Founder, The Groundbreakers

No, I mean, sure. I mean, one of the so one of the things that fascinates me again, is that no individual place is an island, right? We can’t think about Lethbridge County or Lethbridge or Coldale, Colhurst, Noliford, we cannot perceive them as individual islands. They’re all obviously very interconnected. And a simple example would be the Polytechnic and would be the university, right, which aren’t necessarily located in exactly those communities, but they have a direct influence there. That is to say that there has to be sort of a portfolio kind of approach to things. Where if I’m looking at like a regional innovation network, for example, I don’t want to be able to figure out what each of those constituent pieces say indigenous economic development groups, the cities, towns, counties, what they’re all thinking, feeling and saying, and do this in an organized measured way. So while I had built that, and it’s functional, that is for me, that is a tremendous area of opportunity and growth. The other thing for me is, you know, just coming out of a major due diligence process to make sure the platform works, and now it’s scale. Now I’ve got to get on every single desktop I can. My market is economic development, government, business, chambers of commerce, startups, academic institutions, and it’s global, right? So I’ve priced it accordingly. The intention here is to try to be on every one of those desktops around the world as quickly as I can. So I’m ambitious with it.

[01:11:12:02 - 01:11:13:23]

Media Member

Thank you, Paul. Those are my questions.

[01:11:13:23 - 01:11:17:11]

Ian Barker, Editor & Founder, The Groundbreakers

We do appreciate everyone taking time to join us today. Thank you very much for your time.

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Primary Purpose

The Groundbreakers ecosystem navigator is a unique platform that allows me to gather local expert economic intelligence and insight and impact it around the County and really get some concrete recommendations, some concrete learnings about how to best support our stakeholders.

No substitute for human insight

No ChatGPT insights are going to be as powerful and precise as the insights people can provide based on their experience. But what the Economic Navigator framework and AI can do in this case is bring that together and perhaps shed a light on it or categorize it or organize it in a way that I might not be able to do myself.

Using Local Business Intelligence to Shape Policy

No one knows your market better than the people living and working and operating businesses in it. And so, that’s what this does is aggregates that information, aggregates that feedback so that, as a municipality, we can define policy, we can make change that’s actually going to enable business.

Democratized access to information

Tools like this give a sort of democratized access to information. So, typically, this would be a large consulting report. You'd pay tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to reach conclusions that this software can give me much faster and powered by... feedback from people locally that are completing the survey.

Tracking Impact and Measurability Over Time:

It gives Lethbridge County a way to measure effectiveness over time... we can do a diagnostic now with a group of stakeholders, we can take action, we can follow the recommendations that are created in the tools report. And then a year from now, I can run that diagnostic again, and track changes over time.

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Samples of the ensuing coverage are below, which I think encapsulate what we accomplished very well.

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Global News (starts at 7:21):

Municipal Information Network:

My Lethbridge Now (CJOC):

Lethbridge County

About the diagnostic and the results

We ran a diagnostic campaign that asked economic development experts in Lethbridge County a designed series of strategic-economic questions. The results included specific recommendations like:

• Procurement-matching or “reverse pitch” approaches in which large employers identify products or specialized services they currently purchase from outside the region.

• Encouraging knowledge and capability transfer from companies making major investments in the region, including stronger connections with local suppliers and workforce development.

• The opportunity for even more joint research between post-secondary institutions and local agricultural processors.

• Exploring mobile precision-agriculture training and workplace-based micro-credentials rather than requiring rural workers to travel to a traditional campus.

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Thematically, what links many of the recommendations together is increasing the rate and effectiveness of knowledge transfer among regional actors, which holds the potential to unlock waves of new opportunity and growth.

The recommendations themselves are useful less because the ideas were previously unknown to Trevor and the County but because when experts in the region responded to key questions around innovation, infrastructure, capital, talent etc., these recommendations best fit the data as high-priority actions to consider.

The other key payoff is rather than taking weeks or months to gather data via traditional offline research methods, The Groundbreakers diagnostic takes 10 minutes for respondents to complete, and aggregated results begin to form in real time as reports are produced.

We know that the platform has provided recommendations entirely missed by expensive consulting engagements. Between the time saved and the focus provided by The Groundbreakers Ecosystem Navigator, there are major gains in both quality and efficiency.

All of which is to say things are looking very good. We’re getting great in-market validation in multiple places and beginning to get on people’s radar more widely.

Onward.

The work of local and regional economic development teams is as challenging today as it has even been, severely complicated by a rapidly transforming macroeconomic landscape. Its forces are at once unavoidable and unpredictable: the imposition of new tariffs of uncertain duration; the emergence of new trade alliances featuring new logistics; the massive acceleration and proliferation of frontier AI and its pervasive effects; and national governments’ responses, from new infrastructure spending to revised tax regimes and program announcements, to new priorities like national security.

In response, regions and municipalities must devise strategies and implement plans capable of delivering sustainable economic growth, while providing resilience against future economic shocks with long-term ramifications. This in addition to managing ongoing economic development operations: business retention and expansion, workforce development, investment attraction, SME and entrepreneurship support, infrastructure development, and stakeholder management.

Strategy Meets Economic Complexity Thinking

Given the relentless pace and the high stakes involved, local economic development strategy needs to be efficient, straightforward, based on real information, and directly address the question of how the region or municipality will achieve its objectives. An excellent, practical model for this work is the Hambrick and Fredrickson Strategy Diamond. It demands focus in five key areas: Arenas (where you will be active), Vehicles (how you will get there), Differentiators (how you will win), Staging (the speed and sequence of your moves), and Economic Logic (how you will obtain returns).

For local economic development, strategy models are useful but insufficient because they aren’t infused with an underlying economic model, one explicitly aimed at growth, innovation, and long-term economic resilience. Harvard’s economic complexity model is an analytical framework demonstrating that a region’s wealth and growth potential are determined not by the volume of what it produces, but by the diversity and uniqueness of the specialized knowledge required to make its products. That diversity and uniqueness is what gives a region or municipality its staying power, its competitiveness, and its case to attract and develop talent, capital, and new specialized knowledge.

With strategy and economic models together, it becomes easier to find the way forward: how can municipalities and regions leverage their talent, capital and specialized knowledge to their long term economic advantage? It’s a straightforward question, yet one that occupies an immense amount of time and resources. Get it right and the result is a virtuous innovation cycle in which knowledge, networks and infrastructure, product development and innovation, and reinvestment work in concert to lift a place into greater prosperity and long-term economic resilience.

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There is a local information gap preventing decisive action

All too often, the vital missing element is a quick, structured way to analyze local strengths and identify opportunities identified by experts who know a place best: its local economic development, business, government, academic and entrepreneurial leaders. Without that information both time and accuracy are lost at the precise moment when macroeconomic forces are profoundly, irrevocably changing the game. Losing weeks and months weakens response times, reduces planning accuracy, undermines stakeholder management, and potentially leaves valuable opportunities on the table.

Example: Macro events with local effects

From the Canadian context, here are two competing pieces of information. Both have national consequences; both matter at the local level.

• “This should be a five alarm fire for policymakers in Canada. 517 American companies started by Canadians. $414 billion raised. Almost 9 in 10 of them went to school in Canada.” — Lucy Hargreaves. Data from “The Conveyor: How US Capital Recruits Canadian Founders — and What It Produces.”

• Productivity Mega Deduction. PM Mark Carney’s Liberal government, under François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Finance and National Revenue, announced that Canada’s marginal effective tax rate on new business investment will fall from roughly 13% to 6.4%. Businesses can immediately deduct 100% of the cost of eligible new investments – machinery, equipment, and technology — including fibre-optic cable, mining property, oil and gas pipelines, software, research and development, computer equipment, aircraft and vehicles, patents, rail track, bridges, and roads.

Every town and every region needs to respond uniquely

Given the preceding macro context, here are capital availability and infrastructure diagnostic questions asked of four different places, tailored to their local context. Note that the questions are thematically similar but adjust to the local context.

Diagnostic questions produced by The Groundbreakers Ecosystem Navigator.

Lethbridge County, AB:

How accessible is patient growth capital for long-horizon commercialization and bio-industrial development projects based in Lethbridge County?

Trail, B.C.

Can scaling companies in Trail access the follow-on growth capital needed to expand, or does a regional financing gap leave local firms under-financed and at risk of stagnating in place?

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Sudbury, ON

How accessible and affordable are specialized testing and prototyping facilities for entrepreneurs and researchers in Greater Sudbury?

St. John’s, NL

Can early-stage founders in St. John’s access the capital they need across each early milestone, from pre-seed and angel funding through to institutional seed rounds, without experiencing major financing gaps?

