OCRI is sour, grapes

@Gary, I agree whole heartedly with your assessment. Each of the tech centres in Ontario is different and have there own strengths and weaknesses. Toronto as you suggest has the benefit of density and diversity. Waterloo has some strong anchor tenants in RIM, Open Text and Microsoft. Ottawa sits somewhere in between the two but could have strong relationships with many federal and other research facilities that are located in the city. I also agree that the provincial programs while great for TO may not meet the needs of the other areas.

Typical Ottawa recipients of the provincial programs are later stage start-ups (post Series A) and well into follow on rounds. Know of a couple of pre-seed and seed based start-ups that have applied for assistance but none have been successful. Other than what is on the MRIO website, the OCE administered programs (IAF and IDF) locally are a bit of a mystery and not particularly well understood by the start-up community. One size doesn't fit all.

If you are going to build a vibrant tech scene in Canada you need to do it one village at a time. This is why regional based economic development is so important for early stage start-ups. If the community needs require better service then it is important to advocate for improvements.

I agree that Toronto's key strength is it's size-lots of people, lots of companies, lots of expertise, much easier to reach the mass you need for community interaction. At the same time, in Waterloo, although our lack of size is a big disadvantage in some dimensions (Waterloo Region is one-twelfth the size of the GTA), I think we've at least been able to make use of its silver lining.

Because we're small, the level of resources we need to provide one-on-one mentoring and feedback for all tech startups is something manageable. We can do it, and we do. We're small enough that the entrepreneur services group at Communitech can work with most startups in the region, and at a pretty substantial depth in many cases. In 2007, Waterloo Region had six companies close seven-figure seed or early-stage rounds of funding (i.e. pre-A-round), and not only were all six of them Communitech clients, but I think we can say that members of our team played a significant role in helping two-thirds of them close their deals. It's very unlikely that anyone could duplicate that breadth of coverage in a big area like Toronto.

And since I'm now apparently talking about Waterloo's secret sauce rather than Toronto's, I also think that our 'mainstream' support networks here (i.e. not StartupCamp-type grassroots initiatives) are more inclusive about what kinds of companies we help-probably because we CAN be, because we're smaller. Whether you're a 22-year-old university dropout working on a new website or a 45-year-old professor trying to commercialize some discovery you made, we're just as happy to see one as the other. In some other communities I get the feeling that the university prof would have a much easier time being taken seriously.

Ottawa is caught in the middle. Not big enough for Toronto's approach, and probably too big for Waterloo's. We have three main high-tech hubs in the province, and each one is so different from the others that what works in one community may not work in the others, at least not without a lot of localization. It's a challenge I'm starting to see with the new provincial programs added over the last year or two. The government would prefer to see single programs rolled out province-wide, and that's looking more and more like the wrong approach. Because the government is Toronto-based, they've picked Toronto organizations to head many of these initiatives, and some of them don't get Waterloo at all-to what would be a laughable degree if we didn't have to rely on them for funding . then the laughter isn't so hearty.

Having once been the President of an industry association and as someone who put a lot of honest effort and hard work in to trying to build a community through an industry association I can only say one thing: They are destructive, resource wasting, bureaucratic schemes that serve only to give access to (and control over) a platform with which to jerk themselves off.

I am suspicious of people who see a community and try to profit from it. I think that is part of the reason for the Toronto Tech Week backlash. The community is learning to immunize itself from opportunists and value-suckersâ„¢ who don't know how to contribute.

It is pretty easy to spot someone who 'gets' it vs someone who is there to benefit.

A profit motivation is great, I encourage it, but sometimes it is also sad, especially when a few rag tag volunteers do a better job by each contributing an hour or two of their time.

The truth is, we all have a profit motive. Most of us want to get better at running our startups, so we have a huge motivation to be part of a community that can support that. Others have a motivation to improve the coding, UX or UI skills and so they have an interest in pushing that part of the community forward.

By first building a strong and resilient community, places like Toronto will no longer have to worry in the same way about the next downturn or even as much about how many 'successes' there are being produced here. During the coming downturn the Toronto community will only strengthen because instead of destroying the community, people will be able to turn to the community for support.

Industry associations or other groups will never have the incentives to see people through equally tough times.

I admit, I have always hated the 'toronto rah rah rah' center-of-the-universe crap, but this is a case of where I think something novel and worthwhile is finally happening.

