New business development organization aims to boost tech activity in Moncton region

Moncton NB is home to a new innovation enabling organization that its backers hope will help the region's nascent tech and life sciences clusters develop and prosper. More than five years in the making, Tech Southeast Inc (TSE) aims to link the major innovation players and support organizations in the southeast section of the province to facilitate the creation and growth of companies in the information and communications technologies (ICT) and life sciences sectors.

Modelled on enabling organizations such as Waterloo's Communitech but tailored to reflect the region's unique characteristics, TSE was officially launched last week with about $1.3 million in funding over three years. The province of New Brunswick is the largest single contributor to the TSE at $330,000 annually.

TSE is the first tech enabling organization in New Brunswick and joins Newfoundland's OceansAdvance Inc and the Prince Edward Island BioAlliance as only one of three such organizations in Atlantic Canada. (Nova Scotia crown corporation InnovaCorp carries out many similar functions, and PEI has recently launched a second entity, PEI AgriFood Alliance, which is currently in the start-up phase).

TSE estimates that there are about 140 companies in the region employing a total of 3,000-4,000 people and is currently collecting firm data on overall revenues. While the region and its company base are relatively small, TSE points to Olu, Finland — which the region has identified as a "benchmark city" — and the remarkable growth it has experienced since it explicitly targeted the tech sector less than 20 years ago as an area of potential growth.

"There are many similarities in the challenges faced by the Moncton region and Olu. It's a remote northern community, it's export -oriented, has a largely resource-based economy, is remote from financial centres and has a strong interest in becoming global," says TSE president and CEO Doug Robertson, on exchange from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA) where he served as director of innovation policy and research projects. "Olu had two main catalysts. They established a university and there's Nokia, which is a major player in wireless communications technologies."

Robertson says the key ingredient for success in Olu was an emphasis on collaboration and cooperation from the outset. He adds that the same spirit of collaboration is evident in the growing network of enabling organizations in the province of Ontario (Ontario Gateway) where companies can tap into a range of expertise and funding sources through members and strategic partners.

For the Moncton region, the most significant tech player is Spielo, a local gaming firm founded in 1990 that has grown to 420 employees and anchors a small but growing cluster of about 20 gaming companies. Company founder Jon Manship, who sold Spielo to Providence RA-based GTECH Corp in 2004, chairs the TSE board of directors and is chair of Technology Ventures Corp.

Robertson says Spielo has remained and grown in the Moncton region despite the change in ownership and personifies the kind of companies he hopes TSE can grow or attract to the region, taking advantage of a solid university-college base and relatively low business overhead costs.

In addition to digital media gaming and animation, the region has emerging ICT strength in software development, informatics, e-business, e-health and mobile data technologies. Sub-sectors within health and life sciences sectors include biotechnology, bioinformatics and medical devices.

TSE's focus and structure were also assisted by the Austin TX-based IC2 Institute, which was commissioned to study the Moncton region. It concluded that it possessed many of the necessary assets for tech growth including a number of post-secondary institutions, a small base of companies and government organizations such as the Industrial Research Assistance Program, the National Research Council's Institute for Information Technology and the Atlantic Cancer Research Institute. The study also recommended the formation of a Moncton Technology Commercialization Centre, which Robertson says is a possibility once the TSE starts to produce results.

"First we need to get traction and deal flow. The Centre is on our radar for the medium term," he says. "We have to be very careful to do it right and build a centre at the right time. This is literally a start-up (and) there's lots of upside potential."

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