Measuring differences across places or groups

This is where asking the same strategy-economic questions of a group of local experts becomes incredibly valuable. The recommendations generated from their structured feedback provides substantial “how and what” direction. Perhaps most valuable of all, the rapidity of their feedback (diagnostics take 10 minutes to complete, aggregated analysis develops in real time as responses come in) is a massive time saver, reducing by months the time it takes to act.

Build a group diagnostic, easily.

Confronted with rapid economic changes like tariffs, new trade alliances, AI, and national governments’ responses, the imperative is to act quickly and smartly, for which one needs good, current information.

Building a group diagnostic is simple. Each respondent gets the same question, configured to their local context. You send each a unique diagnostic link. As responses come in your evidence base grows in real time.

Group diagnostics can pose questions from a cross-section of strategy-economic questions, or can be focused more narrowly into a Deep Dive.

Mapping and understanding differences.

The group’s responses are provided as individual reports and in aggregated form to uncover agreement and divergence. Included are practical recommendations, detailed analysis, and data visualizations.

Data visualization examples

Optimizing the local flow of talent, capital and knowledge is vital to current and future success. Done right, that flow is a virtuous innovation cycle. Presenting the cycle in diagrammatic form makes identifying gaps and opportunities immediate and obvious.

Speed and accuracy are imperatives, not nice to haves

Economic development work gets truly rewarding when existential challenges like ‘how will our place thrive’ are translated into mission-critical plans, and then operationalized into discrete pieces of work for staff and partners.

There simply isn’t time to waste. If work can be done in 48 hours instead of three months, it needs to happen. Speed and accuracy are imperatives, not nice to haves. That’s because the benefits of AI and geopolitical transformation will not be evenly distributed. It will be won or lost in specific places—in cities, counties and towns where the actual factories, research labs, farms, logistics nodes and skilled people already exist. The places that can rapidly improve the flow of knowledge, talent and capital through their own innovation ecosystems will capture the new work. The places that cannot risk slowly hollowing out.

~

The Groundbreakers Economic Navigator

For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.

-James Joyce

A century later, Joyce’s elegant turn of phrase stands the test of time, charged with new meaning and importance. Today, the particulars of every town and city in the world – what makes each place special, important, and attractive to live in – are at once threatened and afforded game-changing opportunity by universal forces.

In the particular is contained the universal

To understand why this passage holds such deep relevance for cities and regions across the globe, Dublin is an ideal place to begin. The moment we see something particular to the city, two things are likely to happen. Your mind transports you there. You gain a fleeting feeling of what it might be like to follow the River Liffey along the city’s streets or visit the home of Guinness. You connect with the place on an emotional level, and it’s the particulars of this historic seaside city that do so.

Which is where the second thing is likely to occur. You think of home and the similarities and differences; your world and perspective shifts just a little. But it’s likely not the Ha’penny Bridge or St. Patrick’s Cathedral that really gets you thinking, it’s your emotional response to what you’ve seen. This is where the particulars of a place, its people, the built environment expressing their culture, beliefs and priorities link us directly to the universal. We recognize the signals of hope, freedom, happiness, the heart and will to succeed, the desire for belongingness. Our common humanity is on full display despite our many differences.

The roots of each place’s particular nature are fed by universal human needs and behaviours. For ourselves, our families, friends, and community we want to provide safety, security, health, happiness, purpose and meaning. We see it in people’s unrelenting drive for progress, to make things better.

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Universal forces with local effect

We also see it manifest in competition. Between businesses local and global, between cities, countries and political blocks, competition inevitably produces wins and losses, gains, setbacks, and course corrections. At a time of massively increasing socioeconomic transformation and uncertainty, cities and towns – indeed, entire countries – must change their game completely or fall behind, facing the severe consequences of lost potential when talented people leave or never arrive.

The result is an overriding imperative: the need for local progress. Artificial intelligence is transforming everything at a rate that’s only accelerating and the infrastructure supporting it is nothing short of jaw-dropping. xAI’s merger with SpaceX presages orbital AI data centers powered by limitless solar energy. Nvidia is building a Physical AI tech stack, gearing up for a humanoid robot and labor automation they estimate will eventually become a $40 trillion to $50 trillion total addressable market. Mark Andreessen of a16z sees immense opportunity: “productivity gains (driven by AI) should increase demand for labor, because labor becomes more valuable… humans are free to tackle even more ambitious frontiers than ever before.”

For places around the globe, existential questions immediately surface. What sort of labour? How do we attract it? What should we build? All this at a moment in time when slight advantages might transform into life-changing regional prosperity.

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Universal forces with global consequences

The stakes are so significant that success at the local level extends to the geopolitical. The AI arms race between America and China, from raw silicon to frontier intelligence, will define our economic and political futures.

Researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner takes note of this in Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead:

A complete rewrite of world economies supercharged by AGI super-intelligences would be able to compress the R&D effort human researchers would have done in the next century into years. Imagine if the technological progress of the 20th century were compressed into less than a decade. We would have gone from flying being thought a mirage, to airplanes, to a man on the moon and ICBMs in a matter of years. This is what I expect the 2030s to look like across science and technology. An industrial and economic explosion. Extremely accelerated technological progress, combined with the ability to automate all human labor, could dramatically accelerate economic growth. The changes we could be facing might be more comparable to the historical step-change from very slow pre-industrial to the seismic changes brought about by the industrial revolution.

Resolving the paradox of change making things the same

The universal forces we’re subject to, from the economic to the geopolitical, create challenges particular to every place, be it Lethbridge, Tacoma or Montevideo. Every place pursues strategies to preserve and grow the specifics that make it unique, delivering progress and economic resilience as part of building quality of life. Every place needs hope.

This creates something of a paradox. Openness, transparency, competitiveness and freedom of movement create incentives for cities to emulate what works elsewhere, speeding and flattening and eroding by increments what makes each place distinct in the first place. The more we model other places, the less unique we become.

Resolving the paradox — growing and evolving while remaining true to what makes a community unique — is the challenge and the opportunity facing leaders in cities, towns and regions worldwide. Community builders, elected officials, entrepreneurs, economic development groups, academic institutions, the private sector: everyone is affected and everyone has skin in the game.

Quick Diagnostic for Your Region

Local differentiation flows from the mechanics of knowledge

It’s an extremely complicated challenge. City building ranks among the most complex of human behaviours and that’s true whether we’re talking about São Paulo or Sioux Falls. In this context, universals like “hope” or “progress” or “competition” are far too abstract. The path forward lies in the particulars and objectives we can influence and manage. And if there is a single detail, a strategic building block with which to begin, it is knowledge.

At first, “knowledge” also seems too broad or abstract a place to begin. Without the right sort of knowledge nothing works. Hospitals can’t operate. Universities are shuttered. Policing declines. Instability undermines the universals that bind us together and other, darker universals begin to prevail. But that is to make the point. If it’s true that knowledge is the most fundamental of building blocks and it is also true that the world is changing around us at breakneck speed, and it is further true that local leaders must create the conditions for their own community to thrive both now and into the future, then preserving, creating and transferring knowledge is seismically important.

Not just any knowledge. We can’t boil the ocean, we can’t be all things to all people. Harvard’s Michael Porter says about strategy “The worst mistake in strategy … is to compete with your competitors on the same thing. You want to find a different kind of value that you can deliver to a different set of customers. Strategy is fundamentally about how you’re going to deliver unique value.”

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Knowledge: the DNA of Local Prosperity

Your local economy is infused with its own distinct character and advantage, its own particular knowledge bases. Given the incredible pace and complexity of the modern world, the more local business, academic and government leaders collaborate and invest in that specialized knowledge, the greater the chances that difference-making innovations will grow existing businesses, spark new ones, and have the knock-on effect of attracting talented people while encouraging local talent to stay. Quality of life improves, progress is made, hope strengthens.

The DNA of this system is knowledge. It is impossible to overstate — in an AI-powered, 24/7, global, interconnected world — the importance of preserving, growing and attracting as much local knowledge as possible in areas of current and plausible future strength.

Inside Knowledge.

Economists, led by groups like Harvard’s Growth Lab, explain that knowledge has three elements. The first is embodied knowledge. Think tools like hammers, MRI machines, or electron microscopes. The second is codified knowledge found in books, algorithms, and online. Tacit knowledge, often referred to as know-how, is the third. It’s the practical capacity to do things, built through years of imitation, repetition, trial, and error.

One way to think about the stickiness and complexity of transferring know-how is to envision training a robot to walk. You need to impart in code the concept and physics of walking — factoring in motion, balance, terrain, mass and environment — to a machine entirely dependent upon your instructions. Apply the same challenge to construction, like building a bridge. You might be very smart, you might be of an engineering mindset and a naturally skilled builder. You might be able to procure all the materials you need, you might be able to find plans for bridge building. Without the right know-how you may never bridge the gap.

