Canada’s ocean economy opportunity: Q&A with Kendra MacDonald, CEO of Canada’s Ocean Supercluster

Kendra MacDonald (photo at right) has been the CEO of Canada’s Ocean Supercluster since the federally funded, Atlantic Canada-based global innovation cluster started operating in 2018.

As CEO, she is responsible for driving innovation and growth in Canada’s ocean economy. Together with a team working across six cities in Atlantic Canada, MacDonald is focused on changing the culture of doing business in the ocean and increasing collaboration across ocean sectors and Canada’s global reach.

MacDonald was previously a partner in Deloitte's risk advisory practice and the chief audit executive of Deloitte Global. She serves on the board of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and is the past-chair of the Newfoundland and Labrador Association of Technology Industries. Over the course of her career, she has both lived and worked in Ottawa, Montreal, Australia and Hong Kong before moving to St. John's, Newfoundland, in 2010 where she now resides with her husband and two children.

Under MacDonald’s leadership, the Ocean Supercluster has achieved some impressive key performance indicators, including:

• 783 cluster network members across all provinces and territories except the Yukon.
• 741 members (93 percent) are small and medium-sized enterprises.
• 40 are international members, including 11 from the U.S and 29 from Europe, Asia, South America and Australia.
• 73 percent of the Ocean Supercluster’s members said they have experienced or expect to experience growth as a direct result of their involvement with the cluster to date.
• The cluster has helped start 184 new Canadian ocean companies since 2022.
• Co-invested in more than 100 ocean projects with industry consortiums, resulting in more than 300 new ocean products and processes to sell to the world.
• Convened more than 300 partners across ocean sectors (many of whom have never met before) to work on Ocean Supercluster projects.
• 5,947 participants are benefitting from internships, learning resources, training and mentorship to build awareness and pathways to ocean careers.
• Created 5,000 jobs and on track to create 20,000 by 2030
• Formal partnerships established with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (U.S.), Marine Renewables Canada, Forum Oceano (Portugal), European Leaders in Blue Energy, the Port of San Diego and others.
• Reached more than 3 million Canadian youth aged 18-35 with a new On the Job campaign with Shawn Kanungo.

MacDonald, in a Q&A with Mark Lowey, Research Money’s managing editor, talks about how Canada’s Ocean Supercluster has benefitted small and medium-sized businesses, the accomplishments she is most proud of, the biggest challenges faced by the Ocean Supercluster, the cluster’s plan to grow the ocean economy, the need for a blue bio-economy strategy for Canada, her longer-term vision for the Ocean Supercluster, and the impact on the cluster of a possible change in the federal government.

R$:  One of the main goals of the federal government’s global innovation cluster initiative was to engage more Canadian SMEs in innovative commercial projects with large corporations, to help SMEs scale up and expand their market reach. Has Canada’s Ocean Supercluster been able to achieve this goal during the six years the innovation cluster has been in operation and, if so, how? Can you provide a couple of examples?

KM:  The ocean economy is predominantly small and medium-sized enterprises. Ninety-six percent of our projects are led by SMEs. An early example is Kraken Robotics [in Mount Pearl, Nova Scotia] which had 80 employees when their project [with the Ocean Supercluster] started and when they finished their project they were up over 200 or so employees. So that’s a great story. GIT Coatings [which offers sustainable graphene-based hull and propeller coatings for vessels] in Nova Scotia is another example. They were a startup or early-stage company and they now ship their product to over 50 countries.

R$:  An initial concern when the global innovation clusters were created was that multinationals were going to come in on the projects and scoop up all the intellectual property. Has that happened?

KM:  We really haven’t seen that play out or be an ongoing concern. We do have larger organizations that are part of project consortiums. They’re really looking to be the first customer [for the smaller companies]. We do have an IP director who helps with those conversations [about intellectual property]. We really have seen the larger companies coming in and really providing that first customer and that support to have a customer story and get it out to market.

