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Speaker 1 [00:00:01] Hi, it’s John here.
Speaker 2 [00:00:02] And it’s Theresa
Speaker 1 [00:00:03] Theresa. I know you’re something of a foodie, and I’ve always wanted to ask you, how much thought do you put into your carbon footprint when you’re cooking and eating?
Speaker 2 [00:00:13] Oh, I have put a fair amount into the carbon footprint of what I cook, so I kind of reduce my meat consumption as much as I can to try to consume plant-based alternatives. And I do think about how water intensive, different alternatives are. So something that I’ve learned through my cooking adventures in the pandemic is to go to the farmer’s market, find what is being produced seasonally, what’s available seasonally and then building your meals from that.
Speaker 1 [00:00:41] I’m glad you raised that because I find even for meat consumption, how valuable it is to talk to farmers or people who work with the farmers about the cuts of the meat you might be buying. So the closer we can get to the food producers, even though that’s not always possible, the better it is for our own consumption. You know, one of the challenges in Canada’s search for climate action is we don’t always know where the problem lies, and that includes what we eat wherever we may be in the country. Unlike, say, the oilsands, which are very concentrated in one region. Emissions from the production of food are distributed across the country and often hidden by bucolic landscapes or just our distance as consumers from the producers of our food. But there’s no hiding from the fact that farming generates about eight to 10 percent of Canada’s total greenhouse gas emissions. We all need food. Many of us love food and want to continue to enjoy sustainably produced food. And for Canada, that could be a huge opportunity to create more sustainable food products, not just for us here at home, but for the world.
Speaker 2 [00:01:41] We are definitely seeing more of those sustainable solutions on the food growing side, but holistically. We also have to address how food gets to our kitchens and the increasingly global supply chain for agriculture. I think it’s very important for consumers to understand where their food comes from, how far their food has traveled and reduce that physical distance between food growers and food consumers. My partner, James, his family owns an independent apple farm in Creamery, the Morrison Century Farm, and they sell their apples locally. Farmers markets, they accept visitors who come and buy apples by the bushel. And because these visitors does the actual farm, they may ask questions about how apples are grown and they get a deeper understanding of what it takes to produce food. And then I think that starts to help them truly grasp the real cost of having a meal and the role that they might play in the whole landscape.
Speaker 1 [00:02:32] I love apple farms and was lucky enough to be able to eat an apple right off the tree the other day and got me thinking a little bit. Trees are just as you were saying about the carbon footprint of that apple coming straight off the tree versus buying it, let’s say, in a grocery store. And most of us, if not all of us need grocery stores. It just makes food accessible, convenient and even affordable, but often creates a distance between us and the producer. And like so many things connected to the climate conversation, Theresa, a change in those very consumer attitudes is going to be critical. Will we ultimately pay for a more sustainable form of agriculture? You mentioned apples. Are we willing to spend an extra dollar or maybe two dollars for that apple because it’s locally produced and uses fewer chemicals? And does knowing that a producer is carbon neutral makes us more willing to buy from that producer, even if it’s not the cheapest option on the grocery shelves? This is Disruptors, an RBC podcast. I’m John Stackhouse
Speaker 2 [00:03:37] and I’m Trinh Theresa Do, welcome to the climate conversations. In this week’s installment of the Climate Conversations, a special multi-part series on Disruptors that’s exploring viable paths towards Net Zero. We talked to two influential players in Canada’s vital agricultural sector.
Speaker 1 [00:04:00] That’s right, after the break, you’ll hear my conversation with a pioneering farmer from Creemore, Ontario. Not far from that, apple farm trees are just mentioned who have some provocative things to say about the future of agriculture. But first, we look at the big climate challenges facing Canada’s largest food producers. There are few economic sectors more central to the debate about climate change than agriculture and food production. Our next guest has been thinking a lot about a warming climate and how his business may be contributing to it, but also affected by climate change, and it’s key to any solution. Michael McCain has been president and CEO of Maple Leaf Foods, one of Canada’s largest and oldest food producers, since 1999. In recent years, Maple Leaf has made carbon reduction a central focus and today claims to be the most sustainable protein company on Earth. Michael, welcome to disrupters.
Speaker 3 [00:04:52] John. Thank you for having me today on this very important topic.
Speaker 1 [00:04:56] You’ve been CEO of Maple Leaf Foods for a couple of decades now, and I just want to take you back to a moment when you realized that you had to make climate a strategic issue and what captured your attention?
Speaker 3 [00:05:09] Well, the science has been clear for some time. John, it’s certainly clarified over the last number of years, some more vividly. But it has been somewhat clear for a long period of time, and it’s been well known that agrifood is one of the principal contributors to the climate crisis we face. So we’ve been working for a long time trying to do the right thing to improve our footprint, going back for probably a decade. However, I’m reminded of a period of time several years ago when I’m sitting at Davos and in a luncheon discussion with 200 of the world’s leading activists, there are climate activists, food activists, animal welfare activists. I must say I felt a little bit like Darth Vader in the middle of the room. But you know, their whole thesis was the collective goal to eliminate animal meat production by 2035, and I’m the largest shareholder of the largest meat company in Canada. That’s a crystallizing point of view. You know, we had a bit of an existential moment inside our organization where we have to decide, are we going to put our foot in yesteryear and defend and promote all the good things we’re doing? Or are we going to recognize that these activists there may not be fully right, but they’re not wrong either. And that is much better and more productive for us to embrace the problem and embrace the reality that the agrifood footprint and specifically the meat footprint has not been appropriately managed over many decades and that we do need to change.
Speaker 1 [00:06:38] Talk to us about how it’s going at Maple Leaf in 2014. You set out to reduce the emissions. You’ve got five production facilities across North America, and you set out to cut emissions by 50 percent by 2025. It’s an extraordinary goal for just ten years. How how’s it going?
Speaker 3 [00:06:55] Well, actually, John, well, we’ve sort of taken this in two tranches. We established our first tranche of goals, which was a reduction of in our footprint of 25 percent by 2025. We’re sort of on track to that as we speak. We’re getting close to 2025 now, but most of the components of our emissions are down in the 20 to 22 percent range. But we’ve reframed those two years ago when we were one of the first companies to actually adopt science based targets at the time. In the fall of 2019, there were 290 companies, I think two in Canada. We were one of those to 290 globally.
Speaker 1 [00:07:36] And Michael, what does what does that mean?
Speaker 3 [00:07:38] Science-Based targets Once the Paris accord was adopted, it became painfully obvious to most leaders and science advocates around the world that the collection of target setting of most industrial organizations, the sum total of their targets were not credible and didn’t add up to the one and a half degree limitation that was established in the Paris accord. And it’s a central body that accepts applications for targets, reviews them with a very scientific lens for their robustness and their scientific integrity, to the extent that if everybody around the world adopted science based targets, which are, by the way, very aggressive, if everybody adopted science based targets, we would meet the goals of the Paris court simultaneously in 2019, following the very important architecture of avoid, reduce, recycle and offset. In that order, recognizing that you know the first three have to be committed to before you get to the third. We also became the very first food company in the world. To become carbon neutral now,
Speaker 1 [00:08:50] I wonder if you can walk us through a couple of the key decisions for you that got you to carbon neutrality. You’ve had to offset some of it. But what did you do in your own operations that got you down the path
Speaker 3 [00:09:03] again with the backdrop of a large constituency saying that you know you don’t deserve to be in business against the backdrop of an owner, operator and a family that has a 30 year generational view, saying, Do I want to own this meat company over a 30 year period on the back of being carbon neutral versus, you know, the alternative? And yet will we make less money? Maybe, maybe some, depending on how well we monetize that? You know, we don’t have to convince everybody that they should buy more from us just a few. But we just decided that that was the long term, better calculus to own a carbon neutral company, particularly in the context of the vision that we had established. So we did two years of analytics with some outside help just to make sure that we were not just making an impulsive decision, but, you know, to be the first in the world of that, we had to make sure that we were very careful in that in that calculus.
Speaker 1 [00:09:55] In 2017, you made the decision to enter the plant based protein market when you bought light life foods. Michael, how do you see Maple Leafs product mix changing over the coming years?
Speaker 3 [00:10:05] We see it as additive protein. The consumer’s migration today is they want more protein in their diet, not less. They want more choice in the proteins that they select plant versus meat. It’s the rise of flexitarians over vegetarians or vegans. And ultimately, there’s the evidence would suggest that it will be additive to meat consumption is not going to go away, which is over the course of the next 10 years. So it’s not a substitution effect that’s taking place here. We wanted to respect that need for choice and additive protein. We obviously want it to be in the growth markets. But the most important point unsustainability sustainability is plant based protein is not the answer to the sustainability challenges of the meat industry. The sustainability challenge of the meat industry are embodied in fixing the ills of the meat industry, not replacing it, like asking the transportation sector, you know, cars are our bad, so get people to walk to work. No, that’s not going to work. We have to fix the ills of the industry, and we believe that the footprint of animal meat production can be normalized to a sustainable level. And that’s our pursuit.
Speaker 1 [00:11:13] Walk us through a bit of that pursuit. What can the industry do to reduce its own footprint directly in the production of meat?
Speaker 3 [00:11:19] When you look at transportation, inbound transportation, outbound transportation, the movement of cars and vehicles, it’s a bubble on the chart, but it’s a really damn small one. The lion’s share of emissions in our footprint come from two sources. Number one manure and number two grains grain production. I mean, they’re overwhelmingly large bubbles manure because it’s methane. Methane, as you know, is 28 to one in the ratio of its impact on the environment relative to carbon. It is a very corrosive emission because of that concentration, and it shows up in intensive meat production manure in grains. It shows up in agricultural practice and agricultural practice that for a hundred years has unleashed carbon from the soil where it’s been for the millennia into the atmosphere, where it has been having the effect that we’ve all seen. But there are two technologies that are heavy hitters that are fundamentally game changers that have the capacity over the next 10 years to convert an industry from being one of the largest sources of the problem to being one of the only sources of solution. One of them is regenerative agriculture, and the other is anaerobic digestion. Anaerobic digestion is a technology that takes the methane from manure, concentrates it intensifies it, captures it and convert it to a renewable fuel. To the extent that that can be economically applied across the animal meat production system, you convert that largest bubble into a renewable energy source with respect to regenerative agriculture. That’s reversing the negative effects of 100 years, 100 years of poor agricultural practice to not just release carbon from soil into the atmosphere, but actually convert it to sequestering that carbon from the atmosphere back into the soil where it belongs. There are agricultural practices that are tested time true if applied properly and consistently, have that sequestration capacity. It’s very, very exciting.
Speaker 1 [00:13:25] You mentioned consumers and the reality that while we all care about climate, we may not make it part of our food buying decision when we’re actually at the make me counter or in the in the deli. But what’s holding us back?
Speaker 3 [00:13:39] Consumers care, you know, in this order of preference, they care about what goes in their body first, what goes on their body? Second, what’s around their body? Third, and this one certainly falls into the third category. Number two is, you know, let’s put that against the backdrop of other issues connected to the food chain. Things like food insecurity. Affordability. You know, if you are single mother, two kids, one income operating on a budget. There are lots of considerations and carbon neutrality might be, you know, down on the list relative to other subjects. And so, you know, I also think that I also think one of the things that none of us do very well is we don’t calibrate Horizon. We tend to worry less about what’s going to happen next year, the year after 10 years from now versus what’s going to happen next week, next month, six months from now. We know that carbon neutrality in the end, the story of the carbon crisis, probably, and I’m sixty two years old problem. You know, it’s going to affect my life a little, but not a lot. It’s going to affect my grandchildren a lot. It’s going to be life changing, game changing for my grandchildren. So there’s I think consumers sometimes succumb to a little bit of the, you know, the horizon effect.
Speaker 1 [00:14:59] I wonder, as we move to close Michael, if you can give us a global perspective, you operate in Canada, you’re huge in Canada, but you also operate significantly in the United States and Australia. What are you seeing in other markets and what are you sensing around the world in terms of where agriculture is going, where food production is going? With respect to climate action,
Speaker 3 [00:15:20] I think if you did a heat map, John, you would find it the hottest in continental Europe, the coolest in Asia, kind of Canada, the North America kind of neutral. But there’s a lot of greenwashing and a lot of carbon denial in the U.S. industry. And I think to some degree, because we compete so directly with the U.S. that that has a bit of an overflow. You know, we have a three percent for three to four percent market share. And so we, you know, we can go into the U.S. marketplace and we’re the disruptor in that market and we are gaining a very pointed and well-known reputation for being leaders in this space. And you know, when you got three to four percent market share, you don’t have to convince everybody. You just got to miss a few people to favor you with some type of growth. One of the principles when we started down this journey and this was as important internally as it was externally was, we said, we’re going, we’re going to take the first step, but only on the premise of progress, not perfection. And I think that serves us well on this journey
Speaker 1 [00:16:17] might be a good message for a lot of listeners across the country as we wrap up
Speaker 3 [00:16:20] progress over perfection. It’s a good message for a lot of listeners to recognize that sometimes disruption comes with a lack of perfection.
Speaker 1 [00:16:29] Michael, thank you for being on disruptors.
Speaker 3 [00:16:30] Thank you, John. It’s been wonderful to spend the time with you today.
Speaker 1 [00:16:33] Coming up after the break, we talked to an Ontario farmer who’s advocating for a new model of agriculture, one in which the goal is to produce less food, not more. So stay right there.
Speaker 2 [00:16:49] You’re listening to Disruptors and RBC podcast. I’m Theresa Dohme, RBC Economics and Thought Leadership recently released a report called The Two Trillion Dollar Transition. It explores the costs and benefits of Canada’s shift to a carbon neutral economy and how it can fuel a new generation of Canadian innovation, from carbon capture technology to sustainable agriculture to the full potential of supercharging electric vehicles. We look at all the ways for Canada to take a leading role in the fight for climate action and the economic opportunities they create. To learn more. Check out the link in the show notes of this episode and visit our bbc.com. Net zero. And be sure to like and follow disruptors wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 [00:17:38] Welcome back. Theresa. I’m really struck by something Michael McCain said about horizons and how we’re so focused on the immediate future that especially older generations, those in positions of power don’t look down the road at how much carbon emissions will cost our children and grandchildren. How do we overcome that Horizon’s problem?
Speaker 2 [00:17:56] I think it’s as simple as talking about it and creating empathy. If you’re someone who cares about the detrimental effects of climate change, but perhaps older members of your family don’t talk to them openly and without judgment, talk to them about the benefits of doing certain things sustainably and differently, like how much money you save by choosing energy efficient systems to power your home, or, in my case, with food. I’m talking to my parents, James, his family, about how easy and delicious it is to use plant based meat instead of meat. Me and you know, we’re seeing younger generations are forcing a shift in consumption habits, things like plant protein burgers, which is a major focus of maple leaf foods. So I do believe that it starts with influencing drone circles and hoping that they receive the message and can share that along.
Speaker 1 [00:18:44] Well, the challenges of getting to net zero are a problem confronting all generations of consumers and all sizes of agriculture operations. The 100 acre farm owned and operated by our next guest definitely falls into the smaller category, though he has an outsized influence in the sustainable agriculture movement over the past 15 years. Brant, Preston and his wife, Gillian have turned New Farm, which is based in Creedmoor, Ontario, 120 kilometers north of Toronto, into a thriving organic operation. They grow vegetables for restaurants, retail stores and wholesale customers right across southern Ontario. Brant is a former journalist, and his first book was called The New Farm. After 10 years on the front lines of the Good Food Revolution, it was published by Random House Canada in 2017 and offers a hopeful vision for farming’s future, outlining a model of agriculture built around three simple principles. First, to feed Brent’s young family. Second, to strengthen the environment. And third to nourish the local community. Brant, welcome to disruptors.
Speaker 4 [00:19:48] Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 1 [00:19:50] So I before we get going, but I think we need to be clear with the audience. You weren’t actually born a farmer. How did you get into farming?
Speaker 4 [00:19:57] It’s an interesting question. I’m not sure myself sometimes, but you’re right. I was born in Toronto. I grew up in suburban Toronto and worked in international development and human rights and journalism for a number of years. It was really after having a couple of kids and living in the city, my wife and I felt like we needed to do something really concrete and substantial about some of the big issues that we’re seeing around us, especially climate change. And there was really a motivation to have a hands on role in the fight against climate change that pushed us out of the city, and we bought a farm and have kind of never looked back. We sort of went into it thinking that there was going to be a trade off between our desire to farm in a way that was good for the environment and the climate and the amount of money we could make on the farm. And we’ve actually found the opposite that focusing on environmental issues and focusing on the climate impact of our farmers actually made our operation more profitable.