The know-how principle applies across the board, from AI research to gaming, emergency medical services, retailing, agriculture, and every advanced scientific field in existence. It takes battalions of incredibly talented, highly specialized people working in close coordination to tackle today’s astonishingly complex challenges. Those skilled people need capital, infrastructure and talented colleagues with complementary skills to develop the know-how upon which local advantage is based.

Every place has deep reserves of know-how; every place has its comparative advantage. At a time of accelerating transformation and uncertainty, a relentless focus on feeding the virtuous innovation cycle of knowledge, discovery, growth, and reinvestment is the path to universal needs like quality of life, resilience and hope.

Quick Diagnostic for Your Region

The result: diversification.

The more specialized people collide and combine, the more likely they are to push the boundaries of discovery – something economists call the extensive margin. More products and services are invented, launched, and made available worldwide. Economies, not just national but local, diversify. That economic diversity offers greater opportunity. It offers higher incomes, it increases quality of life and hope for citizens. Talented people, specialized in their field, stay. New talent, seeking similar opportunities, arrives. The inverse is also true. Skilled people, people with hard-won know-how, depart for greener pastures when opportunities to apply their abilities are lacking.

The virtuous innovation cycle: new know-how

When we think for a moment about Dublin, we immediately comprehend the extent of their local know-how. It is resident in the people and in the particulars they’ve created over decades if not hundreds of years. Local know-how is in part a product of factors like climate and geography, and in human ways that are harder to articulate but which we often bundle up and refer to as culture. When those particulars collide with external, universal sources of knowledge like your favourite LLM the opportunity exists to create something altogether unique: local, new know-how.

The translation of the abstract universal to the strategic particular opens pathways to new opportunities, opportunities that - with the right marketing know-how – might upshift right back from the particular and local to the universal and global, and all that portends for newfound competitive advantage, hope, progress and quality of life.

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Success isn’t guaranteed

Preserving, growing and attracting knowledge is not easy. In fact, we can observe the damaging effects of income inequality as talent departs for places with massive infrastructure advantages. Silicon Valley is a gravitational force, drawing in the best and brightest from around the world. The outcome is that the region is an incredibly reliable source of innovation, new products and services, and high income. In Seoul, Hyundai Motor Group and Nvidia are in late-stage talks to establish a massive physical AI R&D hub in a project designed to drive innovations in autonomous driving, smart factories, and robotics.

The process of turning knowledge into productive capabilities, where specialized people work on increasingly complex challenges toward an ever-diversifying economy, is clearly a double-edged sword. Areas like Boston or London, armed with these advantages, more easily invent increasingly complex products and services. Those not as advanced stand to lose their talented people – that vital, local knowledge base – to faster-scaling centres of innovation. Every country in the world, every city and town, falls somewhere along this knowledge-infrastructure continuum.

This leads to existential questions for countries, cities and towns around the world. What is our role, where do we fit? Where do we begin?

Winning isn’t just a Silicon Valley game

Inspiring examples of places responding to the challenge are everywhere. At the Malawi University of Science and Technology, the university has built a laboratory complex and industrial park. They are pursuing game-changing projects in fields like agricultural technology, where specialized farming and agriculture knowhow is already present. Their pursuit of next-generation irrigation, planting, harvesting, food preservation, and commercialization inventions could accomplish extraordinary things: higher income, better quality of life — hope. They are building real economic opportunities for specialized professionals to translate local know-how into international opportunities.

The Virtuous Innovation Cycle

The beating heart of this entire system? Knowledge. The answer lies in developing a self-perpetuating cycle of local know-how, extending the productive capabilities of a particular place toward the universal objectives of hope, prosperity and quality of life.

The Mark Carney government just announced Canada’s first Defence Industrial Strategy, designed to “strengthen security, create prosperity, and reinforce strategic autonomy.”

The Defence Industrial Strategy positions Canadian industry to take advantage of $180 billion in defence procurement opportunities and $290 billion in defence-related capital investment opportunities in Canada over the next 10 years, with an anticipated $125 billion downstream economic benefit by 2035. The Defence Industrial Strategy will create 125,000 high-paying careers, increase our defence exports by 50%, raise the share of defence acquisitions awarded to Canadian firms to 70%, and grow Canadian defence industry revenues by 240%. Within a decade, we will raise maritime fleet serviceability to 75%, land fleets to 80%, and aerospace fleets to 85% to bolster Canadian defence.

—Prime Minister of Canada

This is a game-changing move, both militarily and economically, yet there is an obvious difference between ambitious announcements and breaking ground. And there is a profound difference between money spent and money well spent.

We’re suddenly in one of those ‘get it right and win or screw it up and lose’ moments in time where emerging opportunities—including potential linkages with the European Union and members of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP)—are subject to compressed geopolitical timelines. With regard to defence, for example, the Defence Industrial Strategy isn’t occurring in a vacuum. Canada, European nations, Australia, New Zealand and others have all been shocked into action by virtue of shifts in American policy, war in Ukraine, and escalatory events over Taiwan.

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For all of these nations, major announcements at the national level are seismic at the local level. Even assuming that not every defence dollar, pound or Euro is up for grabs, massive opportunities remain for every community willing to put innovation at the head of its agenda. This isn’t idle speculation: the defence industry is a perfect example of massive change on every front, from communications to drones to “algorithm-first” AI defence systems.

While it may remain the case that innovative new technologies designed to protect the home front, transform the battlefield, or guard supply lines are cooked up on a limited scale with a small teams, it takes partnerships, coordination, and capitalization to truly unlock them. This is why, at the local level, innovation readiness leaps to the forefront. The extent to which a community can support defence industry innovators is critical: failure means great ideas die on on the bench or leave for greener pastures. Success means retaining and attracting talent, business, capital and all that means for jobs, quality of life and economic growth.

Inuvik: Creating the Winning Conditions

Inuvik, Northwest Territories, is a great example of a community well-situated to benefit from the increased defence spending. Home to one of many planned Northern Operational Support Hubs, from which Canada will project its Arctic military power, proximity to the existing base already makes Inuvik home to several defence-related businesses, including Pan Arctic Inuit Logistics Corporation (PAIL), Sapujjijiit (owner of the brilliant tagline “Defender of the Arctic”), and Arctic defence company ILS.

The defence spending announcement raises questions for Inuvik’s government, business, academic, and economic development leaders, ones that likely revolve around value-capture issues:

• What do we need to do to capture as much defence spending as possible?

• What structures (physical, digital, social, capital) do we need to create or improve to take full advantage?

• Who needs to be at the table and what roles do they play?

• How do we unlock Inuvik’s full economic potential, not just in defence spending, but across the board?

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Snapshot: Inuvik

Running a quick innovation ecosystem diagnostic should be among their first steps. A snapshot is useful, particularly understanding the transfer of knowledge among the main players.

Explore Your Local Innovation Ecosystem

Reducing barriers to innovation is crucial. Places that make it easier for researchers, inventors, and early stage firms to experiment make themselves attractive. Simply put: people come to places where they can build.

Coordination within an innovation ecosystem is crucial; forging productive strategic partnerships that promote knowledge transfer and FDI strengthens everyone.

The diagnostic presents the local innovation ecosystem as a virtuous innovation cycle:

1. Inputs: research, talent, and capital

2. Dynamics: knowledge flow and interconnections

3. Outputs: applied research, IP, startups, products, jobs

4. Reinvestment: recycling success back into the system

How innovation flows in Inuvik. (Screenshots from a sample report.)

Analyze Your Local Innovation Ecosystem

When the diagnostic is run by people with a clear idea of its true current capabilities, the resulting report is an excellent place to begin optimizing the ecosystem. (Sections of the report include an executive summary, the 4 parts of the virtuous innovation cycle, recommendations, strategic analysis, asset map, visualizations, and system readiness.)

Defence, Critical Industries, Economic Development, and Quality of Life

Every community has an innovation ecosystem. No innovation ecosystem is perfect. The key lies in seeing it for what it is: a complex adaptive system whose evolution and growth we can intelligently influence. When we understand how well its actors and assets are connected and performing, we are empowered to act with greater precision and impact, optimizing for and accelerating economic growth. That’s jobs, hope, future-proofing and economic resilience.

In Canada, on defence, the official national policy is designed to strengthen security, create prosperity, and reinforce strategic autonomy. For communities everywhere, it is the same game, adapted to their local context and building upon their unique local strengths: secure a prosperous economic future.

In terms of outlook, I tend to fall into the latter category. From geopolitics to economics to artificial intelligence, it feels as though massive waves of change are inexorably rolling our way—and the waters are already pretty choppy. For anyone like-minded this raises a rather existential question: Hold your breath and hope, or dive in and get moving?