Especially when the SMEs are dealing with a larger company that gives them credibility and helps accelerate their speed to market. In our industry, several of the larger companies are international. So now, if SMEs have a solution that works with that company in Canada, can [the international partner] help take that solution international? Aquaculture is an example [of a technology that can be applied internationally]. So that’s another opportunity for SMEs. It brings investment, too, because those larger companies often will have more resources to put into the project. One of the things that the SMEs are challenged with is financing.

We want to keep everything in Canada. When the supercluster supports a project and that project gets a lot of attention internationally, we have seen several examples where companies in some cases have been able to raise funds and in other cases have gotten purchased by a European or an American buyer. The operations are staying in Canada, but they’ve been able to grow their business with additional investment internationally.

R$:  What are two or three accomplishments that you’re most proud of during your time as CEO of Canada’s Ocean Supercluster? Any new or recently launched initiatives or programs you’re particularly proud of?

KM:  The Ocean Startup Project. I think we very early on recognized that we couldn’t grow companies if we didn’t have companies. I recently pulled out a picture where we sat around a room – I think it was in early 2019 – and said, This is a problem that we need to address. How do we actually work together, at that time as a region, which has now become the country, to be able to have new ocean companies? We’ve now got 184 new companies that we’ve helped start since 2022 and now that we have been operating for six years we’re now seeing them move from the Ocean Startup Project into the supercluster program and throughout the ecosystem. That’s really exciting to see. The Ocean Startup Project was recognized as a North American accelerator in the Startup Genome report that was issued in December of 2023. Not only are we proud of what’s it’s done for the Canadian ecosystem, it’s recognized internationally as helping to accelerate the growth in Canada [of ocean companies].

I think bringing AI to the ocean economy [is another accomplishment]. It’s hard to believe that two years ago when we talked about getting some pan-Canadian AI funding into the ocean economy that was considered a very high risk thing to do. Now AI is so much a part of our world, but it wasn’t in early 2022 before ChatGPT came along. In our first 80 projects we had one that called itself an AI project. Now probably over half our portfolio is developing AI solutions and is really across sectors and in a lot of cases it’s generating better data to make better decisions to not only improve the business but also improve the use of the ocean resources. I think that’s really exciting.

The third example is that from the very beginning we had an Indigenous working group. We’ve taken very seriously the importance of Western and Indigenous knowledge as part of the ocean economy. We recently had our Indigenous Ocean Business Forum, the first of its kind, and we had about 100 people in Ottawa in November 2024. Seventy percent participation was Indigenous, really trying to change the conversation around the ocean economy and create more opportunities for ocean communities. We’ll be launching in January 2025 our Coastal Challenge which is really designed to support communities in developing solutions around coastal resiliency and adaptation. We had our first sustainable ocean economy session in Iqaluit in January 2024 and the business forum in Ottawa in November, so we’re continuing to move that conversation along and it’s been a really important part of our development.

R$:  What are a couple of the biggest challenges do you think Canada’s Ocean Supercluster has faced?

KM:  Collaboration is easier said than done. I think if you look at the ocean economy, we are cross-sectoral. The ocean is 70 percent of the planet, so there are a lot of sectors that are in the ocean economy. We have the longest coastline [of any country] but that means we’ve got communities on the East Coast, West Coast and North, so we cover a lot of geography and a lot of sectors. We cover Indigenous, non-Indigenous and a lot of provinces. We’ve got a big concentration in northern Quebec, so we’ve got bilingual [considerations] as well to make sure we deliver [on our programs]. So that’s a lot of cultural complexity that we had to manage to get people working together. And then we had a pandemic in amongst all that, so we did things virtually, which was positive on the one hand because it broke down geographical barriers to some extent but it also meant that we couldn’t meet physically as we were trying to build the cluster. And we knew that a lot of our project ideas came when people sat around the table and [shared] their ideas, which was a bit hard to replicate virtually. So collaboration definitely has been one of the challenges.

The funding cycle has also been a bit of a challenge. It was really exciting around [funding] renewal, but we [initially] had five years so you run really hard in the early part and then you’re building the case for the next part. The projects, especially in ocean, are longer projects [and can be dependent] on the seasons. If you have bad weather, then you lose some of that optimal testing that you’re trying to do on the water and then you lose that season until next year. We don’t have a lot of flexibility to play with our timelines. So that’s been a challenge. I think we’ve worked well around it, but we saw a lot of the projects in round one extended [due to] COVID and supply chains and seasonality and all of those things.