Speaker 1 [00:20:50] Tell us more about that because a lot of farmers who I’ve met over the years, but also in researching climate change and sustainability, will say it’s incredibly tough to make a buck to begin with, and now you’re adding on other costs related to sustainability. So how have you made it work where maybe some of your neighbors are a bit more skeptical?
Speaker 4 [00:21:10] In a couple of ways, I think, first of all, it takes time. So the economic benefits from climate friendly or environmentally friendly farming don’t materialize immediately. It takes some time and trial and error in order to realize those benefits. The other problem is that there’s very little support for farmers to make that transition. There’s not a lot of effort spent at our universities and research institutions on figuring out the ways that farmers can farm in a more environmentally sustainable way. And then also, there are very much short term costs. So the transition is expensive and it’s difficult. And I think because so many farmers are in such a precarious financial position, they don’t have the cushion to take a few years of losses in order to get these practices established. So I think that the precariousness of a lot of farmers in terms of the financial position means they’re very risk adverse and they don’t want to try out new practices, especially if it’s going to take three or four or five years for those practices to start paying dividends.
Speaker 1 [00:22:13] Earlier, we got to speak with Michael McCain of Maple Leaf Foods about a lot of these challenges across the agriculture industry and also in food processing, which his company is trying to take head off. They, of course, are much bigger than than your operation have capital and technology that you may not have access to, but there’s different challenges when you talk to your neighbors, whether it’s. The local coffee shop or wherever you catch up on some of these ideas, what do you suggest to them in terms of getting started?
Speaker 4 [00:22:45] Well, there’s some sort of low hanging fruit there practices that are low tech proven in use on a lot of Canadian farms that there’s very, very sound research showing that they can help reduce agricultural emissions and increase resilience. And so the easiest example is cover crops. So these are crops that are grown not to harvest, but to feed the soil and enhance their fertility on the farm in order to promote the growth of the cash crop that you want to grow. So we’ve been cover cropping on our farms for 15 years. The benefits are very, very obvious increased soil health, increased soil biodiversity, better water holding capacity in the soil, better ability to withstand drought and a really effective means of driving carbon down into the ground, pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and putting into the ground. They’re also a really good way to reduce the amount of nitrogen fertilizer that we use, and I think it’s really important to remember that nitrogen fertilizer is actually the single biggest source of emissions on Canadian farms. So anything we can do to reduce the amount of synthetic fertilizer we use on our farms is going to have an immediate benefit to the climate. So a practice like cover cropping is is something that’s really accessible to farmers. Well understood. We call it the gateway practice for environmental practices on the farm. It’s really, really beneficial on a whole bunch of levels.
Speaker 1 [00:24:06] If things like cover cropping are so sensible the way you’re, you’re laying it out, why? Why isn’t everyone doing it?
Speaker 4 [00:24:13] Because there’s an initial cost that takes three to five years, the research shows, before farmers start realizing the private economic benefits of cover cropping. And a lot of farmers don’t have that ability to spend three to five years losing money on a practice before they start making money on it. The other one is that there hasn’t been a lot of public research and education for farmers on how to implement this practice. So cover cropping seed mixes and cover cropping techniques have almost entirely been developed by farmers. This research, by and large, is not happening in our public universities, so there’s not a lot of information for farmers if they want to adopt that practice. So it gets to a whole bunch of problems that we see in the agricultural sector that are major input companies who have an interest in selling products to farmers are the primary funders of agricultural research and the primary funders of agricultural institutions in Canada. And cover cropping is, by definition, a low input practice that reduces the amount of things that farmers have to buy. It reduces the amount of expenses we incur in our farm, and that’s good for the bottom line of individual farmers. But it’s not necessarily good for the bottom line of the people who are who are funding agricultural research in this country.
Speaker 1 [00:25:31] Some people may argue that we need those inputs to increase production and increase efficiency not only to feed Canada, but to help feed the world to hungry and growing world. You gave a TED talk three or four years ago and titled The World Needs Less Food a very provocative title. Explain a bit why the world may need less food.
Speaker 4 [00:25:53] Well, it shouldn’t be provocative because it’s I think it’s pretty straightforward right now. Globally, we have a glut of calories available at the household level on every continent, including South America, including Africa. We have more calories available on average than we need to keep us healthy as human beings. So a lot of the time, the people who are arguing for the necessity of a high input agricultural system, those higher input systems are producing a lot of things like corn and meat, calories that that are often going into highly processed foods that are not making people healthy. We see that malnutrition is, of course, a really, really serious problem. But malnutrition is caused by inadequate distribution of food, not by an absolute lack of food. And what we’re seeing everywhere in the world is that obesity related illnesses are rapidly increasing. And globally, obesity is now responsible for the deaths of three times as many people as malnutrition. So I think we need to get over this idea that we need to keep pumping inputs into our farms and producing more and more food to feed the world because the world is already, to a large extent, overfed.
Speaker 1 [00:27:09] One of the things that Michael McCain shared with us, which stuck with me, I find it fascinating is he challenge of getting consumers to pay for this. We tend to want to pay less for food, not more. We’re very price sensitive in the grocery aisle. There are, of course, great exceptions to that. But I think food producers, big or small know the challenge of convincing consumers to pay, especially to absorb some of what Bill Gates may. Called the green premium of sustainably produced agriculture in your experience, bred in farming, you’ve talked a bit about the investments you need upfront and the time you need, but at the consumer end. How has your thinking evolved in terms of what we humans are willing to absorb to help farmers produce in the way that you’re describing?
Speaker 4 [00:27:58] Well, I think I think first of all, it’s really important to recognize that as Canadians, we pay less for food as a portion of our income than any other country in the planet, except maybe the United States, and that we spend less of our time earning money to buy food than any other civilization in human history. So I think we have to start from the recognition that our food is ridiculously cheap right now. That doesn’t mean that people are going to gladly pay more for it, but I think we have to start from that recognition. Secondly, I don’t think that any big environmental or social problem has ever been solved by consumer behavior. So we’re not going to solve the climate crisis or the farm crisis by just convincing individual consumers that they need to pay more for their food. We need to ensure that people are paying the true cost of their food. And right now, a lot of food is really cheap because the environmental and climate costs of those food are externalized. They’re borne by not by the consumer, but by poorly paid farm workers, by farmers who can’t make a living, by the local environment that suffers because of the farming practices that are employed and from our climate. So we need to start paying the full cost of food, and I personally believe that means that Canadians are going to have to get used to paying more for their food. To be frank, whether they like it or not. And it’s also important to realize that a lot of the food that Canadian farmers are producing is going into food products where the very, very large majority of the price of that food product on the shelf in the grocery store is for things other than the cost of the money that was paid to the farmer is one egg, analysts told me a long, long time ago. If you doubled the price of corn, it wouldn’t make any difference on the price of a box of corn flakes in the store. Because those corn flakes, the cost of the processing distribution, the markup of all the people in the food chain, the packaging, the marketing that’s, you know, 80 90 percent of the cost of that product. So I think, you know, we’re not going to solve the problem of food affordability or accessibility on the backs of farmers. Consumers at some point are going to have to pay more.
Speaker 1 [00:30:11] Right. You’ve been farming for 15 years, roughly and seeing in very different ways the impacts of climate change. What do you see today that was not so evident a decade or a decade and a half ago.
Speaker 4 [00:30:26] We’ve seen very marked changes in climate over the past 15 years. Just on our farm. We have very, very different weather patterns now than we started with. What is really hit home is that we’re now entering an era of extreme variability. So we have colleagues who we’re in contact with on the Canadian prairies, who’ve just had a devastating year. They’ve had to they’ve had to go out to harvest their crops in the middle of the night because their equipment was setting their fields on fire when they’re working during the heat of the day. And it never occurred to me 10 years ago that that we would actually have farms burning because of climate change. It’s just absolutely remarkable. But here on our farm, we’ve had the best growing season we’ve ever had. We’ve had lots of rain, lots of heat, really, really regular rain, whereas the last two years we’ve had really bad drought. So I think what we what we’re realizing here is that we’re in an era of real unpredictability and that the practices that we need to employ to reduce our emissions are pretty much the same as the practices that are going to help us withstand that variability in the future. And so it’s a it’s an imperative for survival of our business to adapt to climate change.
Speaker 1 [00:31:39] This has been an inspiring conversation. Brant, thanks for joining us on, disrupters.
Speaker 4 [00:31:43] Thanks so much, John. It’s been a real pleasure.
Speaker 2 [00:31:46] What an interesting conversation, John. It sounds like a real challenge to be a farmer these days, you know, not knowing whether you’re going to have a bumper crop one year or a drought that wipes you out the next.
Speaker 1 [00:31:58] You know, it really gets back to what Brant said about not only embracing practices that reduce carbon emissions, but also learning to adapt to climate change is something I’ve always admired in farmers. They understand the environment and climate better than most of us, their livelihoods, and for many of them, their purpose in life is inextricably linked to the world around them, to the natural world, around them, which they want to strengthen through everything they do in farming.
Speaker 2 [00:32:25] Mm-Hmm. Absolutely. They are so incredibly resilient. Well, stay with us in the weeks ahead for more provocative climate conversations and cutting edge solutions. And you know, it’s impossible to. Talk about climate change without addressing oil and gas. Next time we explore how Canada’s energy sector is reinventing itself to meet its net zero future. Until then, I’m Theresa Do.
Speaker 1 [00:32:48] and I’m John Stackhouse. This is Disruptors, an RBC podcast. Talk to you soon.
Author: amandeepsingh
Speaker 1 [00:00:02] Hi, it’s John here,
Speaker 2 [00:00:04] and it’s Theresa.
Speaker 1 [00:00:05] Theresa, how are you?
Speaker 2 [00:00:06] I’m not too bad. How are you, John?
Speaker 1 [00:00:09] That’s actually a tough question to answer these days because we’re coming out of a pandemic, so we should all feel a little better. But we’re also facing the extraordinary climate crisis, and it’s so easy to get down on it for all the high level talk about climate, and we heard a lot of it in the election. We can’t forget it comes back to us as consumers, as citizens, as neighbors. The choices we make every day add up in the conversations we have really do have an impact. And yet climate, I find, is one of the most difficult conversations. Sometimes it’s just too big to think about or too personal to talk about, but it really is about us.
Speaker 2 [00:00:49] So speaking of us, John, you’ve talked to people inside RBC and outside RBC, where one of the largest companies in Canada and the leading financial institution. What sort of role should RBC play in these big climate conversations?
Speaker 1 [00:01:04] We see climate change as one of the most significant issues in our world and in our country, and it has a meaningful impact on almost everything we do as a bank. We hear about it from our clients, whether they’re big companies or individuals. We see it impacting the direction of the economy. We see it increasingly influencing investment flows. And in a lot of ways, these are really positive changes. We’re seeing more and more dynamism in the economy among our clients. Among businesses we work with investing in new technologies, finding new processes that are making companies and entire industries more efficient, more competitive globally. We’re hearing from individuals and communities who are really hungry for change, and we want to be part of that conversation. Theresa, you’ve been involved in a research report that we’re putting out this fall looking at pathways to net zero and the two trillion dollar transition, as we call it, which is what Canada needs to think about over the next 30 years up to 2050. We need to transition the economy, and it’s not just oil and gas, it’s not just agriculture. It’s every part of the economy, it’s every region of the country. Teresa, you’ve seen a lot of the evidence from our research and the part of the conversations about what we need to do in the decades to come. Here we are in the fall of 2021. What do you think we stand?
Speaker 2 [00:02:27] I would say that if we were heading out report cards, I think our great at the moment would be needs improvement. Canada is on course to meet only two thirds of our climate commitment with existing technologies and existing know-how and for the sake of our audience net zero. It’s a it’s a complex concept, but at its most basic level, it’s about removing as much greenhouse gas from the atmosphere as we’re putting into it. Why net zero matters and why we talk about it so much is that it’s our only way to stabilize the temperature increases that our planet’s seeing. The Paris Agreement set out to limit global rises to 1.5 degrees. So if you don’t change how we’re living now, how we’re working our current approach, we’re going to be on track to see temperatures rise 3.4 3.9 Celsius this century. And the consequences are catastrophic.
Speaker 1 [00:03:17] It’s a pretty tall order. Do you think we can make it?
Speaker 2 [00:03:20] I think it will take some ingenuity, a lot of hard work, maybe a bit of luck, but I am very hopeful that we can work our way up to a passing grade.
Speaker 1 [00:03:28] Me too. Over the next several weeks, Theresa and I will be talking to some of the business innovators and market disruptors who are working to get us on that net zero path. We’ll also speak to some of the leading climate thinkers and advocates for climate action, each of whom is helping us become more knowledgeable about and more engaged in this existential fight for our planet. This is Disruptors, an RBC podcast. I’m John Stackhouse.
Speaker 2 [00:03:58] and I’m Trinh Theresa Do. Welcome to the climate conversations.
Speaker 1 [00:04:08] On today’s episode, we’re talking with two of the leading evangelists on climate action. In the second half. We’ll hear from Mark Carney, the former Bank of Canada governor who is now the U.N. special envoy on climate action and finance and also chairs the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. But first, we’re going to speak with a woman who’s often called the most influential climate scientist on the planet. Katharine Hayhoe is the Toronto born chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy and a distinguished professor at Texas Tech University. Her work has resulted in more than 125 peer reviewed papers, and she’s contributed to multiple climate reports for the U.S. government and the United Nations. But you know what? What Hayhoe is best known for is her ability to connect with regular people and having those difficult conversations about what needs to change, even with those who don’t agree with her. In 2014, she cracked TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People list, and in 2018 she delivered a TED talk called The Most Important Thing You Can Do to Fight Climate Change. Talk about it. It’s been viewed almost four million times, so people do want to talk about us. Kathryn’s latest book is saving us a climate scientist case for hope and healing in a divided world. Fellow Canadian Margaret Atwood calls it a must read. If we’re serious about enacting positive change from the ground up, Katharine, welcome to disrupters.
Speaker 3 [00:05:37] Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 [00:05:38] I want to start Katharine with a question about optimism because so many climate conversations are negative or pessimistic. You’re an optimist. What gives you optimism?
Speaker 3 [00:05:49] I am, and I would like to say that I’m a rational optimist because I am a scientist and as a scientist, I see all the bad news firsthand. In fact, I get it hot off the press, so to speak. I look at the data myself, and the science does not give us a lot of hope. When we look at what’s happening to our world, climate is changing faster than any time in the history of human civilization on this planet. And that’s why it matters. It’s not about saving the world. The planet will still be orbiting the sun long after we’re gone. It is literally about saving us. But what I’ve noticed wherever I go, and I literally got this question even twice yesterday, once talking to medical students and then once talking to an academic group every single day, almost I’m asked what gives you hope? And so that’s actually why I wrote the book is because I figured there’s enough doom and gloom out there. Enough of us are activated. We’re concerned about it. The majority of Canadians understand that it’s a serious issue. So what can we do about it? It turns out that hope comes from action that interesting and not recycling. And though, you know, every little bit helps. But specifically, when we get out and we use our voice to advocate for change would reengage with others when we speak within the place where we work or the neighborhood or a kid’s school or, you know, an organization where part of obviously our city and our province and at the national scale when we use our voices to talk about why this matters and what we can do to help fix it. We don’t have to be David Suzuki to do this. I’m absolutely convinced that every single Canadian can do this. And when you look to the past, when you look to massive issues like slavery and women being able to vote and civil rights in the states and apartheid in South Africa, how did the world change before? It wasn’t because the prime minister or a president or a king or a CEO or even a celebrity decided it had to. It was when ordinary people used their voices to say, You know what? The world can and must be different. That’s how change happened.
Speaker 1 [00:07:48] What can each of us be doing more of? I recycle, and as our longtime listeners know, I’m an active biker, but I don’t think I’m doing nearly enough. What can each of us be doing more of?
Speaker 3 [00:08:00] Well, it’s so interesting because when I first started to talk to people about climate change, I would get that question immediately. And, you know, I would say the traditional things that we would all say. I would say, Well, you know, have you changed your light bulbs? Have you looked at where your electricity comes from? But then I thought to myself, Is that really enough? So I stepped on the carbon scales myself. I stepped on, you know, I went to a carbon footprint calculator and I calculated my carbon footprint. And I was absolutely shocked because the number one source of my personal carbon emissions was not my light bulbs, and it was not even the car that I drove. It was not my hydro bill. It was my travel. And I’m not talking about like travel. The yoga retreats in Bali. The last time I went on an actual vacation, I can’t even remember. I mean, just to see family. It was travel to scientific conferences and to talk to people about climate change. I thought to myself, Well, this is
Speaker 1 [00:08:54] Oh the irony, the irony.