If you’ve got a problem-solving disposition, the answer is pretty clear. Hope is a product of action: the more you do, the more progress you make, and the more hope grows. This is a necessary mindset during a time of profound change, feeling empowered is vastly superior to being helplessly swept away.

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Local is where it’s at.

My own interest is local. Or perhaps better put: my interest is localities. How do the cities, towns and regions of the world harness change to their advantage? What role does innovation—the practice of engineering change to one’s advantage—play for each place? How do they make it happen? I find this endlessly fascinating. And because this is my interest, I’ve managed to interview a lot of amazing people whose careers are dedicated to making their place, from Lansing to St. John’s to Sudbury, the best possible place to live and work.

But I’ve also been researching innovation ecosystems, how they behave, and the economic models that affect them. They’re best thought of as complex adaptive systems, ever-evolving based upon their own unique set of geographic, social and economic circumstances. And while no one directly manages an innovation ecosystem or local economy, how well they perform can be observed, measured and influenced. The most important concept is economic complexity, with research pioneered by Harvard’s Ricardo Hausmann. A place is economically “complex” when it can make and export a wide variety of sophisticated, hard-to-copy products that few other places manage to produce. This creates local advantages, making it more economically resilient and more adaptable to change.

With the inclusion of a strategy framework, interviewing local innovation leaders via an economic complexity lens creates a productive interview format. My questions are straightforward but always situated within this methodology, producing insightful answers to the complex challenges of local innovation and economic development.

Speaking of complexity…

And then a truly massive wave of change hit, this one more with far more personal impact than anything in years. They call it, with amusement and memes, vibe coding. But that term is entirely, profoundly misleading. At Anthropic, home to mind-bendingly powerful AI like Claude Opus 4.6, software engineers have stopped coding. They prompt. They guide. They check. They interact with the AI. And then they push out the code to people like you and me.

For me, tools like these are life changing, no exaggeration. From the business side, I’ve got a strong product background. In the past, partnered with extremely talented developers, I’ve built some pretty awesome software—stuff I remain proud of. But my critical weakness was life altering: not a coder.

But now? The door hasn’t just been kicked down, it’s been vaporized. I’ve got the product background. I’ve got a specific base of knowledge in a specific area, and a unique framework to help make sense of it. So, a couple of months ago in mid-December, I started, beginning from—with no exaggeration—a complete, total, and absolute lack of understanding of how to build a fully functional application.

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Making software, one eye-rolling mistake at a time

Around mid-December I was prototyping on Google AI Studio. A week later I was on Firebase Studio. I was such a novice that it confused the hell out of me when everything needed to be backed up on GitHub. By early January, something odd was happening: the needs of my product were outstripping the Firebase AI’s capability to deliver. It made errors, lots of them. Obviously Mr. Vibe Code over here was the author of his own demise on many occasions but the overall pattern was clear: individual AI’s have a ceiling and I’d gone a distance beyond Firebase’s.

I’d noticed that GitHub has its own IDE (integrated development platform) but was pretty wedded to Firebase so it was really only by necessity that I took a deeper look at GitHub’s AI development tools. GitHub’s IDE has lots of AIs to choose from, not just one. I chose Claude Opus 4.5 (now 4.6) and redoubled my efforts.

Hello, Ecosystem Navigator!

This was the moment the game changed again. Suddenly, the thing I really wanted to deliver—a genuinely helpful, hyper-local innovation ecosystem diagnostic using my virtuous innovation cycle framework—was entirely within reach. Plus account management, Stripe integration, Serper integration, data management for comps and the myriad tiny things without which success is inconceivable.

Ecosystem Navigator

The result is two things. The first is the classic minimum viable product (MVP) with endless possibilities for growth and improvement. So new that branding and naming isn’t yet settled—I’ve barely placed The Groundbreakers brand in there. The second? It’s really good! It’s by no means perfect, and the grind of bug fixing and improvements big and small is daily, but it’s good. The framework is excellent; the AI does the heavy-lifting.

The thing I envisioned, a quick, practical tool economic development and innovation professionals will regularly use to get a quick gauge on where they stand, to compare with other places, to convey results to partners and other parts of government, has come to life in 1.0 form.

Change is coming. Managed correctly, bent to our advantage, that’s a good thing. Every place, everywhere, has the tools and local advantages to start. We have new ways to approach old problems. We take a step, we make progress, and a virtuous innovation cycle springs into life.

Notes

• As part of soft launching the product, over the past week I reached out to about 40 people, literally from around the planet, asking them to have a look. My thanks to them for their interest and feedback!

• Feel like helping? If you’re from an economic development background—or know someone who is—then please feel free to reach me! Simply reply to this email.

• Yes, video interviewing will continue. I had to pause and build the app, it was an overriding imperative. So, I’ve got more video interviews to publish in the coming weeks and months.

• On that score, I realized that I was overdoing the onscreen text. When the next wave of video interviews are published, they’ll be simpler. My hope and intention remains finding ways of extracting the maximum value from the important things each interviewee says… too much text wasn’t the way.

We also talked about lifestyle as a differentiating factor. The Lansing region is a rare (perhaps the only?) example of being 15 minutes from both the countryside and a world leading particle accelerator.

For anyone engaged with local innovation ecosystems—EDO professionals, government, chambers of commerce, academic institutions, incubators—these eight minutes are worth your time.

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Interview Part One

Key Takeaways from St. John’s

Here’s why this video is a must-watch for anyone involved in innovation and economic development:

• Strength in Numbers: St. John’s is building its future by fostering collaboration across municipalities, post-secondary institutions, and various business sectors. This collective approach is a key to navigating economic challenges and creating a stronger whole.

• Resilience as a Core Competency: The region’s history of overcoming challenges, from the collapse of the fishery to oil price fluctuations, has created a culture of resilience. This isn’t just a byproduct of tough times; it’s a strategic differentiator that attracts talent and investment.

• From Oil to Innovation: The video reveals how the city’s oil and gas industry became a direct catalyst for its tech sector. The need to solve complex problems in a harsh offshore environment led to the creation of new technologies and a highly skilled workforce, demonstrating how a region can leverage its existing strengths to develop new, sophisticated industries.

• A Billion-Dollar Success Story: Discover how Verafin, a company that started in a local incubator, was acquired by NASDAQ for $2.75 billion, marking the largest tech acquisition in Canadian history. The most remarkable part? The company and its founders stayed in St. John’s, proving that you don’t have to leave home to achieve global success.

  

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From the Video. LINK Analysis: St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador

• The Power of Integrated Leadership: St. John’s is building a leadership coalition that brings together over 40 diverse organizations—from municipalities and universities to innovation centers and chambers of commerce. This is more than just a collaboration; it’s a way to ensure all actors are aligned towards a common vision and can leverage their unique resources to create innovative solutions for complex challenges -- Benefitting the entire region.

• Create a self-sustaining, upward spiral of growth: The St. John’s strategy is designed to create a virtuous innovation cycle. By bringing a diverse group of

  stakeholders together to create a shared plan, they are fostering intentional interaction and collaboration. This will lead to the creation and transfer of new knowledge, which in turn will attract more talent and investment to the region, and ultimately lead to a more diversified and complex economy. This cyclical process ensures that each success feeds the next, creating a long-term, resilient path to prosperity.

• Infrastructure for People, Not Just Projects: Economic growth isn’t just about GDP. It’s about creating a place people want to live and work. St. John’s recognizes that infrastructure extends beyond labs and co-working spaces to include the social and cultural fabric of the community. By focusing on downtowns and central areas, they are investing in the essential services and amenities that directly improve citizens’ lives. This focus on the “built environment” is a critical enabler for innovation and a powerful differentiator.

  

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• In a world of economic uncertainty, a community’s outlook and collective optimism are powerful economic drivers. A sense of hope can inspire long-term investment and civic engagement, which are hard to measure but critical for

  sustained growth. This isn’t just a feel-good exercise. It is a strategic move that attracts talent, inspires entrepreneurs, and signals a community that is on a positive trajectory.

• Create a self-sustaining, upward spiral of growth: The St. John’s strategy is designed to create a virtuous innovation cycle. By bringing a diverse group of

  stakeholders together to create a shared plan, they are fostering intentional interaction and collaboration. This will lead to the creation and transfer of new knowledge, which in turn will attract more talent and investment to the region, and ultimately lead to a more diversified and complex economy. This cyclical process ensures that each success feeds the next, creating a long-term, resilient path to prosperity.

• Collaboration as a Strategic Imperative: St. John’s success is a direct result of different actors working together to find solutions. By actively managing

  interconnectedness and encouraging different sectors to “lean on others,” a region can overcome its limitations and create a dynamic, unique economic environment. When faced with adversity, the most important step is to find partners and work together, because this partnership strategy is an engine of innovation and resilience.

