by Iain Klugman, President and CEO Communitech

Mobile

Twitter @Communitech
http://www.communitech.ca

Transcript

When people say to us, what’s the strategy that undergirds the approach that you take to building a strong technology cluster here in Waterloo region, they often think that we’re going to talk about Silicon Valley, that we’re going to talk about Route 128, or Singapore, but what we end up talking about is hockey, because I think hockey is one thing that we do very very well, in fact better than anyone else

First of all we’ve got a culture that says, everyone should think about playing hockey. That it’s an absolutely legitimate career choice. So, if you think about your kids and what they’re thinking about doing when they grow up, its lawyer, accountant, ballerina, firefighter, hockey player. So, it’s an absolutely legitimate career choice. A normalized career choice. And the fascinating thing about that is that the chances of making it to the NHL are less than doing a venture-backed start-up and taking it to IPO. I mean, there are 50 new hockey players a year. And so in this incredibly risk-averse culture where failure is unacceptable, for some reason there is this one profession where we say, we gotta convince our kids to into something we know they are going to fail at. So it’s fascinating.

And the second thing very, very well in this country, in fact better than anyone else, is that we’ve got this incredible development system, where we can wring the maximum amount of hockey potential out of every man, woman and child, and if you go to the furthest flung region of this country, you’ll find a rink, you’ll find a league, you’ll find a training, support organization, you’ll find camps, and so what we’ve said is, ok, first of all we’ll need to legitimize this career choice as entrepreneur, we’ve got to make it acceptable.  Once someone decides to do a start-up, we need to have the same calibre of development system in place for entrepreneurs that we do for hockey players.