Speaker 3 [00:08:57] So, so I decided that pre-COVID I was going to transition 80 percent of the events I did to virtual events, whether people liked it or not. And if I traveled, I was only going to travel by bundling. My events together, so I would go somewhere and do like five, eight, 10. I think my record so far is 29 events in six days, which is kind of crazy, but it’s a very effective use of your time and your carbon. But then and here’s where being a scientist comes in. I started to calculate, OK. So I did this, and here’s how much I could reduce my carbon footprint. And I also got solar panels and plug-in car and address food waste and diet and stuff like that. What if everybody else who’s concerned and activated did it too? How much impact would that have on our national emissions? A fraction, a very small fraction, not even a third. And so I thought to myself, Look, this is not the answer. This is not the most effective thing that we can be doing. So that’s what I did this deep dove into. How is the world changed before? Was it because individual people took individual steps and that’s all they did? No, it’s because individual people use their voices to advocate for change in the larger sphere that they are in.
Speaker 1 [00:10:08] We’ve just come through the summer of the apocalypse. It felt like in many parts of the world. Did that dent your optimism?
Speaker 3 [00:10:16] Unfortunately, it did, because with climate change, a big part of our problem is something called psychological distance. We all agree it’s a big issue. We agree it will affect future generations and plants and animals and people living over there. But you know, we’re the north. We sort of see ourselves as invulnerable to global warming. We see it as a distant issue. And studies have shown that as we decrease our psychological distance, as we’re able to say, look, that crazy heat wave out west, it was one hundred and fifty times more likely because of climate change. The wildfire season we had back in 2017, it burned about 10 times the area because of climate change. The floods that we’re seeing, the hurricane category one passing over Newfoundland, we’re seeing climate change loading the weather dice against us. And so studies have shown that when we’re able to connect the impacts of climate change to our lives, our lived experience, our activation increases, our concern increases. But then you get Covid and I live in Texas. I live in a place where I know people who lost their lives and with their dying breath, we’re saying this isn’t coronavirus. I know people who their families then did not wear a mask or get vaccinated, and then they got Covid. And I’m thinking to myself, have I overestimated the human capability for self preservation?
Speaker 1 [00:11:36] You’ve argued as well that climate is about values, and we’re also talking to Mark Carney, who has a book called Values and I think would agree with a lot of what you’re saying. But you’re also saying it’s a rational decision. And I just wonder how we can balance in our conversations just the rational decision that saves you money or saves you time or makes your neighborhood safer versus the moral decision that this is about values and our collective being an even more existential questions.
Speaker 3 [00:12:10] In most cases, for most of us, those two are not incompatible, in fact, often they’re very compatible. I have a really funny story in my book, probably my favorite story of my colleague John. His dad lives in a rural area of Australia and his dad is a fiscal conservative, but he’s also an ideological conservative. And so in Australia, like in Canada, many conservatives reject the science of climate change because they don’t think there’s any solution other than destroying the economy. So its solution aversion masked to science sounding arguments. Because if you say it’s real, but I don’t want to fix it, that would make you a bad person. And most of us don’t want to be a bad person. So John’s dad would drag up, Oh, there’s more polar bears now than there ever were. What are you saying? The Arctic is melting dot every time John went home for dinner. And so John went back to school. He got a p, h d and cognitive psychology to understand denial. He created the world leading skeptical science website that lists 198 science sounding arguments against climate change and provides peer reviewed responses. Do you think that changed his father’s mind?
Speaker 1 [00:13:14] I suspect not
Speaker 3 [00:13:16] correct. It did not. But then there was a rebate on solar panels in his dad’s area, and so his dad got solar panels started to save a ton of money. Every month, you would send on his power bill, saying, John, look how much money I saved. It reinforced his own identity. It fit rate with one of the things at the top of his priority list. And so two years later, John was sitting with his dad and out of nowhere, his dad said, Oh, you know, global warming. I’ve always thought that was real. And John was like, what? Not only had he changed his mind, but he had forgotten that he had ever denied it because the solutions change his mind. You know what? There is nothing wrong with that.
Speaker 1 [00:13:52] I sometimes think about smoking and cigarettes, and it’s an imperfect and maybe a bad analogy, but that has been a decades long struggle with behavioral change. And when I think about some of the behavioral changes we need for true climate action, maybe there’s some lessons we can draw that out. And even though with the smoking, all the science is there and many of us smoked regardless, we knew the risks that that we were taking and we did it anyway because it was maybe enjoyable, definitely addictive. But it was also cool. And I wonder, in terms of climate and our own behaviors, what kind of norms in terms of mass media pop culture, we may need to start to challenge or think about to help change our own thinking and our own behavior.
Speaker 3 [00:14:41] I think you’re absolutely right. I mean, that’s that whole idea of social norms, the idea that we determine what’s acceptable and what’s not, because we always, as humans have these antenna, these invisible antenna up that are taking, you know, sort of taking the measure of what’s going on. So is it acceptable to have a plastic water bottle? No. Well, I better not have one. Is it acceptable to drive a giant gas guzzler? Oh, well, not really. That’s not cool anymore. What’s cool is the fast electric car better. Think about that next time. So you’re right, that has a huge impact, and that has played a big role in the changes that we’ve seen in the world. Before that I mentioned everything from, you know, women getting the right to vote to civil rights, to all kinds of changes. It’s been changes in social norms where people like that’s just not acceptable anymore. And how do we figure that out when we see other people doing it and when we hear other people talking about it? So, you know, get your solar panels or do whatever it is that you’re doing, but then talk about what you’re doing. That’s how you can change people. And in my book, even talk about how their scientific studies showing the impact of contagion, for example, with solar panels, the number one predictor of whether you’ve got solar panels is whether there’s somebody else within about a kilometer and a half of your house that has the that’s the number one predictor. It’s contagious literally in a good way, not a bad way.
Speaker 1 [00:15:52] We’ve been having a fairly optimistic conversation, which I appreciate, but there may be people listening who say, that’s not the full story. There will be people. There will be sectors. There may be regions that will be losers in this transition. How do you engage people who feel they see writing on the wall? That is not for them. Happy writing.
Speaker 3 [00:16:15] Well, first of all, I think the most important thing is to be proactive about that engagement. Acknowledge it upfront. Don’t wait for them to tell you. Think of it and look at it yourself and realize, Hey, there’s a lot of people who are just trying to feed their families. They have a well-paying job in Alberta, in the oil and gas industry, or here in West Texas, which is also the home to the oil and gas industry. And they’re not doing it. They did that job because they wanted to, you know, help destroy civilization as we know it. They picked that job because we need energy and energy is something that is inextricably linked with human well-being around the world. Access to electricity specifically is one of the major metrics that determines our level of well-being. So when I had the chance to talk to the Board of Big Oil and Gas Company here in Texas a couple of years ago, I was invited to speak and I thought to myself, Well, I can’t do it unless I figure out how we can connect over something we share first. I’m not. Go in there and start with something we disagree on, I have to start with something that we agree on, and if I can’t do that, I’m not the right person to have that conversation. Finally, I realize, you know what? I am profoundly grateful for fossil fuels. Imagine what a woman’s life was like. Imagine what anyone’s life is like 200 years ago, it was short, miserable and filled with bone breaking, repetitive tasks that left them no time for education, no time for leisure, no time for travel, no time for anything that we enjoy doing today. Energy has transformed our lives, so I actually started off by telling them how grateful I was for fossil fuels and how I realized that they were doing this because it helped people and we need energy and a solution to our future is not to just pull the plug. It’s to figure out new ways of getting energy. The same way we don’t use a Model T Ford today, the same way we don’t use a party line telephone in the same way we need energy just as much, if not more in the future than we did in the past. But in the same way, we’re transitioning to new sources of energy. So how can we work together to try to figure out how to get those new sources while still providing good paying jobs for people who have these skills who again are just trying to support their family and be part of the local economy? And I can tell you it was amazing because I went in and meeting all the arms were folded. All the pastor was leaning back. Everybody was giving side I to the one guy who invited me there, like, why did you invite her to speak to us? He sort of read the brainwaves, but when I said that? You could see like the arms were unfolding, people were leaning forward, and then one guy finally said, he’s like, You get it. We’re not the bad guys. We’re doing this because people need energy. And I was like, Yes, that’s right. And how can we keep on making sure they get energy in the future? And so that conversation was supposed to be about 40 minutes ended up going two plus hours. Everybody wanted to know what’s really happening. How is it affecting people and how can they be the good guys?
Speaker 1 [00:18:57] You mentioned the transition and this is a transition. It will take time. There are many people, thoughtful people who say, we don’t have time. There’s a lot of people, including maybe a whole generation, that is convinced that 2030 is not the end, but is, you know, a significant marker in their lives and frankly, their century. And I’m starting to wonder, well, what? What’s it going to be like if we fall short, even a little bit short, but maybe a lot short, how are we going to kind of stay together as people and keep keep at it?
Speaker 3 [00:19:35] Well, that’s part of the danger of having these hard targets, like saying, you know, 20, 30, because if we end up at, you know, one percent over by 2030, it’s not like everything’s lost. We’re a lot closer to 2030 than we would have been if we hadn’t had that goal. Every action counts, every bit of warming counts, every time counts, and we are taking a lot more action today than we were a year ago. And then next year, more, hopefully than. But you’re right. Are we going to achieve our ambitious goals? Are we going to stop smoking fast enough to avoid all of the impacts on our lands? I can tell you the answer is no, because some of the impacts already here, we’ve been essentially smoking that pack of cigarettes every day for years and even decades. And so we have some impaired breathing. We have some spots in our lungs, but we don’t have emphysema, we don’t have lung cancer and we’re not dead. So the time to act is now. And so I think when we sort of remind ourselves that what’s at stake is all of us, we’re all at stake. We all sink or swim together. We can get angry. We can get frustrated. And believe me, I do too. But ultimately, understanding that most people want to do the right thing, but they’re just scared and coming from that place of sort of understanding and forgiveness and encouragement. And in some places, you know, drawing that line and saying this is not acceptable and we cannot keep on doing this, but doing it in a way that recognizes that it’s not about us or that it’s not about allies or enemies, it’s about the fact that we’re all humans together.
Speaker 1 [00:20:55] Catherine, you are an optimist
Speaker 3 [00:20:58] in my immediate moments. I absolutely am.
Speaker 1 [00:21:01] And it’s contagious. Katharine, thank you for being on disruptors.
Speaker 3 [00:21:05] Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 [00:21:06] Coming up after the break, we turn our attention to some of the biggest players in the global economy and speak to one of the most influential people in finance to figure out who needs to do what to get us to net zero. So stay right there.
Speaker 2 [00:21:24] You’re listening to Disruptors, an RBC podcast. I’m Theresa Do. As we mentioned off the top of this episode, RBC Economics and Thought Leadership has a new report coming out this month called the two trillion dollar transition. It explores the costs and benefits of Canada’s shift to a carbon neutral economy and how it can fuel a new generation of Canadian innovation, from carbon capture technology to sustainable agriculture to the full potential of super charging electric vehicles. If we look at all the ways for Canada to take a leading role in the fight for climate action and the economic opportunities they create. To learn more. Check out the link in the show notes of this episode and visit our rbc.com. slash Net zero. And be sure to like and follow disruptors wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 [00:22:15] Welcome back, Theresa. I don’t know about you, but listening to Katharine Hayhoe, it’s hard not to be inspired. What stood out for you?
Speaker 2 [00:22:23] She is so inspiring. I love her overall messaging on the power of the olive branch or finding a way to connect with people who may not agree with you. Being able to reach across the aisle gets to that global cooperation that you had been talking about, and it’s the only way that we’re going to able to move forward.
Speaker 1 [00:22:41] That’s so true. And, you know, maybe you have to be a climate scientist, a Canadian climate scientist living in Texas to know how to engage in those conversations because she’s done it with incredible effect. Well, our second guest is no less an advocate for individual climate action, but much of what Mark Carney focuses on these days is corralling the forces of business and the forces of finance to help get us to net zero. As the U.N. special envoy on climate action and finance, Carney is getting deep into the plumbing of the global financial system to find ways to get capital to the areas that will be critical to the transition to net zero. And as chair of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, Carney is working with more than 160 financial firms that control $70 billion in assets to make that a reality by 2050, if not sooner. There are many people better suited for the task. Carney is a former top banker in both Canada and England. He has deep experience in the private sector, including 13 years at Goldman Sachs and his latest book, He’s done. A lot of thinking about. This is called values building a better world for all. Mark Carney, welcome to disruptors.
Speaker 4 [00:23:54] John Stackhouse, a pleasure to be with you.
Speaker 1 [00:23:58] And I want to ask a question that came to me this morning when I woke up because this is the 20th anniversary of 911 and there’s much debate about how much it changed the world in different ways. And we’re talking about climate, and I wonder why 20 years ago, the world galvanized around a horrific event and was able to mobilize, rightly or wrongly, trillions of dollars and mobilized nations, as well as individual action to change the world. And arguably, we have not been able to mobilize the same will or resources on climate. I wonder how you think through our different collective approaches to global challenges.
Speaker 4 [00:24:42] You know, there has been a lot of progress over those 20 years, but let’s focus on what hasn’t been accomplished and how much more difficult it has become to galvanize global action, as you say. And I think there is a couple of roots of that. One was how quickly the goodwill the global goodwill of the response to 911 was dissipated within a few years. I think the second thing, though I’d underscore, is we had the financial crisis. You and I know that well, we from different vantage points lived and worked through that and the response to the financial crisis. The policy response was overwhelmingly an economic policy response in the run up to twenty seven eight. There was increasing focus on climate action at the global level. The you know, the elements of the consensus of which you just spoke were there and within the private sector an increasing focus. And I would suggest in the financial sector as well that it didn’t absolutely stop. But it was set back dramatically. As the issues in the financial sector became survival, the issues from a public policy perspective became recovering from what was then the worst economic crisis of anyone’s lifetime and had the prospect of moving into a depression if the right policy hadn’t been followed. And that set back climate efforts almost a decade when we got back to the level of public urgency, maybe arguably a greater public urgency around addressing climate in the run up to the start of 2020, government starting to come together, the financial sector starting to focus on this more. And then, of course, we had the COVID health crisis and economic crisis associated with it. And I given that history thought, Well, this is 50. You know, this could be history repeating itself and will be set back again. What’s happened and I’m sure we’ll get into this is has been the opposite that the experience of COVID and the economic circumstances and the right economic response, also a social response has galvanized climate action.
Speaker 1 [00:26:49] Why is climate not relegated by yet another global crisis?
Speaker 4 [00:26:53] Well, I think there’s several factors. One of them is I’ll start with the negative, which is that it’s 10 years later and it’s that much later. It’s that much more obvious. The climate impacts. It’s that much more urgent. That’s the first. The second is that technology has moved on quite substantially. So many more of the opportunities are economic today. It’s a question of will and getting capital to work and investment in the ground that I’m not saying that. We’ve got all of the solutions at an economic level to fully decarbonize, but there is a path for at least the next decade for substantial progress that makes a big difference. I think thirdly, a number of governments and informally I’ve been involved in these discussions with a number of governments over the last 18 months. They took a lesson from a few countries, had a climate focused response to 2008 South Korea, elements of China, elements of the German fiscal response. And lo and behold, those countries established quite competitive position, very competitive positions in key industries, solar, wind as well. So again, the economic congruence, if I can say it that way, the alignment is much better now and it’s much better understood. And I think the last thing which is a softer point, if you will, or a values point in many respects, that’s a harder point. A stronger point is what lessons do you take from the health crisis? We undervalued resilience. We didn’t prepare for something that wasn’t just a possibility, it was a certainty, and there were ample warnings. So we undervalued resilience. We didn’t listen enough to science. We didn’t think about sustainability. And by and large, and you know, there are exceptions to this. But by and large, people’s response to COVID was one of solidarity. They did what they needed to do, not just for themselves and their families, but for others.