• A Culture of Mutual Support: The St. John’s approach highlights a culture where “the province, communities, individuals, or companies have had to lean on others” to get through challenging times. A collaborative ethos is a powerful differentiator that can be leveraged as an economic asset. Regions can focus on fostering this culture by creating platforms and processes which facilitate interaction and trust, allowing knowledge to spill over and new ideas to form.

• A Legacy of Continued Innovation: The success of Verafin includes the legacy it leaves for the next generation of innovators. Capital generated from the acquisition can be reinvested into the ecosystem. More importantly, the experienced founders, employees, and investors from this major success story become mentors and role models, passing on their know-how and inspiring the

  next wave of startups. This creates a self-sustaining, evolving ecosystem where new knowledge is continuously created and applied, fueling a virtuous innovation cycle.

• Diversification as a Strategic Asset: St. John’s is actively promoting its strategic diversification into multiple sectors. The region has opportunities in energy, oceans industries, technology, aerospace, and defense and security. This approach aligns with the principle of economic complexity, which promotes strategies which increase the sophistication of a region’s products and services. This reduces vulnerability and fosters long-term, sustainable growth.

The idea of shifting perceptions and changing the way business is done animated much of our conversation. Done successfully, these are the shifts that lead to billions in new investment and the emergence of entirely new industries.

“The purpose of Edmonton Global is to radically transform and grow the economy of the Edmonton Region.” How the 14 regional partners manage this, from life sciences to global logistics, makes for a very interesting watch.

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From the Video. LINK Analysis: Edmonton, Alberta

• +Growth: Regional collaboration fosters an ‘addictive ecosystem’ by integrating shared infrastructure, talent, and knowledge. This creates a powerful network effect where each new investment or business success attracts others building a self-sustaining cycle of innovation.

• Leveraging Uniqueness: Edmonton’s example highlights a core tenet of regional differentiation: local characteristics are not a limitation but a catalyst for growth and diversification. By building on its underappreciated geographical advantage,

  Edmonton is creating new economic opportunities that are both authentic to its identity and globally competitive.

• Beyond Municipal Borders: A pan-municipal approach to economic development creates a regional value proposition that is far greater than the sum of its individual parts. By pooling diverse assets—talent, infrastructure, and industry—a region can achieve the ‘mass’ and ‘innovation’ sought by international investors.

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• Ecosystem Synergies: International investors don’t care about municipal boundaries; they care about a complete value proposition.Edmonton’s regional approach shows that an innovation ecosystem’s strength lies in its ability to connect disparate assets—from talent in the city to heavy industry outside. This strategic integration fuels an ‘interconnected growth’ cycle where success in one area, like research, fuels growth in others, like industry.

• Crisis as a Catalyst: The COVID-19 pandemic served as a strategic leapfrog opportunity for Edmonton. By identifying a national supply chain gap, the region was able to combine its research and manufacturing assets into a ‘high-impact initiative’ that elevated its economic complexity and created a new, vital industry.

• Integrated Strategy in Action: Edmonton’s life sciences initiative is a textbook case of a successful integrated economic development strategy. It showcases a multi-stakeholder partnership—involving provincial government, federal government, and the private sector—that mobilizes a region’s core competencies to solve a pressing national problem, demonstrating a shared vision and coordinated action.

• Affordability as a Differentiator: Edmonton’s ability to maintain housing affordability by meeting population growth with new construction positions it as a ‘sticky’ ecosystem. This focus on a high quality of life—a key differentiator—makes the region a desirable place for talented workers and entrepreneurs, boosting the innovation ecosystem.

• Closing the Talent-Innovation Loop: The Edmonton region shows that a strong talent pipeline starts with high-quality educational institutions and is completed by an affordable, vibrant community that encourages graduates to stay. This virtuous cycle ensures that local knowledge creation and transfer translates directly into economic output and progress for the region.

What makes a place unique, and how its people innovate to transform that uniqueness into economic and quality of life opportunities, really comes to light in my discussion with Michelle Simms, CEO of Advantage St. John’s.

The province today is positioned as a strategic centre for innovation, technology, the arts, and sustainable industries. It wasn’t always this way. Michelle walked me through how St. John’s and the province, Newfoundland and Labrador, built a “small but mighty” and incredibly resilient North Atlantic economic powerhouse.

It makes for a very good watch, beginning with this first 5-minute introduction.

Well-earned reputation for resilience

Canadians are familiar with aspects of Newfoundland and Labrador’s economic history, including the catastrophic collapse of the Northern cod fishery in 1992. What we and others are less knowledgeable about is the immense effort, adaptation, and economic diversification that has taken place in the province, resulting in over a billion dollars in venture capital invested into its technology sector.

Newfoundland and Labrador, and its capital region of St.John’s, Conception Bay South, and Paradise, is a case study in how a potent mix of willpower, culture, industry and geography can transform the economic trajectory and fortunes of an entire area.

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From the Video. LINK Analysis: St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador

Advantage St. John’s aligns multiple stakeholders toward common goals. It intensifies collaboration among government and other key actors, which is a core feature of a globally competitive innovation ecosystem. It enables the collective pursuit of new opportunities, attracting greater influxes of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI)
→ FDI: capital + new technologies and practices that enrich the local ecosystem. (See Harvard’s Atlas of Economic Complexity)

Knowledge Spillovers & Unique Capabilities: The oil and gas industry catalyzed innovation through knowledge creation and transfer. The need for creative solutions in harsh environments led to knowledge spillovers—transferring expertise to other sectors. This is a core principle of ecosystem synergies, where success in one area fuels growth in another. These specialized skills create a unique, persistent competitive advantage for St. John’s and Newfoundland and Labrador.

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The influx of a billion-plus in external capital shows that St. John’s--and Newfoundland and​ Labrador​--offer a unique value proposition where investments in local innovation ​promise ​g​ood returns​ at ​reasonable risk. This signals that the ecosystem has successfully used its existing strengths to enter or create new, complex markets. These FDI investments are an outcome of increasing levels of specialized knowledge, skills and resources: the innovation ecosystem stands out for its highly skilled talent and their high degree of specialized know-how.

Collaborative Ecosystem Fuels Diversification: The evolution from oil and gas to aerospace, defence, and ocean/marine is a prime example of strategic diversification and increasing economic complexity. A resilient economy is not just diverse, it is complex, with specialized skills and knowledge. The growth of a talent pipeline through post-secondary institutions is a critical component. By expanding their programming, they foster innovation through research, training, and partnerships with industry. This collaboration strengthens the ecosystem, reducing vulnerability to economic shocks.

Building Trust to Spur Progress: Strong relationships and mutual support point to a high degree of trust among stakeholders.Trust is a vital but often intangible component of a successful innovation ecosystem. By having a strong and unified support system, the region can more confidently pursue new ventures and strategic bets, knowing that all actors are aligned and working together to overcome challenges and drive long-term progress.

Leveraging Unique Cultural Assets: The region’s welcoming culture, resilience, and unique character are not just anecdotes—they are strategic assets. Local ​uniqueness lays the foundation for an authentic innovation ecosystem. By leveraging cultural and historical advantages, a region can create a competitive edge. The distinct identity of ​St. John’s--indeed all of Newfoundland and Labrador​--attracts talent who resonate with its ethos and lifestyle, fostering a deep sense of belonging.

What is LINK Analysis?

LINK analysis is based on a framework I put together based upon dozens of interviews with leaders from innovation ecosystems in Canada, the United States and several international locations. To the source material I added well-regarded research into local innovation ecosystems and economic development. The interviews and research are all underpinned by economic complexity thinking. The net result is LINK and a virtuous innovation cycle available to all regions, regardless of their current state of progress or emphasis on innovation ecosystems.

Innovation is vastly more than a buzzword pasted into boilerplate pitch decks or a term to nod at during weekly conference calls. It is a transformative, global force. Innovation is baked into every decision we make, individually and collectively. We all make the implicit assumption that virtually every aspect of our lives will advance in positive ways—either fundamentally or at the margins—given time and resources. This is more true now than at any time in history.

But where will that next innovation take place? Real, tooth-and-nail competition between communities, regions, and among nations is unrelenting. That competition extends into the geopolitical realm as trading blocks and alliances jostle for advantage. Someone, somewhere, will own each innovation, mining and multiplying its benefits for the surrounding area in terms of jobs, infrastructure, economic resiliency and quality of life. Where matters.

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Get in the game

Competition produces its winners and losers but, setting aside geopolitics for the moment, innovation is far from a zero-sum game. If it was, Silicon Valley would own 100% of everything, no other place would invent, create, or build anything new. In reality, every place has its own innovation ecosystem. In the context of accelerating global competition, the extent to which places invest time and energy into building their ecosystems matters disproportionately, regardless of their stage of development. This is observably true: once upon a time Silicon Valley amounted to Bill Hewlett and David Packard working out of a garage in some place called Palo Alto, not far from the little university of Stanford and their mentor and professor, Frederick Terman.

