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gary mason

As Premier Christy Clark unveils a new jobs plan this week, many will be watching to see where innovation and technology figure into her government's new employment strategy.

There has been plenty of talk by the B.C. government in recent years about its desire to turn the province into Silicon Valley North, but those dreams have mostly been just that. While there have certainly been some success stories, the province's high-tech sector is still embarrassingly small and insignificant in global terms.

Shortly after taking office in 2001, Gordon Campbell set up the Premier's Technology Council and the B.C. Innovation Council, and established Leading Edge B.C. to market the province as a high-tech centre throughout the world.

Mr. Campbell was fond of boasting how B.C. would be one of the world's top 10 technology centres by 2010. He ended up killing Leading Edge B.C. three years into its existence, merging the bones of the operation into the Victoria bureaucracy. B.C. isn't any closer to being a world power in high technology than it was 10 years ago.

Particularly troubling are developments at the B.C. Innovation Council.

The organization has gone through a string of CEOs since its inception. In the fall of 2008, the council spent more than $100,000 to bring in Dean Rockwell, a former executive with Cisco Sytems, to be its CEO. At the time, Mr. Rockwell's arrival was viewed as a major coup for BCIC.

But less than two years later he was gone, leaving for a job with Pulse Energy, a company co-founded by David Helliwell, who was a board member at BCIC at the time.

Mr. Rockwell was replaced in the fall of 2010 by Danny Robinson, who was co-founder of Bootup Labs, a startup accelerator that helps entrepreneurs take their ideas from "concept to company." Mr. Robinson lasted six months and left in May after he and the board "mutually agreed the job was not the right fit," according to Lindsay Thom, media manager at BCIC.

Who is doing the hiring at this place anyway?

For an organization that is supposed to be the bedrock of a plan to turn B.C. into a world-class incubator for high-technology innovation, you rarely, if ever, hear about what BCIC is up to beyond awards that it occasionally hands out.

According to its website, it is supposed to be strengthening the province's "technology eco-system" by working with industry, academia and government.

It runs a mentorship program that is much like one already in existence at the B.C. Technology Industry Association. It helps fund high-school science fairs and other regional programs. In 2010, the outfit had revenue of $12.2-million. Of that, it spent $134,993 on talent development and innovation. It spent twice that amount on communication and recognition awards and $4-million on "operations."

How does the government measure success at this organization?

The mission over at the Premier's Technology Council isn't much clearer. Its mandate, apparently, is to help government build a knowledge-based economy and society. The council is made up of members of the private sector and academia – all smart, successful people I'm sure.

But you hear so little about their work it makes you wonder what the government is hiding. Its last report in December of 2010 laid out a vision for 21st-century education in the province.

As documents go it was fine, but there was very little within its pages that qualifies as ground-breaking work in this area. It mined subject material that organizations such as the Canadian Council on Learning have been talking about for years. It called for reforms of the B.C. education system but stayed away from tricky areas such as the power of the teachers' union.

I'm sure the report has found a nice place in the back of a filing cabinet in the Minister of Education's office.

There are many well-meaning and hard-working people at both the innovation council and Premier's technology group. But it's time to take a hard look at both organizations with an eye to reassessing their roles and either getting rid of them altogether or giving them higher profiles and more focus.

The majority of the technology created in B.C. is consumed here, too. There would appear to be a real export opportunity that isn't being taken advantage of.

There are many hoping Ms. Clark will be announcing some fresh ideas and plans for this area later this week.

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