Speaker 1 [00:28:48] Let’s talk about values. That’s of course, the title of your book, which I read with great interest. It’s an excellent book for those who haven’t read it in a very. Serious book, and I mean, not in a complimentary way. I read it concurrently with the Bill Gates book and wrestled with similarities and differences. I think you agree on many, many things, but stepping back, I found Gates. And this shouldn’t be surprising. Perhaps for a math guy like him took a very technological approach. That’s what we would expect from Bill Gates. It was almost Cartesian that this is a problem that can be solved, and you take a more bit more of a moralistic point, if I can put it that way, kind of Hobbesian. And as I compare and contrast the two works, I thought, and this is oversimplifying it, but there’s a real tension between man and machine, both in the cause of the climate crisis, but also in the solutions. But I wonder how you, you know, in the balance, are weighing technology and human behavior as we get deeper into trying to solve this crisis.
Speaker 4 [00:29:51] As you say, John, it’s both. We need the engineering technologies, and I referenced a moment ago that some of them are fully economic, profitable today when solar increasingly on the storage side, prospectively on hydrogen, they’re economic today. But we need those and I’ll use Bill Gates is termed breakthrough technologies elements of green hydrogen, sustainable aviation fuels, direct air capture and even large scale carbon capture, which is a big issue for Canada. We need those to become economic, so we need the engineers. We need the technological solutions. And what I argue in the book and what I really believe, of course I believe it. But is that when you get a consensus around something like sustainability and you move out of a trade off the planet and profit, you know, sustainability today versus tomorrow and people say, no, we want the climate crisis addressed. We expect our businesses, our governments, our financial institutions to be addressing this. This changes the value equation. It means that it is valuable to do things that reduce our carbon footprint that move us towards net zero and it becomes not just risky but actively harmful to the viability of a business. If you’re still part of the problem, if you’re not moving and that gets to the third leg of the triangle, which is financial technology, and that’s a lot of what the work I’ve been doing for the U.N. and run up to the Glasgow cop, which is and you’ve been helping with this as an institution is to put in place the plumbing of the system so that there is proper disclosure about who’s part of the solution, who’s still part of the problem. That there’s new markets that help to invest in not just the breakthrough technologies, but carbon offsets and other things that are necessary to optimize the carbon budget to have bigger capital flows into emerging economies, creating those, but also to have the commitments of the financial institutions. And with that, the transparency about what they’re doing to solve the problem.
Speaker 1 [00:31:57] I’ve been tracking summits and cops back to the to the first one in Rio. There has been a diminishment of the state in those 30 years and an expectation that the private sector, the business should do more and can do more. That was not a dominant line of thinking in Rio in 92, but it is Glasgow in in twenty one. I wonder what has shifted in those 30 years? Has the state failed in its obligations to society or is it just reached its limits? Or is there a greater robustness to private initiative, whether it’s technology or financial mobilization that we’re finally appreciating?
Speaker 4 [00:32:40] I’m not sure I would fully subscribe that the state has had the face in or has set the ground rules and been aggressive enough in the objectives and and in playing its role over the period of time. And so many in the private sector have, I mean, I’ll put it in the pejorative, but have either ignored the issue or a free road on others efforts. And so we have not been nearly aggressive enough in pricing carbon and investing in primary research. The 2008 experience. I won’t belabor it, but is an example where over 90 percent of the quote shovel ready infrastructure was carbon intensive. Effectively, it was anything but green, so it was a massive missed opportunity. What has mainstreamed over the course of the last decade and accelerated since Paris? Net zero has become an organizing principle for sustainability. It’s become much clearer to a much broader range of actors. If I can put it that way that we have a carbon budget, we are spending it rapidly, that emissions need to go down, that ultimately every country, region, sector, company, financial institutions. We’ll have to be at net zero. Candidly, that’s from my perspective, that’s one of gratitude Berg’s contributions, the sort of remorseless logic of a of a teenager, very intelligent teenager, but of a teenager, which is, well, how does this all that up? And you know, it wasn’t anywhere near shape or form and even in the financial sector or especially maybe I should say, in the financial sector 18 months ago, certainly the start of 2020, focus on climate risk management focused on disclosure. We set up pretty big objectives for the Glasgow summit, and at the heart of it was that climate was part of every major financial decision, and mapping to get there was to organize the system around net zero. And now we’re seeing that.
Speaker 1 [00:34:43] But there’s an important tension underway in the world. I would argue around timelines. When I talk to my environmentalist friends, I often divide them into two camps the 2030 camp and the 2050 camp and the 2030 camp. For people who say we can’t really think too much about net zero by 2050. The crisis has to be solved by 2030 by getting emissions down by 40 or 50 percent in that range. And then the 2050 camp for those and I’ve heard Bill Gates speak to those who say, let’s, let’s not undermine the 30 year journey by trying to do too much in the 10 year now eight year journey to 2030. So maybe we’ll fall a bit short of 2030. But the real need is to get on the right path to 2050. And hey, it’d be great to have both, but just don’t let one undermine the other. Are you a 2050 or 2030?
Speaker 4 [00:35:38] I’m more of a 20 30 year. I think that I mean, experience in managing things to extent I have and I have some is that you need objectives that are within your timeline of responsibility. Let’s put it that way that you’re going to live to live for the consequences. Now that’s the first reason. The second, just given how tight the carbon budget is, it is. It is essential. I think the third point I’ll make, which is tangential to this, but I just want to make it, which is some in the 20 30 camp, maybe not those you’ve talked to. Take the view. OK, well, we just need to radically change and shut down a variety of things. I think the lesson of the last 18 months is we’re not going to shrink our way to net zero. You know, we shut down a quarter of the global economy effectively, maybe more and only just met that seven percent annual reduction. We’re not going to shut down another quarter of our economy and then another and another. I mean, so we need to invest at scale to grow.
Speaker 1 [00:36:41] You get to see Canada both as a Canadian on Canadian soil, but also from a from a global perch. What are the two or three most important things the country can do in the next 24 months to get moving?
Speaker 4 [00:36:55] I think I’d say the following one I’d lock down those 20, 30, 20, 30, five hard commitments. So on the auto side, on the electricity side, I think that’s an imperative. I think the initiative in the net zero oil sands, the private initiative making that fully tangible, credible and moving it forward, you know, an appropriately scaled. I think having the whole of the financial sector organized for net zero and being transparent about being organized to net zero as a necessary facilitator of that, if you establish a reputation that climate policies is headed in the right direction and the market can anticipate the future entrepreneurs, innovators, investors, banks, others, they’ll put money behind the future and we’ll get there faster.
Speaker 1 [00:37:44] Well, if this were, this was outstanding. Mark, thank you.
Speaker 4 [00:37:46] Thank you. My pleasure. No, it’s great pleasure, John.
Speaker 2 [00:37:51] Well, that was a lot to chew on there, John. Are you as hopeful as Mark Carney about the ability of capital to nudge countries to try harder, in his words in Glasgow?
Speaker 1 [00:38:03] I’m hopeful that capital can play a really constructive role, but we can’t assume that others are going to take care of this, whether the others are governments or multilateral institutions like the U.N. or so-called big business. Ultimately, this all rests on all of us. We are consumers, we are citizens, we are neighbors, and the choices we make in our everyday lives may not seem consequential in their own, but together that’s what capital responds to. Let’s ensure that we’re all in this together and making informed decisions and making sure that information flows freely in open democratic systems, whether it’s in politics or in the economy or in our own communities.
Speaker 2 [00:38:47] Yeah, I love that, and I think it’s extremely important to remember the power of our own voices to make change happen. So on that note, please stay with us. In the weeks ahead, four more provocative climate conversations and cutting edge solutions, including how Canada’s farmers and food producers are responding to a rapidly warming world. Until then, I’m Theresa Do and
Speaker 1 [00:39:10] I’m John Stackhouse. This is Disruptors, an RBC podcast. Talk to you soon.
Speaker 3 [00:39:21] Disruptors, an RBC podcast is created by the RBC Thought Leadership group and does not constitute a recommendation for any organization, product or service. It’s produced and recorded by Jar Audio. For more disruptors content, like or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or visit rbc.com slash disruptors.
Back-to-school season will look very different this year. Most Canadian youth will return to physical classrooms after more than a year of on-again, off-again remote learning that took its toll. The numbers show that students experienced increased anxiety and depression from the stress of social isolation and the challenges of virtual learning, among other factors.
Recent research from Ontario’s Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) shows a large majority of children and youth experienced harm to their mental health during the first wave of the pandemic, with 70% of school-aged children and 66% of preschool-aged children reporting deterioration in at least one these key areas: depression, anxiety, irritability, attention span, hyperactivity, and obsessions/compulsions.
Mental illness is estimated to cost the Canadian economy $50 billion annually. If we’re to address the cascading issues surrounding it, we need to intervene sooner. We need to develop the tools, technologies and approaches that will ensure that the youth of today become the healthy and prosperous leaders of tomorrow.
In this Disruptors episode from Oct. 2020, host John Stackhouse interviews two leaders in the youth mental health field, Dr. Yuri Quintana, Chief of the Division of Clinical Informatics at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Dr. Joanna Henderson, clinical psychologist and director at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. Together, they explore how technology can and should play a role in helping young Canadians with their mental health struggles.
Listen to hear how when properly applied, technology can provide more access to services, knowledge and support.
And for those interested, try the Resiliency Quiz to learn more about how resilient you are today and the strategies you can adopt that will enhance your life-long resiliency. This quiz has been developed by Strong Minds Strong Kids, Psychology Canada with support from RBC Future Launch.
You can also check out these three articles from RBC’s 9-part Resilience 101 series that profile youth mental health leaders and organizations from across the country: How Going Virtual Helps You Access Services and Support, Creating New Life Lines for Youth in Rural Communities, and Taking a Small Town Approach to Youth Mental Health in B.C.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Simplecast
How Tech Can Reshape Mental Health Care – for the Better
The unprecedented disruption brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic has made this an extraordinarily challenging period for us all.
In-person interactions have been replaced with digital. We can no longer gather and socialize in lunch rooms, hallways or classrooms. Activities that bring our youth joy can’t be experienced the way they used to be. Coupled with new feelings of loneliness and fear of the virus, our country’s longstanding mental health crisis has worsened. Even before the pandemic, an estimated 75% of youth with mental health disorders did not access the specialized care they need. Wait times for counselling and therapy were often six months to one year in Ontario, for example. That backlog has only worsened these past months.
Another culprit? Our devices. The Canadian Pediatric Society says high school students now spend more than 7.5 hours per day on various screens, with 20% of high school-aged children logging five hours per day on social media alone.
There are clear links between screen time and mental health – and anxiety rates among youth are through the roof. Dr. Murali Doraiswamy, a physician and brain scientist at Duke University who joined us on a previous RBC Disruptors episode, says our brains are continuously adapting to the new things we’re doing in our lives – such as interacting with technology – and rewiring themselves. New research from the University of Calgary shows that 96% of those aged 25 and under report feeling moderate or high levels of stress as a result of the pandemic.
So how can we harness our increasing reliance on screens in a positive way, to deliver meaningful mental health support? With COVID forcing so many aspects of our lives to go digital – fast – the time to create lasting change is now – but there’s lots to consider.
“What we should be doing is co-designing,” said Dr. Joanna Henderson, a clinical psychologist and a director at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. Henderson was one of our guests on the most recent episode of RBC Disruptors, which delves into the potential risks and rewards of our growing dependence on technology during the pandemic.
Simply moving counselling sessions over to Zoom won’t cut it, she says
“Using technology to deliver services isn’t just about taking what we do in person and then offering it through the technological interface,” Henderson said. It is instead about leveraging the technologies that young people already use to develop new kinds of services for youth that deliver the kinds of support they need.
But users should be careful – there are thousands of problematic “health and wellness” apps, none of which should not be viewed as a one-stop solution. There are “probably 50,000″ healthcare-related apps out there, Said Dr. Yuri Quintana, chief of the Division of Clinical Informatics at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Many of them don’t get used and part of it is that the style, the content and the way in which people connect to them haven’t been designed in proper ways or evaluated in proper ways,
Quintana believes a blended approach works best, noting that people have different needs, and may require a combination of approaches (apps, telehealth, in-person services) tailored to different individuals. He says it’s about creating new and different models by understanding how virtual services can be leveraged as part of an overall approach
“I think one of the challenges that providers will need to face is how to develop the right blend of services, both technology-based and in-person based for different individuals at different stages in their life. Part of what we need to do now is develop the research to understand what types of technology are appropriate for what types of individuals and what kinds of situations,” said Quintana.
“This COVID pandemic really has woken up people to the need to make services more accessible to everyone,” he said.
RBC’s committment to supporting youth mental health
RBC Future Launch is a 10-year, $500-million commitment (now in its fourth year) to help Canadian youth prepare for the jobs of tomorrow. The program provides funding to community partners across Canada which help youth access through: work experience, skills development opportunities, networking solutions, and/or mental well-being supports and services. Future Launch has released a report that examines how mobile apps can help address youth mental health issues.
RBC Foundation annually invests over $9MM CAD into the youth mental health sector across Canada and specifically as it relates to the innovative integrated youth services model: in the last 5 years, we have invested over $4.5MM across Canada in individual sites as well as provincial and national initiatives.
Speaker 1 [00:00:01] Hey, it’s Theresa. I think it’s fair to say that this past year has been unlike any other, we are all looking forward to a return to something that looks just a bit like normal this fall. For some, it might mean those tentative first steps back into the office. For others, it could involve seeing a live show somewhere, anywhere with other people sitting next to us. But perhaps no group is more excited or anxious, or probably both about the return to this new normal than Canada’s youth. After a year of on again, off again in person learning, students are coming back en masse to the classroom in September in many cases. Unfortunately, they’ll also be bringing with them a year’s worth of mental health baggage. Covid presented a singular challenge to the mental well-being of all Canadians. But youth who are so reliant on social interactions for their development were particularly hard hit. This past May, the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa reported that 50 percent of all patients visiting its emergency department since the start of the year sought treatment for some form of mental health issue. Mental health is a growing concern for our educational system, our health care system and ultimately our economy, according to the Mental Health Commission of Canada. Mental illness is estimated to cost the Canadian economy 50 billion dollars annually. If we’re to address the cascading issues surrounding mental health, we need to intervene sooner. We need to develop the tools, technologies and approaches that will ensure that the youth of today become the healthy and prosperous leaders of tomorrow. This is Disruptors and RBC podcast, I’m trying to raise a. On today’s episode, we revisit an in-depth conversation between my co-host, John Stackhouse, and two of Canada’s top experts in the field of mental health. This is a cause close to our hearts here at RBC. Since 2008, we’ve invested more than 40 million dollars to help support the mental health of children and young people in Canada in 2020 alone. We raised eight million dollars through the reimagined virtual RBC race for the kids. We also partner with a wide variety of national organizations that are similarly committed to the cause. The need for action on mental health is growing. And as John explains in this conversation, which first aired last fall, so too is the need to do something different.
Speaker 2 [00:02:54] Consider just a few alarming statistics,
Speaker 3 [00:02:56] three quarters of mental illnesses emerge between the ages of 16 and 25
Speaker 2 [00:03:01] when most people are just joining the workforce. One in five Canadian post-secondary students is depressed or battling other mental health issues. And Canada’s youth suicide rate is the third highest in the industrialized world. Mental health is a journey that no one should take alone. And in that spirit, I’m joined today by two remarkable leaders in this field. Dr. Joanna Henderson is a clinical psychologist and director of the Center for Addiction and Mental Health here in Toronto. She’s passionate about models of care for young people. Dr. Yuri Quintana cut his teeth here in Canada and is now the chief of the Division of Clinical Informatics
Speaker 3 [00:03:39] at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Speaker 2 [00:03:42] He’s also an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Joanna, Yuri,
Speaker 3 [00:03:50] thank you for being here and welcome to RBC Disruptors. Thank you. Thank you very much. What do you specifically focus on young people with your work?
Speaker 4 [00:03:58] Young people have, as you were pointing out, some of the highest rates of mental health needs. And they’re also our opportunity to change the future. Young people are on developmental trajectories that take them through their childhood, their adolescence, into young adulthood and into the next stage of life where they start to function autonomously and they need the skills and support to be able to do that successfully. If we don’t intervene early, we miss a tremendous opportunity to support young people in their development,
Speaker 3 [00:04:33] as we mentioned earlier. Young people are at a much higher risk of mental illness, yet they also have access and an affinity to technology that previous generations didn’t have is not an advantage or disadvantage.
Speaker 4 [00:04:46] From my perspective, it’s an advantage. It’s unavoidable that young people are connected to technology. It brings with it some risks. It brings with it some challenges to young people. And it also brings opportunity for us to leverage their connection to technology to in my view, what we should be doing is co designing with young people the kinds of technologies and interfaces with technology that help them in their lives.