The obvious rejoinder to my argument is that the sedate pace of 1930s California isn’t the 24/7 uber-connected 2020s. Immense investments in specialized scientific, business and technical infrastructure accrued over the course of decades combine to create insurmountable advantages that only expand as specialized know-how, fuelled by vast sums of capital and network effects, rapidly produce successive waves of innovation, creating an irresistible vortex pulling in the best of the best from every other place.

There’s no catching Silicon Valley goes this line of thinking, and the case is strong. But again, we’re not in a zero-sum game. Paris, London-Cambridge, Seoul, Tel Aviv, and Toronto-Waterloo are growing epicentres in their own right. China, more adversarial today than it’s been for decades, has in Beijing and Shanghai its own major pieces on the board.

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The point is that winning is possible. It can be done, it is being done. There are tools at our disposal, locally, to harness social, demographic, and technological change to our benefit, to claim a share of future innovations as our own with all of the ensuing regional economic benefits.

Which brings me to the video and my interview with Bob Tresize, President and CEO of Lansing Economic Area Partnership (LEAP).

Lansing Economic Area Partnership (LEAP)

Bob was very generous with his time and provided great insight. The following quote is so good, in my opinion, that I’m worried I buried the lede:

We each get a 20 to 25 year window to make a difference as individuals and as organizations. And I always believe it's really important to understand that moment in time that you are in. It is unique and you have to understand your place and space as a community and the personalities and people that are happening within that framework of you, of who you are.

Bob Tresize, President & CEO of Lansing Economic Area Partnership (LEAP)

It’s all right there. An understanding of time, place, context, and action.

While Part One is more of a “get to know,” you’ll quickly hear some of what makes Lansing distinct and from where many of its advantages stem. For insiders, the historical shift in economic development priorities over the course of time will be familiar. But the underlying idea that those shifts are driven by local adaptation to common outside forces of change is, to me, fascinating and serves to make the point that local uniqueness is a competitive force in its own right, and one capable of harnessing external forces to local advantage.

That leads to into to Part Two—publishing next week—where we get into more of the specifics of the Lansing’s innovation ecosystem engine, and what makes it tick.

On that note, I hope you like the video, and please feel free to reach out with your thoughts and suggestions.

The Stuff of Leaders

I have undying respect for entrepreneurs. I don’t care if it’s a business serving millions or a hole-in-the-wall specialty shop, to be honest. The act of self-starting, making a buck on one’s own: this is the stuff of leaders. These are the driven people for whom the status quo won’t do, many of them pursuing breakthroughs which benefit us all.

Proto-entrepreneurs: We Don’t Credit Them Enough

What really strikes me these days, though, given the work I do, is that before the entrepreneur opens for business and powers up for the first time, others have already been there. Proto-entrepreneurs. The ones who created the playing field—the ecosystem—within which future startups evolve and emerge. Solutions aren’t found, jobs aren’t created, innovation remains imagination—all that potential remains untapped until the work of the proto-entrepreneur is done.

While I exaggerate to make the point—of course there are entrepreneurs who thrive despite the absence of structure and support, and of course ecosystems themselves are ever-evolving entities—the more complex and fast-moving life gets, the more today’s innovators and entrepreneurs need well-planned, strategic infrastructure to maximize their chances.

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That is what I find so compelling about The Groundbreakers. It is endlessly fascinating to understand how places capitalize on their advantages while adapting and responding to change. Creating the playing field—fostering the ecosystems and communities where people want to work, where businesses want to locate, and where opportunity and progress produce hope and quality of life—is an entrepreneurial variant we can’t credit enough.

Communication Breakdown

Interviewing these proto-entrepreneurial leaders is a privilege, an educational front-row seat. And the results have been pretty special. But over the course of all of these interviews I kept coming back to some real problems. The first is that when people are so gracious with their time it is important to make the most of what they’ve said. Learning styles differ, but for me now—at my stage of life and the way I think—I’m preoccupied with not missing anything. Here I am sitting on all this stuff feeling like there’s a goldmine of material to learn from and share if only I could extract it properly. Problem!

That leads directly to a second problem. My original intention was to write long-form analytical pieces in which I drew readers’ attention to what makes each city unique and why, while outlining broader lessons from which we could all learn. The premise upon which this was based was pretty simple: the world is changing extremely rapidly with major economic and social consequences. With the world progressively more Apple-ized, Google-lified, and X-formed by the day, how do small and mid-sized cities and regions around the world compete? How do they retain their talent? Attract new people? In an era of front page, hundred-billion dollar AI infrastructure investments, what are the rest of us supposed to do? Big questions, important questions, yet ones that seemed at times to defy my capacity to properly represent. The result was articles I personally love and believe contain good content, but which I toiled over for too long while worrying I wasn't adequately representing the insights and enthusiasm of the interviewees.

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Make Something Easy From Something Hard

The answer to these problems?

1. Mine the full innovation and economic development interview collection, structuring the information aided primarily by two sources of tertiary research. One is a repository of leading academic research papers examining regional economic development and innovation; the other is research based on economic complexity. The end result is an analytical framework I’ve termed “LINK.” The acronym is derived from Local Innovation and Knowledge, key elements of the virtuous innovation cycle available to any community in any place regardless of their size, scale, or stage of economic development. LINK is intended to put some structure and context around a place’s specific economic and innovation efforts so that we can see what works and what doesn’t, why, and what actions to take.

   

2. Video. Ignoring the obvious is a smart way to miss the moment, and I think it's impossible to ignore that video is the fastest, easiest way to reach people and an ideal way to impart short, useful information. To that end I’ve shifted the orientation of my work toward a video-first workflow. In the short term the shift stopped me completely. It meant learning the software (DaVinci Resolve for those interested), surrendering to the idea that I’m new to it and won’t be perfect, either on-screen (look at the camera! look at the camera!) or in editing and design.

No Time Like the Present

I put both video and structured data to work in the most recent set of interviews, which I’ll begin publishing this Monday. The initial plan for video is to keep it super simple: publish to Substack one or two 5-minute videos based upon 20-minute, one-on-one remote interviews. Promote them with 30-second shorts posted to X and LinkedIn.

Later, assuming all goes well, I’ll launch a YouTube channel so that there's an easy way to find collections of The Groundbreakers videos.

The first of the videos, in your inbox Monday, is an interview with Bob Tresize, President & CEO of Lansing Economic Area Partnership (LEAP). We covered important ground and I really enjoyed the direction of the conversation, including this:

“We each get a 20-to-25 year window to make a difference as individuals and as organizations. And I always believe it's really important to understand that moment in time that you are in. It is unique and you have to understand your place and space as a community and the personalities and people that are happening within that framework of you, of who you are.”

— Bob Tresize, President & CEO of Lansing Economic Area Partnership (LEAP)

See you all Monday.

Even if tariffs went to zero tomorrow, enough shocks have been introduced into financial markets and nations’ political calculus to redraw the global map of trade alliances and fundamentally alter economic strategies.

The issue for cities and regions everywhere is that the scale of the economic shock is beyond influence, creating risks and opening vulnerabilities requiring immediate attention.

Fortunately, local leaders are maneuvering to build greater create economic resilience, of which an increasing part is the local innovation ecosystem.

I’ve lucky enough to spend my time speaking with local leaders about innovation ecosystems. Without question, inventiveness and ingenuity evolves everywhere, adapted to local conditions and offering hope to not only survive but thrive under challenging conditions.

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With innovative new ideas and strategies emerging all the time, many of which can be readily adapted by other places, there are opportunities to help make one another’s economies more resilient. And the stronger we are, the more business and opportunity there is no matter where you are on the map.

That’s the purpose of this video: to spark idea sharing at the local level. Spend a bit being interviewed by me, sharing the challenges you’re facing and what you’re doing about it, and I’ll turn our chat into short 3-5 minute videos that just might yield new connections, unlock new ideas and solve problems others are facing.

Liberation Day: highest stakes economic gamble in history

President Donald Trump called it one of the most important days in U.S. history, declaring a new economic world order with America and a revitalized manufacturing sector as its beating heart. But is this multi-trillion dollar, all-in bet on the mark? Can tariffs exceeding Smoot-Hawley trigger a manufacturing renaissance? Will there be a positive knock-on effect, reducing interest rates, making it easier to tame $36.1 trillion in debt?

The immediate response was predictable. Sticker shock. Mockery at how the tariff rates were calculated—and who was targeted. Markets delivered the “largest two-day wipeout of shareholder value on record.”

Trump’s charts have let loose the dogs of economic war. China quickly matched their 34% tariff; new pacts and alliances are forming on the fly. In the coming weeks and months, national counter-measures will be deployed, markets will assess the merits of each case, and capital will flow accordingly. Make-or-break investment decisions will confound firms from Cupertino to Copenhagen. Citizens will use their wallets and the ballot box to make their sentiments known.

