Making This Place One of Those Places
Making This Place One of Those Places
Part 1 of 3 of the Knowledge Park case study: Knowledge Park and the revival of New Brunswick's economic fortunes
Key Takeaways
Digital transformation and economic complexity combine to make it harder for less densely populated regions to compete on the international stage: not every place can be Silicon Valley.
New Brunswick is a classic example of how to successfully respond to these challenges.
Today, this Canadian province’s population is increasing and is repositioning itself for an increasingly digital future. Knowledge Park is intrinsic to the turnaround.
How they did it is instructive for similar regions worldwide.
Listen to: Making This Place One of Those Places.
Here is a real world, global problem. Digital transformation accelerates certain positive trends and exacerbates some negative ones. For example: an empirical outcome of digital transformation is that it clusters in larger urban areas. Places benefitting from this force, Silicon Valley, Geneva, Bangalore and others, come easily to mind.
The influx of talent and investment, and the graduation and development of a diverse range of knowledge workers, together lead to increasing levels of innovation and entrepreneurialism. Head offices spring up, new infrastructure, from transit to hospitals, is afforded by a burgeoning tax base, all of which attracts further rounds of investment. It is economic fusion, in which accelerating pace, greater amounts of talent and advanced infrastructure release tremendous amounts of innovation and income energy, feeding overall socio-economic progress and wellbeing.
Larger, urban centers in advanced industrialized economies are the primary beneficiaries of the growth of complexity.
The problem? You are not in one of those places. Most places are not those places.
In fact, your region falls well shy of a million people; your population is roughly that of Seattle but your capital city isn’t even a tenth Seattle’s size. Microsoft and Amazon certainly aren’t headquartered in your neck of the woods. Worse, by 2016 your population is ageing and slightly declining. Traditional natural resources industries in fishing, forestry and mining aren’t attracting new blood, nor, apparently, do they fit in any way with global digital transformation. It is bad enough that a well known Canadian magazine, Macleans, writes: “An ageing population, out-migration, diminished economic opportunities and at times profligate governments put [the province] in the dubious company of Greece, Portugal and Italy, only with more trees and less Old World charm.”
What are you going to do? As a leader in the local innovation ecosystem, you have to act. You have to spearhead the turnaround.
Welcome to the province of New Brunswick, Canada, circa 2016.
New Brunswick is one of Canada’s four Atlantic provinces, tucked south of Quebec’s Gaspe region and east of Maine, itself the most easterly of the United States. In 2016, 747,000 people called the province home, slightly down from the previous year. Those people are dispersed across an area of 73,000 square kilometres. (By contrast, Czechia has 10 million inhabitants within a similar area: 78,000 square kilometres.)
Today, the situation is significantly different. The population just crossed the 800,000 threshold, up 7% in only a few short years, something very few people anticipated happening. New Brunswickers are returning home, immigration is up. Part of the answer lies in affordability – New Brunswick features comparatively low housing costs and the overall cost of living is attractive compared to the rest of Canada and neighbouring American states.
But it is also true that people don’t go to an area lacking hope, no amount of incentive will encourage migration to a place lacking opportunity. Ground transportation from the rest of North America to two of the other Atlantic provinces, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, must run through New Brunswick: if there was no reason to set up shop in the province, businesses, entrepreneurs, and talented workers would just drive right on through.
The province’s positive arc and its brightened future outlook is instructive – for governments, companies, schools, associations, you name it – for any group around the world with one eye on digital transformation and the other on their own local challenges. This follows: the research, innovation and commercialization community is global and it has many challenges in common.
Let’s pause for a moment. We have identified an overall problem -the geographic disparities in benefit brought about by digital transformation- provided an example, New Brunswick, and sketched out a short background. But in order to make the fullest sense of what is to be learned from New Brunswick’s example, we need a framework.
The framework itself comprises four elements: a corporate strategy analysis tool adapted for broader organizational use; the foundational elements of the built environment: life, support, shelter, movement and open spaces; the categories of leadership and innovation, climate and the environment, business and the economy, and technology and engineering; and context: history, current affairs, and future outlook.
In part 2 (click the button below) we apply the framework and offer recommendations for regions, cities, and organizations facing similar circumstances