Speaker 3 [00:05:15] When you think about technology and mental health, a friend or foe, I think when it’s properly applied, it can be very beneficial to many people, not just patients, but also people who are friends of the person that’s needing help. And for health care providers, unfortunately, sometimes technology is poorly implemented or people use it for purposes that weren’t approved. And so there are some potential dangers. But when properly applied, it can certainly provide more access to services, to knowledge and support services. And we’re trying to help individuals as well as organizations use that technology in the best way possible. It’s still early days, early months in this pandemic and in terms of some of the social change it’s led to. But the increase in screen time is phenomenal for all ages, but particularly for young people. Do we know yet if that is causing significant risks to mental health, Yuri? Well, I think the evidence with technology and apps is still in its early stages compared to other fields. Certainly, I think not having connection with other people face to face is something that people are looking at very strongly in terms of the detrimental effects of that. But the reality is that because of the infectious nature of this disease, we do have to keep physical distance and maybe social distance isn’t the right word, you know, because I think we do need to remain connected with each other. So I think technology can enable us to remain connected with our friends, with our health care providers. But it’s also true that spending too much time connected to technology doesn’t allow you sort of individual time to disconnect and decompress. And so there are some innovative technologies that, for example, monitor your screen time and alert you when maybe you do need to sort of disconnect and spend some time on nature. So I think we need to find novel ways to use this technology such that it complements our lifestyle rather than gets us even more addicted to the technology and isn’t helping us.
Speaker 4 [00:07:18] I think one of the challenges with technology and the interfaces that we’re currently using to connect, they lead to a sense of monotony, a lack of engagement, a lack of productivity. And we haven’t really been able to leverage the capacity of technology, I think, in ways that can really create opportunities. Given that we have to use technology so much, we need to be able to use it intentionally to support young people and continuing to feel productive. And I think there’s a risk in talking to a computer screen or staring at a computer screen for many hours, for example, of not feeling productive. And so it’s figuring out how do we support young people in doing what they need to do, like school or other things through technology, and pair that with actual activities that engage them with the real world and allow them to have that feeling of belonging and productivity that’s so essential at this developmental stage
Speaker 3 [00:08:24] and enjoying what you’re doing some of that through. Can you give us a better sense of what you’ve been working on and how that’s playing out?
Speaker 4 [00:08:31] Sure. So with Youth Wellness Hubs Ontario, where a network of mental health services across the province that up until the pandemic had a strong focus on being placed based so espace in the community where young people had co created the space. And could go to that space when they needed support and were able to access services with the pandemic, we needed to transform the way we offered service to young people in the context of our doors being closed, physically closed in some cases, or our physical services, our in-person services being greatly reduced. Initially, what happened was because we were in the context of the pandemic, people retreated to a position of, well, this isn’t a space for youth engagement. This isn’t a space where we can connect with youth to figure out the solutions to this big problem of how are we going to offer services. And instead, it is one that serves Ontario. We really pushed and we invested in continuing to have youth at the table to design our response. And we were able to really understand from young people that using technology to deliver services isn’t just about taking what we do in person and then offering it through the technological interface, but is instead thinking about how do we take the robustness of technology to offer new kinds of services and to use the kinds of things that young people already using technology to also deliver the supports that we need to deliver in the pandemic.
Speaker 1 [00:10:15] During the show, we also heard from Shanna McCracken, Shanna is the executive director of Frame, an Ottawa based network that connects mental health, health and social services framework’s with youth and young adults to accelerate the integration and implementation of youth care in Canada. Here’s what she had to say about gaps in our system that were revealed by covid.
Speaker 5 [00:10:38] What we’ve heard resoundingly over and over again from young people and their families is that, no, we do not have enough access. We are not seeing impact in their lives in the way that we would hope to as a system. And so I think what covid has done is that covid has really laid back there any sort of barrier or any gap that existed previously has been further highlighted through covid and the rapid pivot that our system has had to do to virtual service. Not all young people in their families have access. Not all young people in their families, and now even fewer than before, have the ability to navigate a very complex and often siloed and fragmented mental health and substance use system.
Speaker 3 [00:11:26] Joyner, what goes through your mind when you hear that
Speaker 4 [00:11:29] Shawna’s right on the mark, we hear that over and over again from youth and families, that their experience of the system is that it is fragmented, that there are multiple barriers, that it’s very difficult to access the services they need and want to be able to achieve optimal outcomes. The pandemic has definitely created even further gaps for young people who are particularly disadvantaged. We had young people who didn’t have enough food to eat. It’s really hard to address mental health concerns if you don’t have enough food to eat. And so we really need to think holistically about the needs of young people. We no longer can think of a system that’s divided up, you know, takes one young person and divides them into their physical health needs, their mental health needs, their educational needs. These are not separate things. Young people need to be thought of holistically. And the services we provide need to cut across all of those different areas. And we as a system have an obligation to work holistically and to integrate our services in ways that make sense.
Speaker 3 [00:12:34] So if I could pick up on that, I think the two key points that both China and China have mentioned is access is very important. And the types of wellness hubs that China has been meeting really creates a very welcoming, non-threatening environment where you can sort of access a whole range of support services. But we also need to sort of create virtual environments where people can access information services. One understudied area is social determinants of health. These are sort of different challenges that people have, economic circumstances or educational circumstances or where they live geographical. And so we need to start learning how to scale. And here’s where technology could help. But it needs to be done in a way that’s sensitive to the diversity of circumstances that people have. And so this Covid pandemic, as horrible as it is, really has sort of woken up people to the need to make services more accessible to everyone. Right now, we’re physically challenged because of the infectious disease nature. But how do we make this available to rural areas? How do we help those people who have other factors? And so I think a comprehensive evaluation of this needs to look at social determinants of health and how do we personalize services both on site and online that meet the individual’s needs. You both touched on the question of safety. I wonder if I can draw you deeper into that, because it’s hard for anyone of any age to discuss mental health and certainly to open up about it to and to seek help, given the massive disruption we’ve had to the way we live, the way we study, the way we commute. I wonder what you’re learning about the way that young people seek help. They’re no longer necessarily around the social safety of a school, for instance, or of a place of worship or of a community center where they may feel more comfortable. How is that being addressed? The challenge of safety in a more virtual world, even when it’s in a new physical environment like the kind you’ve been creating?
Speaker 4 [00:14:46] I think it’s a critically important issue to address. We’ve heard from young people in part their reluctance to engage in virtual counseling, where it’s a conventional in-person counseling, but now delivered virtually stems from concerns about being able to engage with mental health professionals safely and structurally as a system. We also make that worse by sometimes putting in place policies and procedures that are intended to protect the service provider, perhaps from liability or other things, like requiring people to be in a fixed place while they engage in virtual therapy so that if there was an emergency, we’d be able to locate them. But what that means is young people who might, when they want to have a confidential conversation, go for a walk or sit in a car so that they can feel comfortable. They have confidentiality. Those options aren’t open to them. So systemically, we’re creating barriers to young people being able to safely engage. And I think we you know, the pandemic has really shone a light on our failure. I think we really can look back now and see that we didn’t take those into consideration. And going forward, I would strongly advocate that youth need to be at the table in thinking about pandemic planning. They have great ideas, but we need to engage them and we need to engage them in the planning stages.
Speaker 3 [00:16:10] What should we have done differently in pandemic planning?
Speaker 4 [00:16:13] I think if we look at the education system and the transitions that needed to take place, what we can see is that there was tremendous immediate focus on how do we ensure that the curriculum. Continues to be delivered. How do we ensure that young people continue their learning of academic skills and what people were slower to respond to, where the broader needs that school needs for young people? If we had engaged young people in a planning process? I expect that they would have flagged for us very early on that many young people get meals at school. Many young people have adult allies at school that help them stay safe, then help them identify when things are unsafe at home or unsafe in their personal lives, and that the social supports and their mental health needs are often being met in the school system. And when we pivoted in the education system, those pieces were not the immediate focus when in fact young people will tell you all of these other needs are also met in that system. So how are we doing that as well? And there has been important work to meet the mental health needs through the school system. Some important investments for sure, but it wasn’t there at the outset. So that might be one difference that would have been in place if we had planned together.
Speaker 3 [00:17:35] That’s a great way of describing some of the challenges that have been bubbling up over the last many months. It makes me think of the metaphorical but also real hallway conversations that exist, whether it’s in offices or schools, hallways and the like, are where we often have the most honest conversations, where we share our feelings, where we come to grips with our problems in ways that we might not want to do in the more formal setting. And I don’t think we’ve figured out yet how to use technology for the hallway conversation that we need.
Speaker 1 [00:18:11] Hey, it’s Teresa again. I hope you’re enjoying this encore presentation of disruptors. And our look back at the pressing issue of youth mental health. If you like what you’re hearing, I’d encourage you to check out some of the many conversations John and I have had with Canada’s top leaders over the past year, such as our recent look at the burgeoning world of virtual medicine, where I talked with three of Canada’s health care innovators. You can find past episodes of disrupters at RBC, dotcom disruptors or wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to John Stackhouse.
Speaker 2 [00:18:46] My guests today are Dr. Joanna Henderson of CAMH and Dr. Yuri Quintana of Harvard Medical School. I want to bring in another clip from Shawna MacEachern, of Frayme
Speaker 3 [00:18:56] we asked her about whether the shift to online mental health treatment during the pandemic is the right direction.
Speaker 5 [00:19:05] I think it depends what we do with it. I think it depends on if we will invest in understanding what works and what doesn’t. We can’t just keep adding things on to our system. We also need to make space to remove parts that are not meeting the needs. Covid could be a catalyst for us to take an opportunity and build something together that can be different. But I think it could also be something that creates a lot of damage. And I think we will see that for young people in their families and mental wellness overall in our country in the long run.
Speaker 3 [00:19:41] I sometimes think that this pandemic is like a white board for society and we have a chance to erase stuff that we want to leave behind and start drawing a new year. I’m wondering how we integrate online and virtual elements in mental health treatment while still staying in touch with the human aspect of keeping some of the traditions that we built up over the years. I think that’s a great question. And I think one of the challenges that providers will need to face is how to develop the right blend of services, both technology based and in person based for different individuals at different stages in their life. And so, for example, apps and in online systems could create new ways of communication, some which might be actually more beneficial and convenient. For example, text based chatting with a health care professional might actually be more beneficial for some people in certain circumstances. For example, if you don’t want to be overheard as to what you’re saying, but not everybody wants to have, for example, a text based chat or an online experience, and it depends on the particular circumstances. So part of what we need to do now is develop the research to understand what types of technology are appropriate for what types of individual and what kinds of situations.
Speaker 4 [00:21:01] I think another important point that Shonna made is just how do we also unemployment things that aren’t working because that challenges our system as well. And I think with technology, just like with in-person services, apps, other pieces of technological interventions as well as in-person interventions can become established without any evidence that they are actually helpful, then it becomes really difficult to implement them, to get people to stop using them or to stop practicing in a particular way. And that’s going to be as important as we shift to new ways of working. And we really think about transforming how we offer services. How do we get rid of old ways of working that may no longer be helpful or no longer contribute sufficiently to the well-being of young people? So that’s going to be important as well.
Speaker 3 [00:21:58] I think one of the quiet stresses of this crisis is the I’d call it the too much syndrome. There’s just too much of everything. It’s overwhelming. How are you thinking, both of you, about this incredible explosion of mental health apps that we’ve seen as not just during the pandemic, it was happening before. What does that tell you about the world around us? Joanna, maybe start with you.
Speaker 4 [00:22:23] I mean, I think it tells me a few things. I think, you know, the market reflects and influences, you know, young people. And so young people want apps. They want helpful things on their phone that can guide their behavior to help them feel strong and resilient when they’re faced with challenges, you know, at the same time. For me, it’s very concerning because I think what we’ve seen we’ve seen good apps be developed using evidence based approaches, co creation commitments to concretion. Working in that way takes time and commercial sort of opportunities are simultaneously arising. They arise more quickly. You know, many, many apps are being made available that we don’t know. Not only do we not know if they’re helpful, but we don’t know if they could be harmful as well. And so it really, you know, although young people are really keen to have apps as part of what they can use to support themselves and to support their peers, they also want to be sure that those apps can be helpful and useful. And we as a system, I think, need to ensure that we have appropriate policies in place to to regulate some of that.
Speaker 3 [00:23:42] And that’s kind of scary that many of these apps could be harmful. How do you assess what makes a good app and what makes an app perhaps harmful? So in the work that I’ve done with Johanna and a whole range of experts both in Canada and the United States, we took both a pragmatic approach of evaluating the methodology of how it was designed, but also a scientific approach for evaluating the outcomes. And I think that’s very key because a lot of these apps, we don’t have any long term studies and some of them don’t have any studies. Many of them don’t have any studies evaluating that. And so we need to invest in doing these evaluations and then being able to transfer that knowledge to health care providers to guide them towards what is known to work or what isn’t working. I think because of the need, there’s a rush for people to commercialize this and nothing wrong with sort of developing a business. But in that. People may not be actually properly designing these, and some of the apps may not have the best intent in mind, and so one of the things that we call out is to actually know who is developing it and whether there’s any scientific or health care professionals involved in the creation of that. One of the dangers is that some of these apps may be collecting all kinds of information without consent and without the best interest of the patient who needs to be providing oversight. Is this something the government needs to regulate health bodies need to take more ownership of? Or is it up to the technology platforms or each of us as consumers and patients, if you will? So I think there’s a role for all of those groups. But definitely I believe that science and health professionals need to play a leading role in this. And those could be scientists within the government or the government working with universities and other institutes. You know, when you think of what kinds of medications you take, you wouldn’t take something that hasn’t been evaluated or a medical equipment that’s been used. You expect experts who are properly qualified without commercial bias to have evaluated the safety of those devices. And so that’s part of what we’re discussing through these roundtables is who should be involved and how do we organize this? It has been done in other areas. So, for example, cancer treatments are very well funded organizations and it is happening in mental health. But we need larger organizations, larger efforts, and we need to look particularly at the aspects of technology because there are ways of collecting massive amounts of data from your phone and sharing it. And that needs to be certainly regulated. Do there need to be warning labels or some sort of tagging on apps to say that someone like you, Yuri or Joanna have studied it? Canada has looked at this and acknowledges that efficacy? Probably likely. I mean, I think when you look at Cigarette’s, they have warning labels and there was a lot of pushback on those labels. I think when you look at medications that are dispensed, you know, there are government agencies that do that. Certainly, I think something that hasn’t been evaluated for therapeutic use needs to have some sort of label. And we need to have that discussion as to what should those labels be and how should they be informed and how should we be thinking about the data challenge, because everything we touch digitally systems, algorithms, learn more about us every time we use a device. But there’s dangers, particular dangers when it comes to mental health and mental health, perhaps. How should we be thinking about that frontier? Because I can also imagine maybe in some ways it could be helpful, but something we would want to approach with caution.
Speaker 4 [00:27:31] Absolutely. You have it exactly right. There’s potential. There’s opportunity there. The ways that people interact with their phones, the things that they may post on social media, may ultimately be able to provide us with early warning systems for young people who are really starting to struggle. However, having control over one’s data, being able to consent in a way that’s informed, having information shared with you that is digestible and understandable to the person reading the information is critically important. And ultimately, I would argue we need to have young people engaged in these conversations so that the policies we do develop keep their needs and their interests at the heart of the discussion because those easily get lost. When we start to, you know, talk about commercial interests and government regulation, we can lose sight of the views of young people who are profoundly impacted by some of these things.
Speaker 3 [00:28:33] This is such an important conversation and I’m so glad we’re having it. A lot of challenges here, a lot of unresolved problems. And as we move towards close, I want to get a sense of what keeps you optimistic, what motivates you. You both work with young people who are often more creative, strong and resilient in all sorts of ways during what’s keeping you motivated and hopeful about the state of mental health care for young people right now in the midst of this extraordinary pandemic. I think what’s keeping me optimistic is that I see a growing collaboration from all kinds of disciplines health care, basic science, engineering, social sciences, government, private sector nonprofits, a growing number of people who recognize that no one group can solve this problem alone. And I think that collaboration will be key to move forward. And so even though there is a lot of challenges, I think we just need to continue to build on these collaborations. And I’m very grateful to the collaboration that I have with many Canadians who I’ve been able to stay in touch with. Even though I’ve moved to different cities around the world and I think Canadians are generally much more collaborative and engaging and have a sense of values of society, and I think that will position Canada to be a great innovator in the mental health, space and technology space. Joint of these can be dark days, dark weeks, especially as we move towards winter. What’s keeping you optimistic about the future?
