On the 2017 China trade mission, SIPP met with several groups interested in travelling to Victoria this March to look at investments, technology applications and partnership opportunities as part of their attendance at the GLOBE Forum 2018 Vancouver — North America’s largest clean-tech and sustainablebusiness conference. Around the same time, a one-day summit is slated for Victoria as part of SIPP’s Smart South Island initiative and regional bid for Canada’s Smart Cities Challenge — a nationwide competition offering prizes of up to $50 million to support communities ready to innovate using technology and data to solve real-world challenges and improve livability for residents. By 2050, more than 50 per cent of the global population will live in cities, which is why a growing number of tech companies are increasingly focused on smart cities, seeing their innovative technologies, solutions and concepts as a way to help cities become more manageable. Smart cities are also often innovation centres for entrepreneurs. “It’s basically how do we look at better sustainability in terms of our business community, how we treat the environment, human health, and how do we create more sustainability by using the new technologies that are available to us?” says SIPP CEO Emilie
de Rosenroll, noting the agency is currently asking citizens to come up with ideas on how to help solve some of the major challenges in the region. “It’s understanding our challenges, like health, economic resilience, inclusion, the environment, mobility and transportation and saying how do we get people involved and understanding these challenges? The technologies are relatively easy to develop when you clearly understand what your objectives are.”
GREAT TO GREATER Although Victoria is finding its entrepreneurial moxie at last, it still has a long way to go on the world stage, according to entrepreneur Hannes Blum, former president and CEO of AbeBooks. Now serving as venture partner for North America at Acton Capital Partners, headquartered in Munich, Blum has noticed Victoria is still missing larger companies to bring that worldwide talent Gunn would like to see and build an ecosystem around. Few companies in the city actually make it past 50 to 100 employees, he noted, and the bulk of them get stuck at around 20 to 30. Blum has also noticed some entrepreneurs that are very successful by local standards are satisfied too quickly, preventing them
from taking their business to the next level. Another trend he’s noticed is that Canadian entrepreneurs don’t think as big as those in the U.S., who always want to conquer the market. To build a great business these days, Blum says entrepreneurs have to think global. One of the companies that has managed to break the mould and substantially grow is Redlen Technologies, which has gone from 60 to 140 employees during the last five years. The company is a leading manufacturer of high-resolution Cadmium Zinc Telluride (CST) semiconductor radiation detectors that are enabling a new generation of high-performance detection and imaging equipment, including nuclear cardiology, CT scanning, baggage scanning and dirty-bomb detection. Redlen’s COO Jim Balcom is the driving force behind much of the growth, helping to triple the company’s revenue and recruit highquality people to the city. About half of the 80 new recruits are from outside Victoria. Balcom plans on hiring another 10 to 20 people in the next year and often collaborates with scientists and engineers at the University of Victoria to find the right fit. Recruiting the right people is what’s allowed the company to grow, he notes, and is something he spends much of his time doing. Attracting them to Victoria isn’t difficult, given
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