R$:  Canada’s Ocean Supercluster’s Ambition 2035 initiative has a very ambitious goal to grow Canada’s ocean economy by five times, into a $220-billion economy. Do you think this goal is realistic and what are a couple of the key things that are needed to achieve it?

KM:  The goal is designed to be ambitious. We saw from 2019 to 2022 that the ocean economy grew from $39 billion to $52 billion, and it went from 350,000 to 425,000 [employees] in terms of the projected numbers. That I believe is double the growth of the previous five years. 

It is accelerating in terms of growth. But at this point it’s not outpacing the growth of the broader economy which is what it needs to do to be able to achieve [the target in] 2035. We’re far enough out that I think we can continue to push on that acceleration. To be able to do that, regulatory [efficiency] is a big piece. We can only move so fast when you are dealing with some of the big pieces like offshore energy, aquaculture and seaweed – some of these bigger opportunities. All of those things require the regulatory piece and that is something we’re continuing to have a conversation on because [not moving efficiently on regulation] will slow things down.

The other key piece is continuing to change the way that we work together as a country. It’s been really exciting seeing the West work with the East to work with the North, seeing companies work across regions, seeing collaborations come together across the country and collaborations between research and industry. By continuing to accelerate that we are really building from what we already know and are not reinventing the wheel –we’re really learning from each other. I remember when we first launched Ambition 2035 we went across the country and 400 people fed into that process, and one of the key themes was we can’t get there doing what we’ve always been doing. We need to change the conversation, we need to change how we work together, we need to embrace doing things differently and bring in technology. What we also learned through our economic analysis is we won’t get there just by growing the technology opportunities. We have to grow the underlying sectors.

[Growing] the talent is another big piece. Energy is a big piece of that $220-billlion [ocean economy goal] and we know that energy is not as workforce-heavy if you look at people to GDP, compared with fisheries and aquaculture which are relatively high. But still, five times growth needs more people. So one of the things I’m proud of is our recent On The Job campaign with Shawn Kanungo. We looked and said, What can we do? It’s not necessarily more programming. We offer some of that, but this [campaign] is really raising the profile of the ocean economy with Canadians so that they understand. So that we have more tech companies looking at how they apply their technologies into the ocean, we have more graduates coming into the ocean economy, we have more marketing or finance or human resources, all of those skills looking at how they can work in the ocean economy. The On The Job campaign reached about 3 million young people between 18 and 35 – that’s a big number to raise awareness around ocean jobs.

R$:  Canada’s Ocean Supercluster established a national steering committee to guide the development of a blue bioeconomy strategy for Canada. How is that work proceeding? Do we still need such a strategy and if so, why and how would it change the current growth path of and opportunities for Canada’s blue bioeconomy?

KM:  We are hoping we will have some outputs early in 2025. We have had roundtables across the country. I think the opportunity is significant in the blue bioeconomy and if we look at other countries, like Iceland for example that has been very focused 100-percent on fish, we can see the opportunity and the leadership they’ve been able to provide globally. I think what’s been really interesting in the exercises is how much is actually happening across Canada in terms of pockets of activity. Part of this is actually telling a cohesive Canadian story because I think that’s really important. So what are we already doing? And then being able to articulate what the size of the opportunity is for Canada and what it would take.

Unfortunately, [communicating about] a blue bioeconomy is not necessarily easy. AI probably means different things to different people to some extent, but it has become relatively common language. When you get into blue bioeconomy and macroalgae and microalgae and pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals, it can get fairly technical quickly. So how do we articulate clearly what that opportunity is and what it looks like and get those stories? That’s part of what we’re really trying to do is get those stories across Canada. We actually had the head of the Iceland cluster here and he said: Get going. Just by talking about it, by giving you an identity, by shining a spotlight on it, that will start to increase the activity. So that’s what we’re hoping for to start. We’re coordinating that effort. We’re introducing people to each other. We’re doing things so we can better learn how  we build up what we already know, and part of that is figuring out what we already know.