Speaker 4 [00:30:04] Definitely the young people I work with. We have many young people who have had terrible experiences at the hands of the system, and yet they still stand up and put their hands up and say, I want to be involved in making it better. We have community members. We have corporations who are coming together and across the country. We have so many people who understand that system transformation means that we need to work differently. We can’t just keep doing the same thing and expect different outcomes. So that’s what keeps me going and keeping a focus on really thinking about how we want the lives of young people to be different in the future.
Speaker 3 [00:30:42] This is a universal challenge, mental health. And I think we were moving towards accepting that before the pandemic hit. There’s not a family, not a community in this country that doesn’t have mental health challenges. And we’ve become more comfortable speaking about that with each other. Nowhere near enough, but we’re moving in the right direction. And this conversation has been really helpful. And the work we’re hearing about is critical to helping us as a society move towards a more critical approach to recognizing the quality and efficacy and value of those assets. We need them. We need technology, but as they say, handle with care. I’ve also learned from this conversation that while we need more science in all areas of our life and we need more science in mental health, we also need to think harder about patient centricity and finding ways for patients to actually lead what we’re doing in mental health. That may be harder in this remote existence that we’re all getting used to also may maybe easier. It’ll be easier if we make it so, and that, in a way, comes back to all of us. So while this is a universal challenge, it’s also a universal opportunity for us each to play a positive, constructive role in our journey towards a better state of mental health.
Speaker 2 [00:32:11] My guests today have been Dr. Joanna Henderson, director at the Center of Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, and Dr. Yuri Quintana an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. My thanks to both of you for this important and really timely conversation. Thank you. Thank you. I’m John Stackhouse
Speaker 3 [00:32:28] and this is RBC Disruptors.
Speaker 1 [00:32:31] And I’m Teresa Do. Thanks for joining us on this special look back on youth mental health. Here’s hoping for a better school year for all students. Join us next time for a brand new episode of Disruptors as we launch our third season in September. Talk to you soon.
Speaker 6 [00:32:53] Disruptors, an RBC podcast is created by the RBC Thought Leadership Group and does not constitute a recommendation for any organization, product or service. It’s produced and recorded by JAR audio. For more Disruptors content, like or subscribe, whereever you get your podcasts and visit rbc.com/disruptors.
Over the last year and a half, stories of resiliency have emerged all around us. Entire industries were transformed overnight…for better or for worse. Absence of in-person interactions, supply chain disruptions, and changing consumer behaviour were just a few “make or break” challenges faced by many in this country and beyond. But when we think about the organizations most affected by the pandemic, resilience describes not only the way many “bounced back,” but the ability to push forward and see what’s next.
We profiled three resilient Canadian business leaders from very different industries on a special compilation episode of the Disruptors podcast.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Simplecast
Here are three learnings from their pandemic experiences:
1. Reshaping: Digital offerings in the arts can reach new audiences outside of Canada
Strict lockdown measures and the cancellation of in-person events hit the performing arts industry particularly hard. When the pandemic hit, Ontario’s annual Stratford Festival had rehearsals for its 15 plays well underway, and had been planning to officially open a new $100 million theatre. Instead, it had to pivot from traditional in-person theatre offerings to focus on an online content library. As of this past June, over two million people from more than 80 countries have accessed this content and digital has remained a large part of its strategy.
“The future is not only what it’s been in the past since five centuries B.C.—which is live performance and people coming together—the future will be enhanced with a different perspective, a new perspective that is also digital and can be spread right around the world,” said Antoni Cimolino, the Stratford Festival’s artistic director.
2. Rebounding: Ecommerce is only going to become more imperative into the recovery
Covid shone a bright spotlight on the ability to buy and sell nearly everything online, and converted many in-person shoppers to online shoppers overnight. In the rush, small businesses with no online presence were simply left behind. These small enterprises are crucial to the Canadian economy – representing 42% of GDP and 48% of new jobs, as outlined in our report, “Small Business, Big Pivot“.
According to a Canadian Federation of Independent Business survey, only 20% of small businesses were selling online pre-pandemic and 8% started selling online since. One of these business owners is Andrew Feenstra, owner of Halifax bike shop Cyclesmith. Feenstra digitally transformed his store during Covid—and reimagined what it meant to be a retailer. He cites preparation with a pre-existing ecommerce presence as a key factor to managing during the pandemic and encourages other small business owners to do the same. “I’m a bike shop guy, not an Amazon guy. So understanding how people buy online and how the purchasing is done is so different than in an in-store situation,” Feenstra said. “Ultimately, it’s all about preparation.”
3. Resolute: Stay true to your company mission and purpose in times of crisis
Kelly Schmitt, the CEO of charitable technology company Benevity is trying to “infuse a culture of goodness into the world”—a core value that helped steer the company, and the charities it connects, through the pandemic. With all of the current societal and economic issues around the world, people are looking more to their companies to help solve these issues, and that’s where Benevity comes in.
“When we think of a culture of goodness, it’s just the desire of people to really integrate their goodness or their purpose with their work lives. They’re not two separate things anymore,” Schmitt said.
“What we do and how we help companies and their people do good has just become even more relevant.”
Speaker 1 [00:00:02] Hey, it’s Theresa. So what is resilience anyway? I think many of us had to redefine that word in the past year, we realized that it wasn’t so much about getting through a rough patch, but instead navigating a never ending series of peaks and valleys, twists and turns, but mostly valleys in physics. Resilience describes the ability of an elastic material such as rubber or animal tissue to absorb energy, particularly from a blow and release that energy as the material springs back to its original shape. But when we think about the people and organizations that suffered body blows during covid resilience describes the way many figured out not only how to bounce back, but what new shapes to take. These resilient ones figured out a new way of doing business, of reaching new customers, of keeping the organizations afloat. And more importantly, they’ve prepared themselves for a post pandemic future. This is Disruptors, an RBC podcast, I’m Trinh Theresa Do. On today’s episode, we revisit a few of our favourite stories of resilience from the past year. Among them, a bicycle shop owner in Halifax who learn how to sell online and find a better way of packing boxes, and also a Calgary based startup that’s helping companies engage in charitable giving and, quote, infuse a culture of goodness into the world, something that was sorely needed during these trying times. But first, the inspiring story of the Stratford Festival. North America is the largest classical repertory theater company now in its seventh decade of operations. For the second summer in a row, Stratford has had to dramatically curtail its programing. It’s directing most of its performances online, although by the end of August, twenty twenty one, some limited in-person shows are expected on the shores of the Avon River. When we spoke with Stratford’s dynamic artistic director, Anthony Cimolini, last December, the future was less certain. There was trademark confidence and vision for success remained just as clear.
Speaker 2 [00:02:27] 2020 was incredibly challenging. We were beginning rehearsals and and well underway actually for many of the programs or doing 15 plays, introducing a new hundred million dollar theater. And we were stopped in their tracks. Our mission is to connect with people, to bring people together over great works of art and share them with a live audience. And suddenly, the one thing that we were built to do we couldn’t do the economic impact was huge. It was a 20 million dollar hit and staying connected with audiences was vital. And so we had fortunately been recording the plays. On our stages are Shakespeare productions, especially because we wanted to create a Canadian library of these great plays with this wonderful company. And so we have been doing that for many years. And for a while we question whether we should I mean, it was a million dollars for every one of these recordings, but I felt it was important to conquer geography. It was important to conquer time, to preserve these performances and to spread them around the world. So we created a film festival which unrolled over 12 weeks, and it was sent around the world. We showed 12 different films and we clustered them around the ideas that we were examining during this time of isolation. And it was seen by one point two million people around the world and about forty four percent of that one point two million people were from non English speaking countries. So India was our biggest market. And after that, Germany. And it spread the word of the Stratford Festival right around the world.
Speaker 1 [00:04:01] Stratford also launched its own online platform in twenty twenty Stratford at home, charging ten dollars a month for access to a wide variety of films and events. By June, twenty twenty one, more than two million people from more than 80 countries have used Stratford’s online work or attended one of its watch parties. Some people initially worried that going digital might dilute the Stratford brand. But Anthony told us that having a multi-platform strategy is something that will ensure the festival’s ongoing success.
Speaker 2 [00:04:33] We realized that producing work online digital production will be vital to the future. I think we’re all realizing that that, of course, the secret to theater is being there in person with others. And that’s what really makes it magical, that sense of immediacy where anything could happen. But I think in the future that’s going to have to be enhanced with access to all sorts of additional performers, understandings, ways of working through the digital medium. And we’re doing more and more work commissioning artists to explore what that means and new and exciting ways. So the future is not only what it’s been in the past since five centuries, B.C., which is live performance and people coming together, the future will be enhanced with a different perspective, a new perspective that is also digital and can be spread right around the world. One could have been worried that for a live performance venue to suddenly be spreading things digitally around the world would undermine your core business or wouldn’t appeal to your audience. And instead, we found new audiences. We come many people who’d never been to the festival before from around the world. I mean, we’ve always had an international audience. About thirty four per cent of our audience comes from outside of Canada. But now the pickup in South America and across Asia was extraordinary. And I think that it has introduced people around the world to this Canadian treasure. The response has been fantastic. I don’t think it’s everybody’s cup of tea. But from so many people during this lockdown, this time of isolation, it was a way of staying connected with these incredible plays and these words. And our first broadcast was King Lear with Colin Feuer. And who would have thought that in a time of Penda? Something like King Lear would give people solace, would give them comfort, but the communications we receive from people make this devastating play reconnected them to humanity, to the fact that things can get worse. I know that doesn’t sound comforting, but this great place says, hang on, guys, you are something worth something valuable to the world. And things could get worse before they get better. But ultimately, we will in some fashion come through this, maybe not all of us individually, but the contributions that we have made to our families through our work through are the the creations that we made in art, especially. We’ll survive. It will be a future. Shakespeare, of course, lived through the plague. There was a period of time from sixty five to sixty nine when the theaters were only open for about four months. And he understood and that’s actually when he wrote King Lear, he understood that there are times when we’ve got to just hang on to each other and and get through. And this is one of those times
Speaker 1 [00:07:30] strategist’s at home has been showcased in the festival’s Shakespearean films and original content. But now it’s also featuring content from other arts organizations across Canada, organizations that are looking for new platforms on which to share their original content. For Anthony, all decisions made in the past, both by the festival itself and the town that bears its name, give them hope for what the future holds.
Speaker 2 [00:07:55] It’s funny to look back and to look at the decision points that were made, the decisions that were made that actually bore fruit and a lot of it in the years ahead. And it’s hard to know those. I mean, our expansion into creating like three hundred different special events where we get to understand what the what the work in our stages means to the world we live in today. The recording of these films and other related material was all about trying to better connect in new ways with those around us, with audiences. And we knew that instinct was right. We had no idea it would become so critically important in the time ahead. Sometimes the decisions we make about value segments, about who we are, how we’re going to express ourselves has a payoff in the years ahead we can never anticipate. You sometimes wonder why theater flourished in Stratford, Ontario, this railway town that made some really important decisions years ago. They decided to create a park system in the middle of town. And even when other railways want to move in and destroy that park system, they refused and that park system grew. And then when the railways were going to close here in Stratford in nineteen fifty three and the crazy idea of starting a theater festival for economic development came up. It flourished because of the beauty of the surroundings. No one would have known back in 1911 when there was a plebiscite in this town and they turned down jobs to keep their parkland, that they were actually making the decision about the quality of life they wanted in the future. They were making a decision that would be a lifeline for for them 50 years later, because if they had ruined that parklands, there’s no way we could have had a theater festival here. So sometimes those critical decisions that we make, those decisions about who we are, what we believe in, what we want for our children, have payoffs in the years ahead that aren’t just a nice to have, but actually critical to survival.
Speaker 1 [00:09:53] Next, we hop on a bike and ride our way down to the other side of the country for an update from Andrew Feenstra. Andrew is the owner of Halifax Bike Shops. Michael Smith, which sells everything from Bells to Baskets, extends to cargo bikes. Few things captured the imagination of Canadians, more in twenty twenty than the idea of escaping for wild isolation and exploring the outside world on two wheels. Problem was how to get those hot wheels when everyone else is trying to do the same thing. And at the same time as retail stores were closing their doors in many parts of the country for sale. Smith in business since nineteen eighty six, the first few months of covid meant big changes and how they went to market and new definitions of what it meant to be a bike shop. Here’s part of our conversation with Andrew from last December.
Speaker 2 [00:10:46] Twenty 20 was a very interesting year, very challenging. The big thing that we had to do was pivot and pivot changed the entire business or a bicycle shop in Halifax, brick and mortar. We went to almost 50 percent of our sales were done online for a few weeks. And that changed everything how we did our business. We never had a shipping area in our store. We now have three staff that are picking and packing orders and shipping them all across Canada. That is completely new roles and we have taken some of our existing sales staff that would normally help customers that are in the store to helping customers online. I’m a bike shop guy, not a Amazon guy. And understanding how people buy online, understanding how the purchasing is done is so different than in an in-store situation. So, you know, there’s a lot of training, a lot of adjustments on on running the business and investment. We had to invest a lot into our our website, our online platform and get everything all sorted. And a lot of this was done multiple years ago, but the top was just trickling before March and then it fell off wide open come March 15th, when everything was kind of a lock down and open for online basically, and curbside pickup that we that we had done and and to learn how to do it, we we copied other companies. Some of our staff had gone to other businesses and said, wow, they did an amazing job on their curbside pickup. How did they do that? Let’s copy it and learn from from some of the best in class.
Speaker 1 [00:12:17] The quick pivot online allowed Michael Smith to realize record revenues last year, but the success was not without its hiccups. The biggest challenge, it turns out, was learning how to ship boxes en masse.
Speaker 2 [00:12:30] Last November, we did nine boxes. This November, we did three hundred boxes shipping out and so doing it by hand does not work anymore. If we can save 30 seconds on every box that all of a sudden adds up to four hours of someone’s day, that is not spending time on that type of thing. So it’s really making it now. Now that we’ve seen where it can be and where it’s going, we now have a bit of a vision on that and then we can start to make those efficiencies. We’re actually changing the lay up of our basement. So it’s much easier for when the items come in and where the items go out working with Canada Post on their pickup schedules and things to make it quicker. And so we don’t have so many boxes sitting around waiting for pickup in our basement. So those things are going to get picked up faster and everything just becomes more efficient.
Speaker 1 [00:13:21] When we caught up with Andrew this June, he reported that online sales had settled at twenty percent of the total after a pandemic high of 50 percent in early twenty twenty before covid online sales amounted to just three to four percent. The shift led Andrew to invest in new software to ensure his website is better integrated with both the in-store point of sale system as well as Canada Post Cycle. Smith’s main shipping partner. Looking back, Andrew said that covid-19 pushed his business strategy ahead by four years in just fourteen short months. And we talked in December. And you highlighted one key lesson from his pandemic experience.
Speaker 2 [00:14:01] Ultimately, it’s all about preparation. You know, there’s there’s a few things that you learn as a kid and Boy Scouts is be prepared and that’s everything that is. Our success for this year is being prepared for it. Not that we could have known what Colvard was going to do, but we were certainly prepared for it in multiple years. So companies that all said, oh, get online, get your you can’t go and all that kind of stuff. We did that a few years ago, but it was such a small part of our business. But we were ready for it. That was probably the biggest thing that we’ve learned and going into each year, we always prepare for the next year. And that’s really where most other companies can learn, is literally be prepared and be prepared for the unknown, and then you’re going to be much, much better off for your own success.
Speaker 1 [00:14:45] Coming up after the break, we revisit a conversation that my co-host, John Stackhouse, had with Kelly Schmidt, the CEO of Calgary based software company Boniadi. They chatted about how the charitable sector learned to reach new donors in different and surprising ways during covid. So stay right there. You’re listening to Disruptors and RBC podcast. I’m Teresa Do. I hope you’re enjoying this encore presentation. If you like what you’re hearing, I’d encourage you to check out some of the conversations John and I have had with Canada’s top business leaders and innovators over the past year. One standout is John’s provocative chat on intellectual property and the future of Canadian innovation with Jim Balsillie, the former CEO of Research in Motion and the chair of the Council of Canadian Innovators. You can find past episodes of disruptors at RBC, dotcom disruptors or wherever you get your podcasts. Now, here’s John Stackhouse.
