How A Single Vision Can Grow An Industry

Lost among the hoopla of the Olympics late last year was an announcement that Kodak, which bought the BC tech heavyweight Creo for almost a billion dollars in 2005, was moving much of its operations to  to Israel.

That created a strong glimpse of BC’s (and Canada's) place in the new world of technology.

Creo, the image management company which employed some 4,000 people worldwide before it was driven into Kodak’s welcoming arms by a bruising takeover battle with a private capital company, still had 1,265 employees in facilities in Burnaby and Delta three years later.

Now it will be left with a mere 500 employees in the Vancouver region. Importantly, those employees will be more involved in managing services than in new product development (NPD), which is critical in an industry where successful NPD holds the key to successful commercialization and growth.

So, a company that was once considered a giant shrinks to the size of a medium-sized business. In corollary, yet another large industry anchor company, the kind we need in BC to generate enough gravity to build industrial clusters, disappears from the scene.

Now, many will see this sort of thing as inevitable. Vancouver startup grows to a world leader and is eventually swallowed by a global corporation, which then begins the requisite move of operations to more commodious climes.

These days, one of the most commodious technology climates is tiny Israel.

Why is that? Because Israel, an entire country with less than twice the population of BC, has convinced government, industry and academia to look with a singular vision towards the future, and not be mired in the past. The country aims to be a technology superpower and is diligently combining these three legs of the technology innovation stool to achieve that aim.

There’s a reason why many of the top companies on the Nasdaq are Israeli-owned. The country has a map for knowledge industry growth and follows it implicitly via collaboration among the key stakeholders in the country.

Yet, here in BC – or startup country as some of us like to refer to it – we’re still debating where innovation comes from and which of the three legs on the stool should get the majority of funding for it

In fact, the Premier's Technology Council is currently holding

This issue of developing a well-rounded industry has been around as long as I can remember – certainly before Israel started its big push to become a technology power. So maybe in our continuing talk about it, we should be looking hard at how they have managed to do it.

Singularity. It’s a rare but wonderful thing.