Monday, January 22, 2007

Our Economic Future

In Sunday’s Ottawa Citizen Columnist Randall Denley writes about a Conference Board of Canada study that suggests “Acting Canadian is killing our economic future” (ppA4). He’s right.

Canada, and most of the developed world, faces a very difficult economic future if we don’t come to grips with how we compete as globalization re-writes the world economy. It’s not just a case of picking a few winning cities and universities, pour money into them, and hope that their rise pulls us all up – because that’s just the tools – and as Denley notes China and India pour out graduates, and have cities, at 100x the rate we do.

What’s needed is a strategy that leverages these efforts to address specific competitive areas – like entrepreneurship. While labour increasingly moves to the lowest cost producer – value remains with the group (and country) that controls product design and the relationship with the customer. What’s more the businesses and business models that flourish in a global economy have not been fully defined - yet. With the right resources and approaches it could be a time of incredible opportunity.

So what’s needed? First we have to address the stumbling blocks for entrepreneurships – team formation and business execution knowledge. Entrepreneurship leverages individual insight, risk and personal motivation to address the productivity gap. Focusing on team formation shifts the basis of competition from labor to skilled teams and their customers and product. While addressing business execution knowledge companies concentrates effort while avoiding missteps.

If Canada, and Ottawa, is going change our economic prospects we need to recognize that entrepreneurship is a process. It can be made both more frequent and successful with tools and processes that connect people and retain knowledge.