Speaker 3 [00:15:55] Canada’s philanthropic sector is the second largest on the planet. When you measure it on a per capita basis, we’re behind only the Netherlands and it contributes an estimated 151 billion dollars to our economy every year, or at least it did in 2018. Of course, last year was different from coast to coast to coast. Most charity walks, runs and rides had to go virtual or be canceled altogether. Even the bells associated with those iconic red kettles jingled a little less loudly this past holiday season. But against that bleak backdrop, we’ve seen some surprising, perhaps even prophetic, successes take the case of Brevetti. It’s a fast growing company based out of Calgary that’s trying to reinvent philanthropy. And it just reached unicorn status, giving it a value of more than a billion dollars. It’s my pleasure now to introduce Benevity’s newly announced incoming CEO, Kelly Schmidt. Kelly, congratulations and welcome to Disruptors.
Speaker 4 [00:16:58] Thank you, John, and thank you for having me join today.
Speaker 3 [00:17:00] Maybe I can start with some background on Benevity. Many of our listeners probably don’t know it or maybe have only heard about it in passing. Tell us a bit about the company.
Speaker 4 [00:17:10] Sure. But is the category creator and market leader in a space that we call corporate purpose technology. So over six hundred and fifty companies, including RBC, use our platform to power their corporate goodness programs and engage with nonprofits. So whether that’s employee giving and company matching, community investment or grant making, volunteering, prosocial actions, you know, in our history we’ve facilitated over six billion dollars of donations and thirty four million hours of volunteering to over 300000 nonprofits around the world.
Speaker 3 [00:17:45] So a lot of numbers there to digest, Kelly. But before we get deeper into those numbers, I want to ask you about that so-called culture of goodness, which I think was a phrase coined by your founder, Brian Townville, who just handed over the CEO mantle to you. What does that mean?
Speaker 4 [00:18:01] Yeah, so culture of goodness, with all of the societal and economic issues around the world, people are looking more to their companies to help solve these issues. And so when we think of a culture of goodness, it’s just the desire of people to really integrate their goodness or their purpose with their work lives. They’re not two separate things anymore. And companies that promote these purposes and culture of goodness actually are more successful in attracting and retaining talent as well.
Speaker 3 [00:18:27] It’s interesting how much charity has changed in a short time. There used to be an expression I gave at the office, which was a way of deflecting from someone knocking at your door, asking, asking for money. But now, I guess with work from home, the office is everywhere. But our connection with charity is also everywhere. We want to give, but we also want to connect. How has been every kind of rethinking, reimagining charity in light of all that technology is changing?
Speaker 4 [00:18:53] Yeah, I mean, really, our platform was designed to democratize, if you will, giving and volunteering, and it allows employees to support the causes that they’re passionate about in the way that they want to. So it’s not just once a year arm twisting exercise for the charities that the company says are important, but it’s also your time. It’s opening it up to the causes that you think are important. It’s tracking prosocial actions such as getting groceries for a neighbor. Those are all of the things that the platform is enabling. And it’s interesting what you said earlier about giving in Canada, declining in twenty twenty, because we actually saw on our platform that in Canada, companies and their people stepped up and donations increased over 70 percent year over year in twenty, twenty two.
Speaker 3 [00:19:39] What’s going on there? Because that’s a that’s a fascinating divergence that overall there are some indications of philanthropic giving going down and yet you’re seeing that’s a massive increase. Why the difference?
Speaker 4 [00:19:50] Yeah, we tend to not use the word philanthropy too often at benefits because it is often associated with high net worth giving anybody is really a micro donation platform and it was designed as such. And so without considering the company match that might be provided, the average donation size on our platform is in the neighborhood of fifty dollars, yet over two point three billion was donated through the platform in twenty twenty. And so we’re seeing that close to 75 percent of companies have some form of program that supports their people, are doing good and rewards them for it. We saw many companies step up with matching campaigns all the way from one to one to five to one to deal with covid and racial equality movement and other issues in twenty twenty. And that drove a lot of giving momentum.
Speaker 3 [00:20:39] And how how is the Colvard crisis changing? I’m tempted to use the word philanthropy, but you’ve just suggested that may be an inappropriate word. How has Colvard changed opportunities around social good?
Speaker 4 [00:20:50] From my lens, I would say covid accelerated a lot of the trends that were already there. And so food security, precarious employment and housing, mental health. You know, many people were right on the edge with these issues before and just barely holding it together. And covid was the final straw or maybe the third strike and the impact of it was disproportionate on the charitable sector. So there was a time in twenty twenty, if you were a hospital or a food bank, you were getting more donations than you maybe knew what to do with. Yet if you ran a youth center or a science center or a place that was a hub of activity, that where you had to close your doors completely due to covid, your donations probably dried up and you were figuring out how to keep the lights on without selling off the furniture. And so a lot of the trends were already there. But I think the thing that’s going to persist is that many of these organizations to survive, they had to become online overnight. And so, as you said, there’s been no charity galas, no golf tournaments, the fundraising activity that they used to do just completely. Dried up, and I think this hybrid model of in-person plus online is probably going to be really powerful going forward, not just for how we all work, could do our jobs, but also for the charitable sector. If I think about the science center in Calgary here I’m on the board of, you know, now we can bring in experts from around the world online versus our online presence, just maybe being a Facebook page. And so it’s a good opportunity, I think, for the sector to experiment and find new ways of doing things and new ways to attract new donors and to grow.
Speaker 3 [00:22:17] I’m glad you use the word hybrid, because that’s a word that’s come up on a number of episodes through the crisis. We’ve come to call it the the hybrid hustle, which is what a lot of businesses need to to think about as they think towards the recovery. Whether you’re in retail or entertainment or finance, you’ve got to be online everywhere all the time, but also in person building and deepening the relevance. Kelly, I’d love to get your thoughts on one charity that’s been digital from the start and what we can learn from its experience during the pandemic.
Speaker 2 [00:22:52] I’m Todd Minocin. I’m the country director for Movember, Canada. It pays to invest in your in your digital infrastructure. We’ve been an online charity since two thousand and ten, basically. And having that platform ready and available for people to participate was a huge part of how we got there this year. We were in a position to kind of look at how to make incremental improvements to some of our technology that resulted in massive returns on on how it worked for people. The other thing that I think we really learned this year was that Canadians were ready to move to mobile for philanthropy. Our sense is when you’ve been sitting at home for eight or nine months, working on your laptop and ordering your life supplies on your phone beside you, making that switch to philanthropy on their phone with something we really noticed this year and felt like it was a significant difference in giving.
Speaker 3 [00:23:46] It’s interesting to hear Todd explain it that way, because we’ve become so comfortable with medical appointments, grocery delivery, conference calls, all on our phone, often on the same device, sometimes at the same time. But as Todd said, you’ve got to invest in the digital infrastructure and in the technology. I sense a lot of charities think they can just put up a webpage or have a site. And that’s their effort for
Speaker 4 [00:24:10] digital destination sites, as you describe them, typically aren’t overly successful because the challenge is how do you get people to your site? Right. You know, in a platform like ours, you can have access to 10 million users instantly. But the mobile piece is interesting. That was actually a part of our offering that we rolled out about a year ago. And so you can do all of your good on your phone. And when we think about the future and where it’s going, certainly we started by using corporations as the aggregator of people. But we want people to think of pulling out the inevitable app on their phone when they think of doing good in all aspects of their lives. And so their family circles, their friends circles, their sports teams, their kids schools, their churches. It’s not much of a stretch to think that you just pull out your mobile phone and track your good as as it happens. And as you move through those circles.
Speaker 3 [00:25:01] Another charity that turn to tech during the pandemic is one actually that I have deep personal connection with. I met our next guest more than a decade ago when he just lost his son and was exploring ideas around what to do about youth mental health. We spoke for a couple of hours and it was it was profound. It was a moving conversation that is with me still. He did far more than I thought possible, showing the incredible power of purpose and passion. He saw no choice but to do it. And now he’s been forced to reinvent fundraising again.
Speaker 5 [00:25:35] My name is Eric Wendler. I’m the founder and executive director of Jaga National Youth Mental Health Charity. We’re fortunate that our staff of forty eight happened to be mostly young people, so they’re pretty savvy, adapted quite well to the challenges of pivoting to digital. The beauty of it was we had already anticipated shifting a lot more of our work to digital, and we see it now as a real compliment to when things return to normal. And we have our are in person.
Speaker 3 [00:26:03] As many of our listeners will know, one of Juggs biggest annual fundraisers is the Jocke ride. But instead of a massive one day in-person event, Rodders took part virtually last year using apps like Swift and Strava. And Eric was thrilled to report they actually raised more money than they had anticipated.
Speaker 5 [00:26:22] So the target for twenty twenty was twelve hundred and fifty riders to raise a million dollars for Jack. Doug, on top of that we receive about two hundred thousand in sponsorships for sponsorships. Never left us. And we were shocked that we actually ended up with over twelve hundred and fifty riders, about 7500 donations, and instead of a million raised, we raised a million, three tenth. So we exceeded our target by
Speaker 2 [00:26:48] about 30 percent.
Speaker 3 [00:26:49] That’s really impressive. And when I hear the stories of the Jack Ride or the earlier example of of Movember, Canada, I think of digital relevance. And Kelly, I wonder how other charities can build digital relevance, which has increasingly become essential to success.
Speaker 4 [00:27:06] Yeah, I mean, many charities became online video first organizations basically overnight, even if they didn’t have a head start as some of these examples. And frankly, they can’t really fulfill their mandates unless they do that. And so now is certainly the time to experiment. The resistance to change is really low and and the cost to experiment has gone down. And so, as you said before, you know, when there’s a will, there’s a way we didn’t think visiting our doctors on zoomer by phone was was ever going to happen. And then overnight that changed. And so it’s probably going to be in person and online going forward. And, you know, depending on the organization and what they’re trying to do, there’s different ways to engage with their donors and to also find new donors through platforms such as anybody.
Speaker 3 [00:27:52] Kelly, how how do you see over the next while technology continuing to remove constraints for for charities and for those of us who want to both give and connect with social good?
Speaker 4 [00:28:04] Yeah, I mean, you’re not just restricted by borders anymore, that’s for sure. Well, that’s probably one of the biggest benefits there, John. We actually see a lot of cross-border donations facilitated through our platform, whether it’s to support Australian wildfires or the racial equality movement in the US. You know what a platform allows this for these causes to feature their content and for us to publish specific campaigns to support them. And we’ve got the benefit, I guess, of having aggregated about ten million users in our platform, that it would take probably a lot of money and a lot of time for causes to reach that many people all at once. When an event like this happens or when help is needed, it’s always.
Speaker 3 [00:28:45] A challenging time in the social good space, but it sounds like an incredibly exciting time to Kelly, where does he go from here, especially as we move out of crisis, into recovery?
Speaker 1 [00:28:57] You know,
Speaker 4 [00:28:57] I think, unfortunately, twenty, twenty one is going to be a pretty tough year as well. We’re certainly not out of the woods yet. There’s some positive signs on the vaccine front. But a lot of what we’ve seen and what we’ve learned in twenty twenty, you know, including around sort of this hybrid online in person model, it’s just unlikely to change. We’re unlikely to go back to a world where all of us sit in offices from eight a.m. to five p.m. every day as well. It’s just the world has changed. So we just think that what we do and how we help companies and their people do good has just become even more relevant. And so we’re just we’re going to be doing more of the same. Plus, we’re going to be focusing on engaging more internationally headquartered companies. We’ve been mainly focused on North America and as I said earlier, trying to engage people in different aspects of their lives. So not just their corporate life, but in their personal circles as well.
Speaker 1 [00:29:49] That was John Stackhouse in conversation with Benevides CEO Kelly Schmidt this past January, by mid-June, benefits reported having processed more than 800 million dollars in donations so far this year, with covid-19 relief in India brevity’s top cause, making up more than 10 percent of all donations. I’m Theresa Do. Thanks for joining us for this look back at some of our favorite stories of resilience from the past year. I hope you’ll join us next time for another special summer episode when we revisit the pressing issue of youth mental health. Talk to you soon.
Speaker 6 [00:30:31] Disruptors, an RBC podcast is created by the RBC Thought Leadership Group and does not constitute a recommendation for any organization, product or service. It’s produced and recorded by JAR audio. For more disruptors content, like or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or visit rbc dot com slash disruptors.
Over the last year and a half, the pandemic has made us more dependent on technology than ever before. Our digital connections are paramount, and as consumers embrace more Internet of Things (IOT) and smart devices, the pressure is on: our wireless infrastructure needs to keep up with increasing demand.
In June, the Canadian government launched its latest wireless spectrum auction—which raised a record $8.91-billion. The 3,500 megahertz spectrum is crucial in building out 5G services and securing Canada’s competitiveness in the global economy.
As Canada’s Big 3 providers roll out these fifth generation networks, how can we start thinking about the vastly different digital future that awaits many industries just over the horizon? In this Disruptors conversation from Oct. 2020, host John Stackhouse chats with Bell Mobility President Claire Gillies. Together, they explore what lies ahead for Canada’s wireless sector— and consumers in a 5G world.
Read on / listen to learn how Canada’s technological future can be shaped now—and why Gillies thinks 5G should be viewed as, “exploring the art of the possible”.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Simplecast
How Canada Can Win the 5G Race
5G has been touted as the most transformative technology since wireless services were introduced in 1985. The fifth generation of mobile technology, it’s expected to be 100 times faster than existing 4G networks in Canada, and much more responsive when sending and receiving data in real-time. Imagine downloading a three-hour HD movie in under a second on your smartphone. That’s 5G.
It’s not just about speed – picture firefighters wearing AR augmented helmets that allow them to see blueprints and thermal images in real time, or a doctor in Halifax performing a real-time surgery on a patient in Regina.
5G is a “game-changer for humanity,” according to The Financial Times – and it’s being rolled out in Canada as you read this.
There’s clearly a lot of hype, but what does it mean for Canada? We’re still in the early phases of capability, but by summer 2021, there will be an even greater evolution of 5G, when the CRTC auctions off the extremely high-frequency spectrum (3,500 MHz). And the time to plan for it is now. From agriculture to healthcare, Canada has some distinct advantages that we can capitalize on to help make us more competitive.
Claire Gillies, president of Bell Mobility, and a recent guest on the Disruptors podcast says 5G presents an opportunity to re-think businesses and organizations in entirely new ways, and explore “the art of the possible.”
“How do we use AR and VR in training circumstances? How do we use it to enable remote medicine and surgeries? Anything is possible but we all have to put our minds and our investments around making these things happen in the Canadian market.”
Canada is challenged by its limited scale and population density and will need to build robust infrastructure capabilities to get in the game. But we come to the table with a long record of innovation and a solid foundation to build upon.
“The promise of 5G is not so much about deploying infrastructure” said Keith Ponton a Senior Systems Consultant at IBI Group, a global architecture, engineering and technology firm. “The 5G race is around developing innovative technologies and approaches to leverage that.”
He points to Canada’s long history of leadership in agricultural innovation. “There are a number of 5G technologies that support the smart farms of the future that would allow us to be leaders in that space in a domain that we already understand.”
“It’s important for us to have a posture of a running start in this race. We don’t want to wait for the infrastructure to be fully deployed before we start thinking about the innovative applications that will be the platforms for business and innovation for the next 10 years,” he said.
The future we envision now will determine the future we build. 5G can facilitate the kind of real time, always-on connection that will be critical to the smart cities that lay ahead (think: autonomous vehicles, connected, sensor-enabled light posts and real-time transit capacity alerts).
5G will also translate into cost savings for municipalities across the country. The Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association predicts that Vancouver could reduce congestion to the equivalent of taking 12,500 cars off the road thanks to smart traffic systems, Calgary could save up to $87M for households with 5G-enabled smart grid technologies and the small town of Kingston, ON could save $930K annually with smart street lighting.
It’s still early days in the infrastructure rollout but the time to innovate is now. Other nations are already capitalizing on 5G’s game-changing capabilities. Let’s not let the opportunity slip our grasp – or risk losing our competitive edge as a country of innovators.
