Looking at the news, everyone in London seems to be very excited about the
CARGO HUB PLAN: Ottawa and the city will unveil big bucks to help London become an international air cargo gateway
Whether or not this plan makes solid business sense in the near term is not my concern [clarification: I should say, of course I have concerns but I can't address them in this post]. I couldn’t possibly know one way or the other.
For the sake of getting to my point I’m going to grant benefit of the doubt and assume there has been demand for this from the business community — despite the fact I’ve never seen any mention of it in the press — and move on to question why this has been persistently celebrated and brought to the very forefront of the conversation about growing London’s economy.
Why?
Investing money in it is one thing — fine — but investing so much attention and prominence in the discussion is another. I don’t see how it distinguishes the city among others of similar size.
Celebrating London as a transit hub is like celebrating it as a “business hub” or a “residential hub” — it’s just something cities are supposed to be, e.g. Windsor and Hamilton, which apparently are ahead on expansion.
The cargo hub is dominating the city’s economic narrative at the expense of more generative ideas. The more attention we spend on this, the less we have to spend on initiatives that might truly capture the public’s imagination and cultivate a more entrepreneurial mindset.
Attention is something that can be invested or wasted just like money, and we seem to be throwing it down a hole. The cargo expansion has a low rate of return in terms of keeping people interested, spreading the word, and getting noticed by people from elsewhere (coverage in national media, etc).
Where are the symbols that resonate on a human level to generate civic pride? Where are the signals that encourage an entrepreneurial spirit?
One answer would be Stratford.
Here’s a must-read, must-bookmark article on innovation clusters in the Financial Post:
Whatever the case, in key sectors such as manufacturing — where job losses have hit 218,000, representing an 11% drop over the past 12 months — innovation clusters are being viewed as an economic lifeline. Stratford is just one of the new cluster darlings. Digital media has been seen as the next technology boom, with a potential global market of US$2.2 trillion by 2012. As a result, the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation and the local municipality have each parceled out $10 million to build the new institute that will focus on growing our expertise in the sector.
UWO has agreed to some form of partnership in the Stratford Institute, and the article also mentions $5 million going towards an Institute for Chemicals and Fuels from Alternative Resources at Western, but these aren’t the kinds of things that are being trumpeted the loudest here.
People don’t quite know what those things are, they don’t resonate. We need something that resonates — and we need leaders who will lead the innovation narrative.
Instead of talking about incubating entrepreneurial enterprises and fostering a culture of innovation, we’re seeing the wrong ideas reinforced. We’re being conditioned not to be creative, not to do something ourselves, not to invent new opportunities, not to take risks…
There are some exceptions; we need to celebrate those — and talk about their further potential — to get the innovation narrative rolling.
Look at digital interactive gaming — an industry that currently employs a relatively small number of people but packs a huge punch in terms of generating attention both within and from outside the city.
You know how excited everyone gets whenever a movie or something is partially shot in the area, and how much pride people have in performers who were born here? Video games are in that kind of space — and quickly gaining stature in the entertainment industry.
In November, the Call of Duty sequel set entertainment industry sales records. A couple of weeks earlier, CBC called the Assassin’s Creed sequel “the pride of Montreal.”
Here in London, Antic Entertainment just won the Canadian New Media Award for best innovative web-based game for Junk Battles and Digital Extremes (their Unreal Tournament is one of my all-time favs) was recently picked by the National Post as one of Canada’s top 10 employers.
How many Londoners even realize what’s happening in London’s gaming cluster?
I sort of did but didn’t know the extent of it until I hung out at the DIG London conference last month, presented by the LEDC. Kadie Ward set the stage on the Tech Alliance blog:
The Digital Interactive Gaming industry is poised for tremendous growth – Ubisoft Executive Yves Guillemot believes that the industry will grow 50% over the next four years. Are London and Ontario ready to take advantage of this opportunity? Home to several game-design and digital media companies including Big Blue Bubble, Digital Extremes, and Antic Entertainment, with access to talent from Western, Fanshawe, and tirOS College, London is stepping up its game with DIG London 2009.
In June The Free Press had a good article on London’s stature in the industry (the link is to a site that scraped it: I can’t find the original since LFPress.com was redesigned):
… Danielle Parr said London is emerging as a “quite significant” centre for video games in Ontario
Parr said a few established companies tend to spin off talented people that form their own firms to create a cluster.
“ When you form a pool of talented people, you can build on that,” she said.
Parr is executive director of the Entertainment Software Association of Canada, representing publishers & distributors (not necessarily developers).
Here’s their report on the industry — worth $1.7 billion and employs 14,000, with past annual growth at 23% and expected growth at 29%.
London has 6 game developers (according to that report) including Digital Extremes with over 100 employees and a very high profile.
Toronto has a lot of companies, but relative to the city’s whole economy digital gaming doesn’t really register (compared to big presences in Vancouver with EA and Montreal with Ubisoft).
Other than London and Toronto, the only other Ontario city with a number of developers is Ottawa — though compared to London I don’t know if Ottawa’s companies are making as big a splash.
There’s an opportunity here to brand London as the place in Ontario known for digital games– and by extension, digital media more generally.
This is something that should be on everyone’s talking points. The message “gaming cluster” should automatically come up in any conversation about London’s future economy.
It signals innovation and creativity, it has a coolness factor — and a hotness factor — that resonates with people in a way that’s remembered and passed on, it’s cutting edge, it’s collaborative and inspiration-driven, it bridges the arts with technology and business….
Put simply, people love gaming (in a way that they do not love cargo) and will go out to preach London’s gospel without being asked — but they have to be made more aware of everything that’s happening here.
Not everybody will understand the value of video games, and the immediate returns may not be obvious, but anything that gets us talking about clusters of entrepreneurship [read Ed Glaeser's pdf] will help us get to the next level in the new economy.
There are plenty successes and more good ideas with potential in London. We just haven’t hit on a narrative that resonates yet.
Everything that gets our attention should feed back into that.