What is unfolding is a high-stakes global referendum between blanket-tariff unilateralism and freer-trade multilateralism. With reputations and economies at stake, who really holds all the cards?

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Build it here: the underlying ideas worth understanding

The Liberation Day brand caught on immediately. Belief in its meaning did not: blocking opportunity in the name of freedom feels innately wrong. When goods cost more and with less money to go around, people are inarguably less free than they were before. Businesses are less free when higher costs slash profits; workers are less free when losses precipitate unemployment. For these straightforward reasons, blanket tariffs are rarely the ideal weapon of choice, despite legitimate geopolitical concerns.

—Signalling Confidence, National Security, and Strategic Advantage

That’s why the Trump administration’s declaration of economic independence signals such strong confidence in American economic inventiveness and might. Across-the-board tariffing is not only viable, goes their thinking, it anchors a game-changing America-first economic model with repatriated manufacturing situated at the epicentre. It replaces and weakens its main strategic adversary, China, along with dozens of other countries, including Canada and, uh, the E.U. Stay the course long enough, continues the reasoning, and new plant and equipment will inevitably spring up across the United States. American ingenuity, scale, and a massive head start in AI-related infrastructure will erase strategic weakness, and American manufacturing will be great again.

—4D Chess? Tariffs and Debt Reduction

Trump has intentionally injected uncertainty into the stock market, according to a provocative theory that pairs tariffs with debt reduction. Forcing liquidity out of stocks and into bonds lowers bond yields, making it less expensive for the government to pay down its debt. Add to it the spending reductions wrought by DOGE and you’ve got a leaner, less expensive U.S. government fuelled by a reinvigorated, colossal manufacturing sector.

—Globalization of Manufacturing Hasn’t Fulfilled Every Promise

Feeding into the bring-it-home sentiment is the accumulated resentment of decades in which entire categories of manufacturing—textiles is a common example—have evaporated from the U.S.A., Canada, and Europe, replaced by low-cost alternatives in places like China, Vietnam, and Bangladesh.

We have been ripped off for decades by nearly every country on Earth, and we will not let that happen any longer. President Donald Trump

Further, one of assumed benefits of globalized manufacturing was that rising incomes and exposure to the democratic freedoms of the West would trigger the same desires in China, with a liberalizing effect. Instead, the opposite happened. China’s state capitalism model has given rise to a manufacturing and military Goliath, with less freedom for its citizens, not more.

It is an absolutely legitimate desire to repatriate manufacturing, and to rethink aspects of global trade. These include strategically important technologies, national security, and long term employment—what work will people do and how do we build those industries?

But none of these things are best solved with tariffs. The debt reduction theory flies in the face of economic reality. The legitimate challenges America faces didn’t have to result in breaking alliances and pushing otherwise friendly nations into the embrace of adversaries.

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Uncomfortable Truths and Disconfirming Facts

Tariffs are a tax: The tariff on an imported good is paid by the importer, e.g., Home Depot. Home Depot pays the tariff fee to the U.S. government. Home Depot’s costs go up by the tariff amount. Tariff costs are almost always passed along to consumers.

Economic warning signs: Across-the-board tariffs raise the price of nearly everything. The effect is inflationary. When things cost more, people and businesses buy less. When they buy less manufacturers cut back on production. Less production means lower demand for labour, leading to unemployment. Consumer confidence is very low: the Expectations Index sits at 65.2—the lowest in 12 years—and well below the 80 threshold where recession worries begin to crystallize. Stagflation—high inflation, stagnant economic growth, and rising unemployment—can’t be ruled out.

New trading blocks are emerging in real time: Nations are free to pursue their own interests. If there are economic, intellectual, strategic reasons for teaming up, they’ll do it: there are no guarantees that foreign companies will build plants in the States. Some manufacturers might leave the U.S. if (1) imported inputs make US-based production too expensive, and (2) countries offer compelling financial incentives.

Retooling takes time: Too many people see manufacturing in simplistic terms. It simply isn’t plausible to retool the entire automotive supply chain within the United States without countless billions in cost and years in construction. Money that could have been invested in next-generation technologies instead gets diverted into switching costs, all while needlessly expensive vehicles cause sales to sag. And if the uncertainty is intentional, indefinite delay on major investment decisions will result.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The U.S.A. is already an advanced manufacturing leader. Aerospace. Biotech and pharma. Semiconductors. Robotics and automation. Name an advanced manufacturing category and America is already ahead or neck and neck with China. That suggests doing more of what they’re doing now, i.e., what has led to the U.S.A. leading in such vital industries, and how can that advantage be maximized?

And now for the really bad news

—Part 1

Global trade in 2025 is not the global trade of 1985. Services constitute an enormous amount of trade based on intangibles like intellectual property and digital services. Harvard’s Ricardo Hausmann estimates the U.S. runs a trillion dollar annual surplus in services. When American foreign operations are included (Apple operates in 43 countries and sells in 150) the U.S.A. collectively holds as much as $16.4 trillion in overseas assets.

The fundamental flaw in Trump’s strategy is that it focuses on the trade deficit in goods while overlooking the much larger role that services, intellectual property, and investment play in the global economy. Professor Ricardo Hausmann of Harvard Kennedy School and Director of the Harvard Growth Lab.

This is very bad news for several reasons:

• Trump’s claim that the U.S. is being ripped off completely omits services from the calculus. He has left $16.4 trillion in overseas assets exposed to retaliation, assets that can in no way be repatriated.

• The retaliatory tariffs Trump brandished at the White House appear to be based on trade deficit calculations, not published tariff schedules, meaning…

• …If the U.S. abandons the rules-based order that has made it the world’s economic superpower, e.g., Google, Apple, Microsoft etc. then other nations have every incentive to do the same. The costs to American firms could be immense.

—Part 2

Trump has repeatedly said that tariffs will generate hundreds of billions in revenue used in part to fund income tax reductions. (While failing to mention that the ‘revenue’ is a tax on American businesses and consumers). The concept envisions rebuilding American manufacturing while keeping costs low.

What is not mentioned is government investment. The lead America holds in fields like robotics, automation, biotech, aerospace, and pharma is directly connected to cutting-edge research and development conducted and funded by government agencies like NASA, NIH (National Institutes of Health), NSF (National Science Foundation), and the SBA (Small Business Association).

And therein lies a massive problem. If the idea is to be the world’s manufacturing superpower, the engine must match the ambition. America’s USP—its unique selling proposition—is based on inventiveness and competitive spirit. But when research funds are cut, future discoveries and breakthroughs never happen. When tech transfer from universities to startups is curtailed, the historic American innovation advantage starts evaporating. Trump’s higher cost, reduced-investment environment creates incentives for former partners to exclude the U.S. from productive new alliances, closing the competitive gap. It’s a deeply harmful own goal.

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—Eyes on the prize

The sad thing is that no one wants this. More high-skilled jobs and fewer Walmart greeters is in everyone’s interest. Would it not be more beneficial to deepen economic ties with allies and get to the win faster? And, if China is indeed a political and military threat, wouldn’t a more targeted tariff strategy strengthened by strong, partnership-based economic unions be the smarter play?

Winning in 2025 is different than winning in 1985

Here is a basic formulation: more ideas → more output → more people → more ideas. You can see the scaffolding of an innovative economy within it, producing wave after wave of more and more sophisticated goods and services. It neatly explains advanced economies’ success once you see that new ideas need to come from somewhere—like leading-edge university research—and that output results from a series of stages including technology transfer, and starting and scaling new ventures.

The formulation is the DNA of competition, the basis upon which every game is won, from geopolitics to small business.

What people miss—what Donald Trump certainly seems to have missed—is the dramatic shift in the nature of modern competition. Everything is more complicated, interconnected and specialized, with AI increasing the pace and payoff by orders of magnitude. Labs require specialized infrastructure. Research teams need compute. Startups need data and sufficient capital to adapt. They all exist within city and regional ecosystems where local business, government, academia team up to create conditions where innovation thrives. Nations form trade agreements because they bring complimentary skills and resources to the table. The shift is from one to many, with each member playing a specialized role.

Liberation Day won’t lead to economic independence. You want freedom and independence? Invest in people. Create the conditions for innovation to thrive. Build the infrastructure, attract the talent, eliminate the barriers.

Show leadership.

If you want to do something uplifting, spend time chatting with innovation-focused community builders. I come away inspired after every interview.

To date, I have used those interviews to produce long-form community profiles, doing my best to capture something of the character of each place and its people. It’s my way of getting at what makes innovation ecosystems critical in a digitally transformed world. It’s a format I love and will continue to produce.

