Where 'the magic starts to happen': Construction of Ottawa's new Innovation Centre moving along
Matthew Pearson, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: July 8, 2016 | Last Updated: July 8, 2016 5:33 PM EDT
Etched into the concrete above the future entrance to the city’s new multimillion-dollar Innovation Centre at Bayview Yards are the words “City of Ottawa Workshops.”
Built in 1941, the red-brick building on Bayview Road — a stone’s throw away from the Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway — functioned for years as a maintenance yard, workshop and storage facility. It’s where the city’s truck fleet used to come for oil changes or engine repairs before it was shuttered and the pigeons moved in.
These days, it’s undergoing a massive transformation to become a different kind of workshop for a different kind of worker. City of Ottawa Workshops 2.0, one might say.
Set to open in mid-November, the centre is the first “entrepreneurial hub” of its kind in Ottawa. The vision is to create a one-stop shop that brings together people who want to start or grow a business, as well as organizations and government agencies mandated to support them.
Some hope it will launch the next Shopify, but others say it just gives politicians reason to cut another ribbon.
Where the magic ‘starts to happen’
The $30-million centre will be run as a non-profit with a board of directors chaired by Nordion chief executive Steve West. Richard Quigley is the interim managing director brought on until February to oversee things during construction and immediately after the building opens.
Invest Ottawa, the city’s arm’s-length economic development agency, will be the anchor tenant, occupying much of the first floor.
The province is putting up $15 million, with the city providing the remainder, including the property, which is assessed at $8 million. An $8-million contribution from the federal government will help establish a global cybersecurity program, a makerspace and lab supplied with tools, equipment and technology to design and develop digital media and advanced manufacturing prototypes.
Ottawa’s four post-secondary institutions — the University of Ottawa, Carleton University, Algonquin College and La Cité collégiale — are also involved.
During a recent tour, Quigley says a front desk, to be located adjacent to a striking red staircase workers call “the dragon,” will be the first stop for people who come in off the street looking for direction.
“Someone who’s lost can come and we’ll help them find the right place they need to be,” Quigley says. “You don’t know what you don’t know is one of the problems.”
New entrepreneurs often struggle with some big questions, such as where do I start? How do I get financing? Who do I talk to?
They’ll likely be pointed in the direction of Invest Ottawa, which offers entrepreneurs everything from classroom lessons and mentorships to advice on marketing, financing and global expansion.
But Bruce Lazenby, Invest Ottawa’s former CEO, says the building’s biggest value will be in providing a place for people to meet, commiserate and collaborate. Or, as he and others say, collide.
“Then the magic starts to happen,” Lazenby says.
Consolidating entrepreneurs and the services they’re looking for under one roof will create a focal point in Ottawa for building entrepreneurial businesses, Quigley says.
Invest Ottawa staff will work in one side of the building, while some of the companies that are participating in the organization’s various programs will populate the business incubator at the other end.
“This is going to be the more colourful side,” Quigley explained during the tour.
He’s hoping bright colours, exposed concrete beams, casual seating areas and a wall of windows will foster the creativity of the 20- and 30-somethings who will run their startup companies from here.
In addition to meeting space, mail and telephone privileges, and high-speed wireless Internet, startups will have access to the prototyping tools and technologies in the makerspace and media lab.
Invest Ottawa will also run a “hot desk,” a membership-based program for people seeking a short-term office space that saves them the cost and hassle of signing a lease elsewhere.
Although Quigley says he’s been fielding calls from lots of companies who want to move there, the new innovation centre won’t have commercial office space for rent. Such a thing could be part of a second phase involving the construction of a 180,000-square-foot tower, but the business case for that won’t be developed until next year, Quigley says.
Speaking of business case, he says rent paid by Invest Ottawa and other tenants will cover the building’s annual operating expenses and a portion of the common facilities, while additional revenue may flow from renting out the auditorium and meeting rooms. Selling the naming rights isn’t on the table, Quigley says.
Buildings don’t make startups … or do they?
From the mayor on down, Ottawa’s Innovation Centre has many cheerleaders. But the value of such centres isn’t accepted as a universal truth.
In a 2006 essay titled How to be Silicon Valley, American entrepreneur and investor Paul Graham argued a place needs two kinds of people to create a technology hub: rich people and nerds.
“Within the U.S., towns have become startup hubs if and only if they have both rich people and nerds. Few startups happen in Miami, for example, because although it’s full of rich people, it has few nerds. It’s not the kind of place nerds like. Whereas Pittsburgh has the opposite problem: plenty of nerds, but no rich people,” he wrote.
