… perhaps more appropriately “don’t want to hear you”.

Imagine a comfortable risk averse and stay the course type bureaucrat with his/her hands over their ears chanting la la la la. The more times change, the more bureaucracies struggle to stay the same. Both the City of Ottawa and Ontario’s Ministry of Research and Innovation (MRIO) are going through the motions of having an economic development program reviews. Both are “supposedly” having public consultations and provide contact information to get involved. However, I sincerely question how motivated they are to open the process to people that does not share their sedentary views. I have sent request to; Ian Duff Manager of Economic Development City of Ottawa (ian.duff@ottawa.ca) and Brian Love from MRIO, contact person for the Ontario Commercialization Network (OCN) (brian.love@ontario.ca). Neither has returned my requests and after a couple of weeks the probability of a response is extremely low.

TheCodeFactory Mission:

TheCodeFactory fosters the development of business ideas from concept to execution by providing a collaborative environment for entrepreneurs and innovators to access services, share business experiences and connect. Entrepreneurs are also supported through fiscal and policy advocacy.

Based on my discussions with area entrepreneurs I believe there are some opportunities to advocate for both fiscal and policy changes regarding entrepreneurship and start-ups in Ottawa and Ontario. The bureaucratic wall before me actually makes me more determined than ever to be heard. I plan to attend the next economic development committee meeting here in Ottawa;

Corporate Services and Economic Development Committee
Meeting Date: Tuesday 18 November 2008
Meeting Location: Champlain Room
Meeting Time: 10:00

If you have thoughts or concerns please feel free to post a comment or send me an email offline at ian [at] thecodefactory (dot) ca. I also encourage Ottawa entrepreneurs to get involved in the city budget process and OCN review.

Ian Graham

Filed under: Entrepreneurship, Start-up, The Code Factory by Ian
No Comments »

When I first evaluated the Ottawa area and ecosystem one of the striking discoveries was the depth and strength of the Ottawa open source community. My initial thoughts on open source excellence were that Ottawa is truly world class in this arena. Start with The Eclipse Foundation lead by Carleton University Alumni Mike Milinkovich. The Eclipse Foundation, in my opinion is perhaps the best example of open source excellence anywhere in the world. Carleton University is a pioneer in the area of open source software education and one of the leaders in this area worldwide. Ottawa has a rich and vibrant Ruby on Rails community with Shopify, OverlayTV, Infonium and many others using this as the open source platform of choice. Andrew Ross has been an open source dynamo bringing OSBootCamp to Canada and 5 other countries, soon to be more. The Ottawa open source community is alive, well and thriving.

As founder of TheCodeFactory I am particularly excited to note that each of these groups is actively involved in our community and each have (or will have) events at our space this month. The Eclipse Foundation will have a democamp on the 27th, Ruby Tuesday (OGRE Ottawa Group of Ruby Enthusiasts) meet on the fourth Tuesday of each month and OSBootCamp YOW10 will be held on the 26th. It is exciting to have all of these world class organizations coming to visit.

There has also been interest from a number of other organic groups that have taken the time to contact me directly. Chris Schmitt approached me a few weeks ago with an idea we called “Team Camp” and I am a HUGE advocate for this group. Team Camp is all about turning ideas into start-ups. Chris came to me with his team camp flow chart and idea just before DemoCampOttawa10 and by the end of our coffee we had agreed to launch the idea at democamp. We are now on Team Camp 3rd edition tonight.

The CocoaHeads (Mac OS and iPhone User Group) and Ottawa Software Quality Assurance will also be calling TheCodeFactory home this month and I wanted to thank them for taking the time to reach out. Of course both CapCHI and The Ottawa Network have been calling TheCodeFactory home to monthly events for some time.

I am extremely excited and jazzed about the fact that Ottawa’s world leading open source community and grass roots organizations are calling TheCodeFactory home for their events. Tech in Ottawa is alive, well and thriving and many of these groups are making TheCodeFactory their clubhouse or meeting place. November promises to be an exciting month for open source, entrepreneurial and software groups at TheCodeFactory this month.

If you are an open source user group or grass roots software organization would love to hear from you.

Ian Graham

Filed under: Entrepreneurship, Open Source, Start-up, The Code Factory by Ian
No Comments »

I have had two pings already this morning regarding BizSpark a new program launched by Microsoft and it sounds pretty cool. Friend of TheCodeFactory Steve O’Halloran from AssetLabs and Montreal TheCodeFactory Member Raymond Luk of FlowVentures both forwarded information regarding this very cool initiative. Sounds like a good support system at a most reasonable price for Start-ups.

Anyway suggest you check it out and decide for yourself.

BizSpark

Ian Graham

Filed under: Start-up by Ian
No Comments »

There is a whole lot of talk about what Canada needs to do to improve in the innovation arena. The Conference Board of Canada has come out with their latest assessment which is available on line at:
.

Innovation
.

Couldn’t find a written report on the site only web based and interestingly enough there are a few YouTube videos. The hue and cry is that Canada must have a national innovation strategy. How typical of the Conference Board of Canada to have such a myopic view on innovation.
.
Natural ecosystems and innovation ecosystems have a whole lot in common. First a bit about natural ecosystems and the tree planting analogy. A friend of mine was a junior ranger back in high school and his primary function as a junior ranger was to reforest areas that were clear cut. The junior rangers would plant seedlings in the de-forested areas. After many years of doing this they found that seedlings indigenous to the local area actually took far better than those imported and replanted from areas far away. The rationale was that the local seedlings were acclimatized to the area, soil and weather.
.
This is similar to facilitating innovation ecosystems. If you try and transplant and start a system from scratch you will likely be far less productive than if you facilitate what already exists locally, much like local saplings does better in their native environment. For example there is a movement afoot to bring a clean tech cluster to Ottawa. That all sounds well and good, however, there is little in the way of local talent to leverage and the type of skills for this sort of endeavour, at least in my opinion are absent. Try to set up a cluster like this in Calgary or Edmonton and there is already a strong ecosystem already with adjacent skill sets and the probability of success is greatly improved. There is, however, in Ottawa an incredibly rich and deep talent pool in the open source software arena, which is a prime motivator in setting up TheCodeFactory.
.
Innovation is highly regionally based, and therefore when setting up these regional networks you really need to understand what already exists. If you are going to develop a national innovation strategy you really need to do an assessment of all of the village ecosystems in the nation. Develop strategies that facilitate existing excellence in these centres and then find ways to accelerate the rate of development in the local ecosystems and potential synergies between these areas. There isn’t one all encompassing national strategy for innovation rather finding a way to knit like groups together.
.
In my opinion the shortest path to innovation improvement is to build on excellence one village at a time then find ways to knit it together. The hollowness of the cry for a national innovation strategy is deafening.
.
Ian Graham

Filed under: Commercialization, Innovation by Ian
No Comments »