Let’s start by looking back … way back. In 2001 Ottawa was a tier 1 technology center acknowledged as “Silicon Valley North” a world leader in Telecommunications, Semi-conductor … Tier 1 … World Class.

Fast forward a decade and Ottawa is still in the news “Which Canadian city will be 2012’s Silicon Valley North” and “How Ottawa’s tech sector lost its edge”. The latter article could be written off as Ottawa’s tendency to self flagellate … the former is from TechVibes and far more authoritative on the Canadian Tech scene. Regardless the tone of the two articles is similar. To quote one of my favourite Ottawa tech guru’s (and speaker at TheCodeFactory opening) Denny Doyle from the TechVibe article “To put it harshly, it’s not just in decline. It’s in decay.” It refers to the city of Ottawa tech sector.

Life is not fair get over it. How we got here is largely irrelevant but what is incredibly important is where does Ottawa go from here?

Photo Attribution: Which way do you want me to go? By Vincent Ma

Looking forward … IMHO the greatest impediment to success isn’t any external factor(s) but whether Ottawa (Holistic city and all of the stakeholders) has the will to collaborate and strength of character to succeed. Ottawa is a political city and this is evident in many aspects of local culture from the significant civil service presence complete with all its bureaucratic cultural overtones, the snail’s pace of almost any major project in the city and the result is the city of comfortable brown shoes. Comfort and conformity are the enemies of disruptive innovation. Fortunately disruption this way comes (The winds of change, The gathering storm) and 2012 may be the year for Ottawa to show its true character.

I’ll end the post with one of my favourite quotes by Thomas Kuhn: “The crises of our time, it becomes increasingly clear, are the necessary impetus for the revolution now under way. And once we understand nature’s transformative powers, we see that it is our powerful ally, not a force to feared our subdued.”

Ian Graham

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I received this picture in an email today entitled smart and I must say after reflecting on it a bit I am truly inspired. The sentiment I took from it was “Don’t work hard … work smart”.

My initial reaction was great point it is important to work smart. The person in the picture that took the time to turn his cube into a sphere is making great headway. The cost of the time it took to turn the cube into a sphere will be recouped by the speed of progress or at least that is the theory. That is working smart.

Then I reflected on it a bit more … working smart is important but so is working hard. The analogy that springs to mind is an Olympic athlete. To achieve a world class level of competitiveness an athlete has to work both hard and smart. The athlete has to work hard in the sense that “no pain no gain”. I used to lift weights on a daily basis and the tactical measure of success was feeling the pain of a good work out. The pain meant that the muscle tissues were broken down and would rebuild and become stronger. Building a business is a lot like that and there is defiantly some heavy lifting required and some sacrifices to be made. Back to the Olympic athlete … Becoming world class athlete also means being smart about how you train. Elite athletes have to be smart about how they eat, manage their time and condition their mind. There is much more emphasis today on sports psychology than a decade or two ago. I chatted with a friend that is a coach and had trained an Olympic athlete to visualize their run before the event … the athlete one the first ever gold medal for Canada at home. Elevating your game means working both hard and smart the two are closely intertwined.

A sphere is definitely a superior shape for moving the ball forward on a plain. What if the terrain changes to a steep hill either up or down? Then managing the sphere may actually be more effort than the cube with no opportunity to pause and rest. There is a lesson here but I am not certain what it is.

Working hard and working smart are not mutually exclusive and IMHO both are essential for starting a business. An important consideration to remember is that working hard does not equate to working smart and lots of activity isn’t necessarily progress. When you are feeling busy but don’t seem to be making progress that may be an indicator to pause, reflect and work smart not hard.

Thank you to Elias for the inspiration.

Ian Graham

Filed under: Entrepreneurship, Featured, Start-up by admin
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Long before starting TheCodeFactory I had blogged extensively about the challenges and opportunities facing the Ottawa Tech community. Topics covered everything from funding to entrepreneurial support systems. One of my favourite posts and IMHO one worth revisiting is called; The Entrepreneurial Hockey Analogy written on April 3rd, 2007 (roughly the same time as TheCodeFactory aha moment). Considering the post was written 4 years ago many of the concepts and principles are still valid. Looking back at the post with the accumulation of knowledge having worked in close proximately with start-ups for four years it is time for an update.

It takes a village to raise a start-up and the goal of collaborative economic development should be to promote the advancement of all participants to their maximum capability. This will produce maximum economic benefit to the region.

Hierarchy principles;
- Everyone that wants to participate should be given the opportunity
- Team advancement to the next level should be based on merit
- Healthy competition will benefit stakeholders at all levels of play
- Support mechanisms should be appropriate to the level of play

The top most level of play is labelled “Super Elite” and the equivalent of the NHL in North America. In the entire continent there are only 32 teams of roughly 32 players each for a grand total of 1,024 players in a population of 360,000,000 … companies that can compete at this calibre of play are exceptional. There are maybe one or two growing start-ups founded in the past 7 years at this level in Ottawa today.

The goal of a healthy and functional ecosystem should be to incubate and accelerate the growth of start-ups through the various stages as quickly as possible. The type of support needed by a start-up in the super elite league with Series A funding is totally different than the company of two founders with an idea that just incorporated last week.

Building a healthy ecosystem means incubating start-ups in the formative years, accelerating growth once the business model is scalable and then connecting the start-ups with the appropriate resources to continue to scale and grow even faster. To get a single team to super elite probably takes close to a decade … to get multiple teams to that level require a truly collaborative network of support services based on the open source principles of; open, transparent and meritous.

Ian Graham

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