We would like to thank everyone who has been participating in the discussions on the potential BC-led Digital Technology Supercluster initiative. It’s been amazing to see the breadth of support and energy across sectors, post-secondary institutions, and with organizations large and small.
A couple of weeks ago, the consortium of supporters including the BC Tech Association, BC Business Council, Wavefront, Research Universities’ Council of BC and UBC worked with Deloitte to publish a positioning report which you can view on SlideShare or download it here.
With the support of industry leaders like Telus, Microsoft, Lifelabs, and many others – as well as the support from post-secondary and not-for-profit partners, we’ve made tremendous strides in coalescing the founding consortium as well as creating the model by which companies and stakeholder groups can benefit from this undertaking.
The concept is to create an industry-led, world-leading digital technologies and platforms powerhouse aimed at innovating and transforming industries at the core of BC’s and Canada’s economic future. We anticipate the value of our initiative in terms of total contributions to be in the area of $400 million over five years thereby representing an unprecedented, generational opportunity to advance and transform BC’s digital technology landscape in collaboration with regional partners across the country.
This diagram summarizes the priority technologies and with it sheds some light on the kind of companies that may wish to join us.
The foundation of our supercluster will be a growing pool of cutting-edge technology research and development project collaborations. Led by our founding members, these are currently being defined and will be heavily influenced by the most advanced global innovation trends as well as customer problems in our verticals of interest (see diagram above).
As we mentioned, our first priority was to solidify the support of the founding industry members and with that underway, we are now seeking the support of SME organizations to participate in the supercluster.
Securing support from SMEs organizations. We are seeking the participation of Small (1-99 employees) and medium-sized members (100-499 employees) as both ongoing supercluster members and supercluster associates who will participate on a project basis.
For supercluster members, the membership will be in the form of minimum cash and in-kind commitments over a five year period. For supercluster associates, the contribution thresholds will vary by project and will be determined in due course.
We recognize that the commitment levels may be challenging for many of the early stage companies in our community, but we would invite you to consider writing a letter of commitment detailing the scope of your support and desired participation in the supercluster as it moves forward.
We’re working quickly to gather the necessary components to submit our Letter of Intent by the deadline of July 21st. If you are interested in participating, please reach out to Dean Prelazzi at dprelazzi@gmail.com or 604-551-3701.
