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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