Kitchener - Waterloo is the Shining Jewel in Ontario's Technology Dominance

The province of Ontario is by far Canada's leading region for incubating high-tech industries, according to a new report from the Council of Canadian Academies. The province is also a world leader in training scientists from other countries and linking with tech businesses around the world.
"Ontario can make the case for the strength of science and technology enterprise," says Eliot Phillipson, chair of the committee, which wrote the State of Science and Technology in Canada report. Dr. Phillipson is also a professor emeritus of medical science at the University of Toronto.
The study shows that Ontario, with a third of Canada's population, produces half of the country's technology output – and nearly half of its scientific research papers.
Other key findings of the report include:

• Ontario accounts for almost half of all Canadian R&D expenditures.
• Ontario is the main hub of Canada's collaboration network.
• Ontario is the leading province for Canada's total intellectual property ownership.
• Ontario produces 46 per cent of Canada's bibliometric output (the analysis of peer-reviewed scientific papers).

The practical significance of the findings should be of particular interest to international investors. In sum, the findings define a bedrock of world-class excellence in technology and the sciences. For example, Canada has the third largest video game industry in the world, after the United States and Japan. Ontario alone possesses dozens of game developers, and trains video programmers in colleges from Toronto to Ottawa to Sault Ste Marie.

Dr. Phillipson points out that Ontario is especially strong in two of the six areas of research where Canada excelled in a recent international study: clinical medicine, and information and communication technologies, or ICT (the others are psychology and cognitive sciences, physics and astronomy, visual arts and historical studies).

In both clinical medicine and ICT, Ontario has developed "tech clusters" where strong research programs fertilize a profusion of small technology companies. Some of these grow into large companies, which support increased university research, which in turn lures major foreign investors attracted by the opportunity to set up local affiliates.

Perhaps the most well-known and colourful "cluster story" is the tale of an immigrant family from Turkey whose son studied electrical engineering at Ontario's University of Waterloo. That son, Mike Lazaridis, dropped out in order to bid on a research project. He subsequently levered that contract into the multibillion dollar Research in Motion, the company that created the iconic Blackberry mobile phone.

Within a year of launching the Blackberry, RIM ploughed much of the profit back into the university, setting up the now-world-famous Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, soon followed by the Institute for Quantum Computing. Within a short time Microsoft, Oracle, Google and many other offshore giants set up development offices in Waterloo and its sister city of Kitchener. Kitchener-Waterloo, with a modest population of just over 300,000, is now one of the world's premiere ICT clusters.