I am equally interested in other formats. This quick 12-question, 3-minute survey is designed to uncover what subscribers and readers would like to read, watch or hear.

Section 1 - Format

How likely are you to engage with the following content types on The Groundbreakers?

Section 2 - What interests you?

Which of the following elements would make you more likely to engage with TGB content?

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In this audio version of the original article, hear what Economic Development Lethbridge (EDL) is doing to create a distinct innovation ecosystem attractive to citizens, innovators, partners, and its regional network.

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Affordances: a Way to Think About Change

We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t have contradictory reactions to the same things. Our response to change is a perfect example. We’re tempted to wash it away with anodyne sayings like “change is the only constant.” Yet we’re uniquely adapted to change. We possess agency: when the game changes we intuitively know what to do.

The concept of affordances1 offers interesting insight into our psychological adaptation to change. Affordances refers to how we stand to gain or lose from interactions with our environment. This might sound like an unhelpful abstraction but consider: a house affords shelter. A lab affords research. A startup affords jobs. When affordances ‘collect’ in places, a productive niche in the ecosystem may form.

Smartphones provide awareness of how affordances vary regionally and globally. This leads to a form of socioeconomic arbitrage with transportation networks affording people the mobility to move where they can make the most of their skills, advantaging some areas while disadvantaging others. This situation creates an imperative: every region and every city must act decisively or risk increasing the mobility effect.

People who create affordances for others – including those who successfully innovate – strengthen the social structures of which they are part, often emerging as leaders. At the community level and beyond, skillfully combining affordances like research and commercialization infrastructure creates the conditions for a culture of innovation2 to take root and thrive. With the global information playing field level enough to reveal just how dramatically affordances vary, the fate of regions resides with decisions and actions leaders take today. What is the “right” set of affordances that convinces people to come, to stay, and to build?

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Necessity is the Mother of Invention

Knowing is one thing, doing is another. Of Canada, Alain Francq, the Director of Innovation for Conference Board of Canada, recently said, “We have a dire need for transformative intervention across multiple facets of the economy – technology, industry, culture, government – to improve our innovation performance.” His observation aligns with the viewpoint that, strategically, Canada hasn’t yet successfully implemented knowledge-based economy policies – evidenced by low IP ownership – and is thus losing ground internationally. When a structural mismatch of affordances occurs companies leave and potential knowledge-based startups fail to form. Other places pull ahead.

At the regional and local level, the story is very often much more hopeful, including places where the imperative to shift from an industrial to knowledge-economy footing is paramount. Hamilton, Ontario, known for decades as Steeltown, earned a labour intensive, heavy-manufacturing reputation centred around giants Stelco and Dofasco. The collapse of the steel era could have led to disaster, the disjuncture between what affordances the city possessed and what was needed so profound that recovery proved impossible.

But that isn’t what happened. Instead, Hamilton’s leadership sparked an economic reinvention, relying in large measure on their close relationship with McMaster University. A robust multi-sector innovation ecosystem now sits an hour west of Toronto including life sciences, advanced manufacturing, automotive, and ICT.

Fusion Pharmaceuticals is a prime example. A radiopharmaceutical company led by McMaster professor John Valliant, Fusion was acquired in March for $2.4 billion USD. Fusion’s targeting molecules emit alpha medical isotopes to “precisely and effectively induce cancer cell death.” Incubated and supported by McMaster, Fusion significantly elevates Hamilton’s reputation for biomedicine, pharmaceutical, and nuclear medicine excellence.

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Economic Transformation: Making Change a Good Thing

Compressing a city’s economic transformation into a few paragraphs runs the obvious risk of over-simplification. New infrastructure affording new economic pathways takes time. Change doesn’t happen overnight, nor does it satisfy everyone. Steelworkers don’t just become coders; people struggle when shifts of the magnitude Hamilton endured occur. That truth is an essential part of what makes the Hamilton-McMaster fulcrum worth understanding because the reality is that the menu of affordances Hamilton must provide its citizens has been radically rewritten. People with skills they can’t use will leave; people wrong-footed by a changed world need help. Innovation, both social and economic, is therefore a critical component of the city’s strategic economic development plan, harnessing change along with McMaster to found a knowledge-based, diversified, and resilient economy.

Redefining The Art of the Possible

Dr. Darren Lawless is Associate Vice-President, Research Innovation Partnerships at McMaster. His challenge is fascinating: demonstrate the art of the possible. “We all have to change, and McMaster can help. The way we change is by forming partnerships, and showing the art of the possible.”

When the city shared with McMaster its strategic goals and objectives, including expanding its emphasis on life sciences and advanced manufacturing, it logically built upon McMaster’s existing applied research strengths. “We can help in those areas,” says Darren. “We have an amazing ecosystem of researchers.” Other interests shared between the partners include information communication technology, transportation (air, marine, rail and road), and music.

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“Stacking” Affordances

Forward-looking government-university partnerships are crucial for economic reinvention, with innovation ecosystems forming the backbone. But the “stack" of affordances cities must accumulate in order for their economies to spark waves of successively more complex products – the hallmark of thriving innovation ecosystems – demands robust private sector participation. Bridging the academia-business gap is unquestionably a major challenge. But the Fusion acquisition and yesterday’s announcement that the Canadian Pandemic Preparedness Hub 3(CP₂H) will have access to funding of up to $169 million 4 suggests abundant expertise, scale and opportunity.

McMaster targets private sector partnerships, its research centres making clear their interest in solving research problems impeding industry growth, and driving innovation. The foundation of their private sector appeal lies in the promising intersection between applied research and commercialization; the university’s research infrastructure expanding and accelerating the frontier of discovery while reducing risk.

MMRI

McMaster Manufacturing Research Institute’s May 2nd, 2024 open house makes for a good example of a university-led event bringing together ecosystem players in pursuit of innovation, jobs, and regional competitive advantage. The open house featured technical solutions designed by McMaster researchers and students5, dozens of area manufacturers, and public sector ecosystem groups, including NGen, Ontario Centre of Innovation, and Southern Ontario Network for Advanced Manufacturing (SONAMI), of which MMRI is a member.

MARC

McMaster Automotive Resource Centre (MARC) is a useful example of a hub and spoke partnership model that creates a productive 2-way street for multiple automotive companies. The Centre’s breadth of electrified vehicle research, scale of operations, and ability to push the boundaries of innovation via interdisciplinary work makes for a compelling package, explaining why competitors have come to build a shared R&D resource into their respective businesses. Working with MARC – relationships include GM, Stellantis and Honda – offers more than one form of strategic benefit. Resource sharing reduces R&D costs and shortens research timelines, and there are multiple technology acquisition paths for promising innovations. MARC’s startup program supports researchers and entrepreneurs entering the market with their own offerings.

Trust, Communicate, Experiment, Share Risk, and Act

But all of this doesn’t answer a fundamental question: how does it all work? Underpinning McMaster’s civic and corporate partnership strategy is an open and personal philosophy, reflecting the culture of a university intent on being of service. For Darren Lawless, this philosophy is enacted in five clear ways: trust, communicate, experiment, share risk, and act. This result is simultaneously practical – advancing known municipal, business, community and university interests – while setting the stage for the unexpected. 

By definition the unexpected defies prediction. But when we want to precipitate the unexpected — say a chance meeting of keen minds leading to a breakthrough — we are certainly capable of supplying the right mix of ingredients. “Serendipity is something that I think we can help create within the innovation ecosystem, which I'm passionate about,” says Darren. “We’re running a lot of networking events, which is a key role for McMaster. You should go talk to them! He's right over there, she's right over there. All of a sudden, the conditions for serendipity arise and new opportunities are created by meeting and talking with people.”

It seems slightly contradictory that part of dealing with the complexity of modern innovation includes intentional doses of randomness in search of serendipity. But less and less can great minds go it alone. They need the place, the infrastructure, the team, the support — and the ensuing collision of ideas where the magic of innovation so often now lies. “The world is very complex, so you have to have an open mind. You have to experiment, you have to pilot,” Darren says. “And you have to be honest: if something doesn't work you stop. But instead of looking at failure and success as a zero and a one, let's try and understand why it doesn't work, because maybe you're close. Maybe there's a better way.” 

Innovation ecosystems like Hamilton’s afford ideas, the currency of the knowledge economy. Partnered with McMaster, the city’s innovation infrastructure affords it the opportunity to pursue transformational economic leadership, powered by locally developed solutions to complex, global challenges.

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How do all the places on Earth that aren't Silicon Valley respond to global competition, digital transformation, and economic complexity?

How do those cities and towns compete? How do they collaborate? How do they move themselves forward in an increasingly competitive and time-compressed world?

Innovation ecosystems are what The Groundbreakers is all about: Modern innovation, worldwide, with all its variation, intensity, and complexity.

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