A Tale of Two Cities
Now shut your eyes and imagine Vancouver works like this: All of the many companies that make any kind of performance-sports clothing in this yoga-loving, hiking and cycling town – Lululemon, Mountain Equipment Co-op, Arc’teryx, Sugoi, Westcomb, Lila Style and more – get together regularly to exchange ideas on what trade shows they should send a couple of group representatives to. They talk about the joint training they’ll organize for all their employees. They hash over what the current trends are for their business – not in that jittery networking, I’m-not-really-going-to-show-my-cards way, but digging into what’s really going on and how to make their cluster stronger. And the same thing happens with the other clusters – digital media, biotech, green building – that are the strongest and most creative cells in Vancouver’s economic biology.
Behind them, of course, the Lower Mainland Association of Small Businesses helps bolster their co-operative efforts by maintaining databases of possible buyers and trade shows each cluster might want to make contact with. The association also provides accounting, payroll, legal and even labour-mediation services for any of the smaller companies in the clusters that might need the help.
That’s quite the dream, you’re thinking, as you continue to read this story with your eyes shut. It doesn’t sound anything at all like the Vancouver that exists now. In the real Vancouver, the companies inside each of the region’s high-producing clusters tend to be secretive and competitive. The prevailing business ethos is “Discover something and then cash out” not “Let’s grow our companies for at least 100 years.” And there is, for sure, no small-business association providing back-shop services to just-breaking-in junior members.
But the dream is very real in the minds of a miniature cult within the city: the Bologna People. That cult is composed of a wildly divergent group of business- people, union leaders, fans of co-operatives and others who are united by one common factor: they have all been (or want to go) to the study sessions in Bologna, Italy, organized by Vancity and, until recently, the B.C. Co-operative Association. There, every year for the past 10 years, a group of about 20 to 30 select participants has been treated to an intense summer camp in economics, co-operatives and how cities with mostly small businesses, such as Bologna and Vancouver, can use collaboration to outdo bigger players. That’s because Bologna has achieved international fame as a city that is successful in those three fields.
People as diverse as Jim Sinclair, the head of the B.C. Federation of Labour, and Virginia Greene, head of the Business Council of B.C., have gone to Bologna. Social reformer and ex-city-councillor Jim Green has gone. So has the mayor of West Vancouver, Pam Goldsmith-Jones, and Surrey city councillor Marvin Hunt. The list could go on for several more pages. For one to two weeks in the sticky-hot stretch of late June and early July, they and others like them have listened to lectures in classrooms at the University of Bologna’s economics department (hermetically sealed against the bone-melting heat), talked to Bolognese residents who work in everything from packaging to vineyards to box-making, and visited any number of factories and boardrooms.
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