Mark & I actually think 'Industry Associations' are valuable because they focus a constituency that both helps defines the industry problem set and serves as a service market that funders understand. Typically there is also a legal and organizational framework to provide continuity and support required to implement long term or time-consuming programs that may be beyond the personal commitment of a totally volunteer organization. In fact I've tried to organize a start-up association in Ottawa for these very reasons. (My problem with OCRI is the disconnect between their membership and who they are funded to serve).

The other point is that French, like Jane Jacobs before, has identified cities as the drivers of innovation & in large part because they foster the interaction between diverse groups, allowing self identification & connection to strengthen nascent groups and boundary interaction to transfer approaches between groups. The core driver of this idea transfer is the interaction between people.

I believe that communication infrastructure now provides the ability for this type of connection to occur at a regional level. We've all seen the emergence of community out of blog discussion and Demo/BarCamps & I'd like to see what would happen if this connection became a more permanent part of a regional plan & with streaming and video interaction from a much broader set of industry meet-ups.

Just like in a traditional city what this does is provide a framework to identify people and ideas that resonate with you & and because it's regional it allows the opportunity for personal connection that's necessary to build business's and exploit opportunities. Sure there is a lot of stuff to work through to make it work & but it's doable & and it offers the opportunity to increase the diversity of connections because the base increases both in population and diversity of industry.

Ali & I'd love to learn more about what Communitech does that makes it special & and how it got there.

Though the Toronto community is terrific in term of social events, nice people, great discussions. I think the ultimate (not penultimate) role model in Canada is Communitech.

We work in the middle of Toronto and Waterloo, so we've had the benefit of working with organizations on both sides. No community organization compares to Communitech in terms of bringing real value.

Communitech delivers on its promise of assisting new startups with big-name mentors, real connections to angel and VC financing, etc. And of course there's lots of talent in Waterloo.

The only thing Waterloo startups are jealous of about Toronto, from what I see, is the lack of diversity. There are 10 startups in T.O. for every 1 in Waterloo.

I wish we could find a way to combine the startup diversity of Toronto with the real-value support present in Waterloo.

David, I think Peter raises some interesting points regarding OCRI and while their efforts are well intended, in my opinion, they have lost touch with the grass roots in the area. I have blogged about this several times in the past few months. Their propensity is to put a positive spin on everything which is OK if you are marketing the city, however, if you need to address some of the problematic issues glossing over them doesn't help resolve them.

The tech downturn was particularly harsh on Ottawa because the vast majority of companies prior to the bubble bursting were telecom based and when the bubble burst telecom was one of the industries hardest hit. This isn't to say things are bad, in fact, the melt down has created fertile grounds for start-ups and my rule of thumb is that on average I learn of a new knowledge based start-up every business day. Ottawa has a very rich start-up scene that is starting to find a common sense of purpose.

In the past 18 month I have probably meet with ~400 area entrepreneurs. Based on my discussions with these individuals the concept of TheCodeFactory was born, which is essentially a start-up club house. I have secured a space in downtown Ottawa and am in the midst of fitting up the place, which is a bit like living in a home renovation show. Anyway the space should be open in 4 & 8 weeks and is receiving favourable reviews from many in the start-up community. In fact Marc-Andre and Aydin Mirzaee have agreed to hold Ottawa's first web weekend there.

More people in the GTA, the surrounding communities, and the higher education institutions that are in those communities. Ottawa is relatively isolated and not a hotbed of engineering or CS or digital media students. Ottawa attracts students and young people interested in politics, not technology.

I think Peter's post offers a caution, a red flag, to those that think a member-based industry association is the solution. The more I look at the ecosystem, the more I come to believe that the industry association model is just plain broken for emerging companies.

I believe this has a lot to do with emerging web tech companies growing up during a period of rapidly declining costs of R&D and acceleration of tech change. The institutional structures simply can't adapt quickly enough.

Something we SHOULD be thinking and talking about in more depth are intentional 'network organization' models built from the ground up on the DNA of the social web world. Our institutional partners can really help here. Is there an interest in this conversation? I'm curious.

(p.s. Thanks for putting Florida and me in the same sentence! That drink's on me!)

More people. Diversity. Ottawa (where I lived for 4 years) is SMALL. The downtown is small, the night life is small. Creatives go to Toronto or Montreal.

What it did have was an incredible background from people at Nortel, Corel, Newbridge Networks (now Alcatel), etc.. However, aside from Corel, which was desktop software, these are hardware based businesses. HW takes different levels of money.

I think you would agree that there are few hardware businesses in Toronto, or at least few that come out and attend.

Oh, and government services are antithetical to innovation.