Graham is no stranger to the world of startups. His tech accelerator, Y Combinator, has produced the likes of Reddit, Airbnb and Dropbox, each worth millions.
Neither is Kaz Nejatian, who wrote in a recent Policy Options piece that minimizing the risk of disruption, as governments often attempt to do, scares away true innovation.
He points to the ride-hailing app Uber as an example: How a place treats Uber, he says, is a barometer of its openness to startups (even the disruptive ones).
Ottawa’s city council initially railed against Uber and the bylaw department has fined dozens of its drivers since it pulled into town in 2014. But earlier this year, council legalized Uber (the new bylaw takes effect in September).
Governments tend to avoid risk, yet risk is often a key ingredient to innovation. Sometimes you just have to try something and hope for the best.
If Ottawa really wanted to attract startups, Nejatian says, it would do something other jurisdictions are unwilling to do, and use that to the city’s competitive advantage.
For example, the city could position itself to become one of the friendliest jurisdictions for self-driving cars, which might attract the companies that produce them to set up shop here. But there’d be a risk in allowing the vehicles on Ottawa roads, so some might not go for it.
Nejatian also says people, not buildings, make startups.
He founded Kash, a payment technology company, in his mom’s basement with just $4,000. It now has offices in San Francisco, Waterloo and Toronto and almost 20 employees. He can rhyme off the names of half a dozen companies that had a similar beginning, only to later become household names.
“Politicians seem to like buildings because they provide nice backdrops. People who start companies don’t want to fill out forms to get advice from some bureaucrat that has never started a business. They want fast Internet, cheap rent for their apartments and for government to stop bugging them.”
Had he taken the advice provided to him at Toronto’s MaRS innovation hub, he says his company would have been dead two years ago.
At innovation centres, people can “get sucked into a cycle of perpetual advice that is unhelpful for companies that are trying to be innovative,” Nejatian says.
But bricks and mortar matter, says Lee Silverstone, co-founder of Gymtrack, a platform for networking fitness equipment in order to let members track their progress using a mobile application.
“Having something where people can come together is quite powerful,” he says. “I think it is an excellent initiative to both promote entrepreneurship and to keep smart Ottawans here.”
The company’s first office was at Invest Ottawa, but Gymtrack grew out of the space in less than a year and moved into its own office on Bank Street.
Silverstone hopes Ottawa’s innovation centre will bridge the gap between early-stage companies and financing, which can be a challenge to secure because there is less private capital available in Canada.
By building and growing more companies here, more money will be reinvested into the Canadian marketplace as older, successful entrepreneurs become angel investors and support a new generation of upstart businesses, he says.
And that’s good for the country, he adds, as it helps shift the national economic focus away from pulling resources out of the ground in favour of tech development.
It’s a debate Invest Ottawa’s Lazenby has heard before. The lack of startups isn’t a problem bureaucrats can solve, but what governments can do is invest seed money. And, he points out, Invest Ottawa services aren’t provided by government employees, but rather by people with private-sector experience like his.
“It is an interesting debate: Should the government do something, nothing or everything? I think nothing is the wrong answer and everything is the wrong answer, but something makes sense,” he says.
The Communitech Hub, a similar startup ecosystem in Waterloo which some in Ottawa have looked to for inspiration, opened its doors in 2010, thanks to cash from the federal and provincial governments, and private-sector partners (the organization itself was founded more than a dozen years earlier by entrepreneurs, including RIM’s Jim Balsillie).
Communitech says more than 450 startups were founded in that region last year, raising a total of $219 million in investment capital. It has worked with a number of successful companies, but none have reached the Shopify level.
In fact, Quigley couldn’t come up with the name of any well-known brands that got their start there.
A place for the public
Though it might be funkier than most, the centre will still be an office building where people work in areas only accessed by security card readers.
But the public will be able to visit the cafe, a second-floor terrace and rear courtyard, where fruit trees will be planted and raised beds installed for a community garden, Quigley says.
The auditorium and some meeting rooms may also be available for rent.
Kitchissippi Coun. Jeff Leiper says he hopes to bring an arts component to the centre, something he says is missing from similar centres, including Communitech. He’s particularly interested in bringing Ottawa’s music industry in.
The innovation centre happens to be in his ward, so he’s perhaps more tuned in to what’s happening there than some of his council colleagues.
But he’s also quite hopeful.
Leiper also says the centre could help diversify the city’s economy and build on its legacy of success in the tech sector.
“The tech industry holds out one of our best hopes of diversifying the city’s economy beyond government,” he says.
“There’s no reason we can’t be Silicon Valley North again.”
mpearson@postmedia.com
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