What we’ve seen with Ambition 2035 is that it helps people understand what the size of the opportunity is. It gives the community a common language, so now every ocean entity can talk about this size of the economic opportunity for the ocean economy and then what their role is in it. So can we do something similar with the blue bioeconomy [strategy] to give everyone a common [understanding of]: This is what we think the opportunity is and this is where I play in that opportunity. Part of it is just giving people a common story so that we’re not all showing different numbers and different perspectives. Then we can look at what are some of these barriers that we’re facing and what do we want to be and how do we tackle those barriers.

R$:  What’s your longer-term vision for Canada’s Ocean Supercluster? Where would you like to see the cluster in 10 years? Is part of that vision making the Ocean Supercluster self-sustaining financially?

KM:  Let’s start with where I’d like to see the country in 10 years. I think what the cluster program is trying to tackle is the productivity challenge we have in Canada and the challenges we continue to see around our innovation scorecard. How do we increase industry investment in innovation? How do we increase adoption of technology? That’s what really excites me about this [cluster] program – this program is trying to do that. We’ve got lots of stories where industry is accelerating their investment in technology and in innovation as a result of this program.

So hopefully 10 years from now we will continue to see the growth. We’ll be hopefully achieving our ambition or very close to achieving our ambition [set out in Ambition 2035]. That would be incredibly exciting: having people understand the opportunity, having a sustainable ocean economy, and having the climate piece of that conversation because we know that our ocean is heavily tied to climate and carbon sequestration. [In 10 years], we will have a fully instrumented ocean that we understand. We’re making better decisions. We’re maximizing use of our resources. We’ve grown the economy and are taking advantage of the size of the opportunity. Hopefully the Ocean Supercluster will be able to continue to play a role in driving that. And we will be able to diversify our sources of revenue to be able to do that, because we are continuing to make a difference on that journey.

R$:  The polls are telling us that we’re likely to see a change in the federal government. If that happens, do you think the work started by Canada’s Ocean Supercluster will continue, even if there’s no further federal funding for Canada’s Ocean Supercluster and the other global innovation clusters?  

KM:  I think the ocean opportunity resonates. The ocean economy is growing globally and it is accelerating. Canada does have the longest coastline in the world. We have the fourth-largest ocean territory. We are well respected internationally in the ocean community. We’re well respected internationally in the artificial intelligence community. We’re well respected internationally in the clean tech community. So you put all those things together and there is a tremendous real opportunity for Canada in the ocean economy. If you look at [the size of our ocean economy] – $52 billion in 2022 compared to a US$3-trillion opportunity by 2030 – that is a tremendous economic opportunity for Canada. I think that the Ocean Supercluster can continue to play a key role in driving that, and that is not politically aligned. That is a true jobs opportunity and GDP opportunity.

If you look at how many opportunities there are in Canada, this to me really stands out as one where Canada does have a significant opportunity to differentiate itself and have a leadership role globally. It aligns climate and economy and community and a lot of the pieces that we care about. We hope to continue to be a strategic partner to government, which I expect will probably look different than it does today. But we are right now one of the largest [ocean] economy clusters in the world. Clusters continue to play a key role in driving the economy and our hope is that we will continue to play that role into the future to really see Ambition 2035 through.

R$:  How have you enjoyed the ride so far, after six years at the head of Canada’s Ocean Supercluster?

KM:  It has been fascinating. I started digging into the true economic potential that exists and the fact that [our ocean economy] is undersized and we don’t necessarily have the focus that we could. When you compare us to countries like Norway or Iceland or Singapore, these are small countries that are punching way above their weight in the ocean economy. So I think the opportunity is real. I get to see different sectors, I get to really experience Canada and really sell Canada to the world. People don’t wake up around the world and think, What’s happening in Canada today in the ocean economy? We’re not the first country people think about. But when they hear about what’s happening in Canada they get incredibly excited and look at ways to be able to work with us.

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