Speaker 1 [00:00:01] Hey, it’s Theresa. Perhaps, like me, you’re hearing more and more about the benefits of 5G, even though many of us are still stuck on the 4G highway or God forbid, the 3G side road. The promises are many — 5G or fifth generation wireless technology will deliver higher peak data speeds, more reliability, greater network capacity and a more uniform user experience. All the major cell phone manufacturers are pushing 5G enabled devices, though Canada is still playing a bit of a catch up to the world that’s all about to change. In June, the Canadian government began its latest wireless spectrum auction, and it’s considered the most consequential auction in many years. The 3500 megahertz spectrum is crucial in building out 5G services for Canada’s wireless players. 5G represents a unique opportunity to grab new customers and deliver profitable new high speed services. But the necessary investment to make 5G happen is also forcing consolidation in the wireless sector. Most significantly, with the proposed twenty six billion dollar takeover of Shaw Communications by Rogers, what will this new wireless landscape mean for Canada and Canadian consumers? And what does Canada need to succeed in this global 5G revolution? This is Disruptors, an RBC podcast. I’m Trinh Theresa Do. On today’s episode, we revisit an in-depth conversation between John and Claire Gillies, CEO of Bell Mobility, one of Canada’s wireless giants. They talked last fall before the spectrum auction in which Bell is a top contender, about some of the real world benefits of greater connectivity that will come from 5G’s implementation. Among them, everything from smart farms to smart cities and a whole lot in between. Without further ado, here is my co-host, John Stackhouse’s interview with Claire Gillies.Speaker 2 [00:02:18] Claire, thanks for joining us on Disruptors.
Speaker 3 [00:02:20] Very happy to be here at such an exciting time in the wireless industry.
Speaker 2 [00:02:24] So we’re going to get into some of those opportunities and hear about some exciting examples of what can be done and what is being done with 5G. But first, I just want to set the table with a bit of an explanation about 5G. I’ve heard it referred to as transformational. The Financial Times, I think, called it a game changer for humanity. That’s a pretty tall order. What is it?
Speaker 3 [00:02:47] Well 5G, and what it stands for is it’s the fifth generation of wireless networks and it really is not an evolution, as you’ve described. It’s really a revolution in the wireless industry that will change the way we work and live and play, because what it offers is so many more new capabilities than the past generation of networks.
Speaker 2 [00:03:09] To give us a sense, especially for the non techies listening, of what the key differences are between 5G and 4G or even 3G for that matter.
Speaker 3 [00:03:20] There’s three primary elements that come into 5G that really advanced. Number one is speed and capability of the network. So we’ll see a dramatic improvement in the speed of networks as we move forward. Number two is the latency or the quickness, the responsiveness of the network. And the last piece, of course, is some of the services. And, you know, I refer to it as the ability to do slicing and different capabilities within our network that will afford us new options for things that we can build.
Speaker 2 [00:03:53] And what does slicing is an interesting term. What does slicing look like for most of us as users?
Speaker 3 [00:03:58] So you can think of it as instead of every service or application getting equal access to the network, it’s the ability for us to take a portion of the network and allow individuals or applications to use a dedicated quote unquote lane, if you want to think of it in the highway example that we’re all so familiar with and with that, you can explore different services to accommodate that need. It could be someone who needs very high speed, dedicated access in emergency circumstances. And oftentimes I talk about that in the form of public safety. If in case of an emergency you would take a slice of the network and you would dedicate it to those individuals responding to the crisis so they could in an uninterrupted way deal with the state of emergency. That’s just one of the examples of slicing. And now there’s multitudes of things that go along with that.
Speaker 2 [00:04:56] I suspect most people feel like they’ve been hearing about 5G for at least a few years now in other parts of the world. They’re moving ahead fairly quickly, especially in Asia. Where are we at now, Claire, in terms of 5G in Canada? And what does the timeline look like in terms of these opportunities coming to be so?
Speaker 3 [00:05:15] The Canadian market is still very much and what we would describe as an early 5G phase based on the current network spectrum and combinations that we have available to us. And what happened in Asia is they saw the different frequencies of their network become available sooner. So in South Korea, as an example, they had access to three point five gigahertz. If we look south of the border in the US, they’ve done some millimeter wave auctions for Canadian market. We’ll see the three point five megahertz spectrum auction happen next summer, the summer of twenty one, at which case then you’ll see another evolution of 5G that will, of course, add more and more benefit to the end users
Speaker 2 [00:06:00] in Korea is such an interesting example because just in 12 or 18 months, they’ve moved rapidly ahead with 5G. What sort of things should we be learning from Korea and get prepared for going into deeper into the twenty twenties?
Speaker 3 [00:06:14] There’s definitely a few things. So the first thing was, of course, how the government supported them. They really rapidly deployed and made the critical spectrum combinations available for 5G early. And then the second thing that really happened is the major operators in that country really focused on urban areas. And so what it did is it gave the end users immediate benefit where they could feel that density change. And the third thing, of course, was the providers really. To deliver services, they took full advantage of the 5G capabilities.
Speaker 2 [00:06:51] I fear one of the things we’re missing as Canadians is the transformational opportunity not just across the economy and not just for consumers, but for organizations of any size, shape or form if this technology is as powerful as it’s it’s laid out to be. And we’re clearly seeing in Asia that it is clear what should we be thinking about in terms of using this technology to make Canada more competitive?
Speaker 3 [00:07:19] It really is for businesses, I think, at this point, and exploring the art of the possible, thinking about how we should change our businesses in ways that we’ve never dreamed of before. How do we use air in VR in training circumstances? How do we use it to enable remote medicine and surgeries? And the list goes on and on. But it’s sort of this idea of, you know, anything is possible, but we all have to put our minds and our and our investments behind making these innovations happen in the Canadian market.
Speaker 2 [00:07:53] So it’s not just about thinking faster and it will be faster, but it’s rethinking your business or your organization in entirely new ways. And to understand that better, we reached out to someone who has a quarter century of experience in the telecom industry, who’s helped build smart city infrastructure in the US and India. Keith Ponton is a senior systems consultant at IBI Group, and he told disruptors these are early days, but there’s so much possibility for Canada right now.
Speaker 4 [00:08:23] A lot of the measuring sticks we have for five ground carrier deployments, how many carriers have deployed, how many cell sites, how many handsets are deployed? And that’s a very early indicator of who’s leading the pack. But I think the promise of 5G is not so much about deploying infrastructure, but it’s about the applications that will develop typically in a three to five year window after the base infrastructure is available. So well, Canada, because of our population density, tends tends to not lead in those discussions compared to a country like South Korea. It’s important for us to to have a posture of a running start in this race. We don’t want to wait for the infrastructure to be fully deployed before we start thinking about the innovative applications that will be the platforms of business and innovation for the next five to 10 years.
Speaker 2 [00:09:20] Such an interesting point about density and scale. Canada does not have certainly Asia’s density or scale. Claire, without those two factors, how do we accelerate?
Speaker 3 [00:09:32] I think, first of all, as Keith pointed out, it’s important that we get the network coverage and availability in place. And so that’s what the carriers are working very quickly on now. And then there’s a series of different partnerships that we have to encourage this innovation and thought leadership. And we’re really investing not only in businesses, but also in the education infrastructure within the country to explore new ideas. How can we use augmented reality? How will smart cities evolve? When we look at things such as cell research and machine learning and mobile computing, how will all of these factors play a role in how we leverage the fulsomness of the 5G investment that we’re making? And so how does Canada play a role? We get behind it. We get behind it as government. We get behind it as business leaders to make change happen and continue the reputation, quite frankly, that this country has had in terms of being a technological leader.
Speaker 2 [00:10:39] We also ask Keith how Canada can maintain or build on that reputation.
Speaker 4 [00:10:44] You know, my answer is to focus on what we as Canada have as advantages. What we don’t have is a huge population density and large cities on the scale of some US markets or South Korea or even European cities. But what we do have and bring to the table is a lot of innovation and experience. So going beyond the ability to deploy infrastructure, I think the 5G race really is around developing innovative technologies and approaches to leverage that. For example, certainly Canada has a long history in terms of agricultural innovation and leadership in that market. And there’s a number of 5G technologies that support the smart form of the future that would allow us to be leaders in that space in a domain that we already understand.
Speaker 2 [00:11:33] I’m glad Keith mentioned the Smart farm because that echoes the report we put out a couple of years ago called Farmer 4.0, which looked at the digital transformation of agriculture and the skills as well as technology. That Canada needs to be a food producing power in the twenty twenties and thirties, a couple of summers ago I visited a farm outside Saskatoon where the farmer was testing a self-driving harvester. Picture this, a machine going across the prairies with no driver turning up and down the field on its own. And actually, there were a couple of guys chasing it from time to time with laptops, trying to correct the coding. And as I talk to the farmer about how this would transform his operation, he said a few things that really stuck in my mind. One obviously was the ability for him to spend his time doing other things. He didn’t need to sit on a vehicle going up and down the field. He could spend his time studying the data, for instance, that was coming off the vehicle that really excited him. But he wasn’t sure how that was going to happen because networks are not consistent. And until we get there, it’s going to be a little harder for farmers to take advantage of these new technologies, the way that other farmers, especially in Asia, are starting to seize on the technology. Is there the desire and capability of Canadian farmers? Is there all the pieces are there? So how is the country? Do we help pull them together?
Speaker 3 [00:13:10] No, you’re absolutely right. And, you know, the term smart farm is really very on point. And you think about all of the different things that technology will now allow us to measure at scale with 5G, because obviously the cost to deploy a wireless network in some of these more rural and remote markets is very efficient. But I want you to think about agriculture. And there’s an example of something we did with a winery able to measure wind speed, temperature and humidity levels for people who are thinking, in that instance, managing their crops, that you can expand that to many other smart agricultural aspects of the Canadian market.
Speaker 2 [00:13:54] I’m so glad you raised the winery example. We profiled another winery on disruptors a few years ago and spoke to a winemaker who was able to control the vineyard with her phone. She was kind of sitting on stage as well as direct the drones that were working with weather sensors. All kinds of fantastic stuff to see. But I think we take for granted the network that makes that possible. And if you don’t have that speed, the low latency, you’re not able to control all those devices. And all of this really kind of opens up the door to the Internet of Things, which is another bit of a cliche these days, but is a really important way of thinking about the economy of the future, that we have all sorts of devices, drones, appliances, but factories and vehicles connected. And of course, they’re connected by networks. And it’s not just business leaders, any organization, we hospitals, schools, local community associations, how should they be thinking about these opportunities clearer as we look into the future?
Speaker 3 [00:14:59] Well, first of all, I think this has been a moment in time where everybody is really reflecting on what the future needs and what their business needs are and their personal needs are as they as they look to advance. And so in that moment of reflection, I think a lot of organizations are looking at transformative technologies. So, you know, the first thing, of course, for anyone is you can have the service application, but you need a couple of different things. The first one, as you said, is we need the network coverage. Right, without an incredible network partner, really, the application is not relevant. It’s not valid. It can’t work to its optimum capability. And so choosing the right network partner and making sure that we have a robust connectivity infrastructure in Canada is key. And we, of course, drive that mandate each and every day at Bell, then I think it really is about conversation and exploration. There are many, many experts and this is where I know our technical teams that love to have these conversations with, you know, to use your term disruptors, people who really want to be change agents. And what you find is those individuals who are looking at transforming their business. They get the first start. You know, they make that progress and then others will rapidly follow. And, you know, we have some terrific examples. There’s one specific tank company and they completely change their business. They change the way their fleet went out into the field. They changed the way they monitored. And as a result, they were able to improve their operational efficiency dramatically. You can imagine what happened, people followed, but they had the advantage of being there first. But to your point, you know what’s critical? Have a conversation. I can tell you that we have a team of people who have experience and they want to explore options and develop new solutions for you and can steer you in the right direction. So businesses don’t need to try and figure these things out on their own.
Speaker 1 [00:17:11] Hey, it’s Theresa again. I hope you’re enjoying this encore presentation of disrupters in the second half of the program. John continues his conversation with Clare Gillis and also speaks to the chief digital officer of one of Canada’s most innovative cities. If you’re liking what you’re hearing, I’d encourage you to check out some of the many conversations John and I have had with Canada’s top business leaders and innovators over the past year, such as our special Earth Day episode, where I talk with two environmental pioneers who are using block chain to help fight climate change. You can find past episodes of Disrupters at RBC dot com slash disruptors or wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to John Stackhouse.
Speaker 2 [00:17:58] Today, I’m chatting with Clare Gillis, the president of Bell Mobility, about the 5G revolution and the truly connected economy is going to usher in. One city that’s on the cutting edge of 5G is Hamilton, Ontario, which was once known as the steel capital of Canada and is now home of the Innovation Factory at McMaster Innovation Park. Hamilton has also been named as one of the leading seven intelligent communities of 20 20 by the Intelligent Community Forum. That’s why we reached out to the city’s chief digital officer, Cyrus Tehrani, to get his take on the possibilities 5G presents for both consumers and business.
Speaker 5 [00:18:37] The analogy I give it, I think of it for myself as I look at my smartphone and I really can’t live without it. I know that’s a big statement to make. I can live without it. But the functionality that it provides me in my life on a day to day basis, I can’t imagine being lost that now, whether it’s something even like Google or Waze or whatever, that’s all because of the speeds that 4G enabled. And I think we’ve all had that experience where you go to an area where it’s 3G or 2G or something else, you’re like, oh, I can’t even use Google Maps. It’s not updating. So think about the opportunities that potentially exist. How much more new use cases can be evolved that we haven’t even imagined, but it won’t be until it’s fully probably adopted and deployed. And we definitely don’t want to be behind and looking at, I think, other regions and saying, oh, I wish we could do that, but we don’t think about how to make that investment or make it a priority.
Speaker 2 [00:19:28] Clear what communities we’ve just heard from Hamilton be thinking about to position themselves for perhaps a very different future with 5G.
Speaker 3 [00:19:38] As cities are constantly building and renewing their infrastructure, there are opportunities to integrate 5G and IOT technologies along with that that will revolutionize the way they do business and allow them to actually proactively monitor and manage potential risks. So as we are continuing to move forward and progress as we come out of this very challenging covid period, I think building better is absolutely the right way to think about it. And building better means building with connectivity, building with insights with our end users in mind, whether those are consumers or whether those are business owners.
Speaker 2 [00:20:22] I think of the example of smart parking, which would be fantastic. I’d love not to have to drive around the block multiple times waiting for a spot to come open. I’d rather get notified or have my vehicle notified and take me to the spot as it’s becoming available. More broadly, how do cities make a compelling case for the investments that will be needed?
Speaker 3 [00:20:45] For me, it’s always around. What’s the return on the investment, whether it’s the citizen experience or whether it’s a reduction in the costs that a city is operating at and how they can reinvest those dollars in new things to make their community better and stronger for the citizens who live there.
Speaker 2 [00:21:03] I suspect coming out of this crisis, another area of opportunity will be health care as we look for more home care, for less centralization, perhaps, of a lot of health care services. That’s going to depend on technology. That depends on networks. Again, what should we be thinking about in terms of the health care revolution that may be upon us and what 5G can do to accelerate that?
Speaker 3 [00:21:27] You can imagine in the future that we could have a one of the best surgeons in the country and Toronto operating on someone in northern Alberta remotely at a distance through the connectivity that we provide with 5G. So it just in terms of making availability of the very best in health care accessible in a democratized way to everyone, this is going to be a game changer, I think, for all of us and not just here in Canada, but also the role that we’re going to play in the global economy.
Speaker 2 [00:22:00] And it’s not just some of those kind of sci-fi examples that involve robotics. Stuff that’s happening today can be accelerated and even transformed with this technology. We published a report a while back called Paging Dr. Data, and it looked at how data is is transforming health care, but really needs to transform it far more in different international studies. So that I’ve looked at it seems most of the focus right now is on manufacturing and the industrial sectors. Perhaps that’s because that’s where the money and efficiency gains are. Should we also be thinking in those directions? It’s not just cities and health care systems, but how do we transform our industrial base in this country as we continue to face more and more competition?
Speaker 3 [00:22:49] I mean, you talk about manufacturing and retail. You think about improving automation, providing visibility into things such as the. Supply chain, where parts are moving, all of these elements are thinking about how do I how do I use data, you know, whether that’s heat sensors, whether it’s movement control and again, many, many other applications and saying, how do I make this better, faster, more efficient for my organization? And as a result, many of those things will also pop out benefits to the business, as well as end user benefits. That will, of course, further create an attitude towards that business from a consumer.
Speaker 2 [00:23:35] As we look at Asia, the adoption rates there are accelerating and the enthusiasm for 5G, you see this in business surveys is really significant in not just in places like China and Korea, but in South Asia and India. And there seems to be a bit less enthusiasm in North America. And I wonder, Claire, how we can balance those sometimes competing forces in our minds.
Speaker 3 [00:24:04] Earlier in the conversation, we talked about how the third generation and the fourth generation of networked technology have changed the way businesses have participated in the economy. And I just as you fast forward into 5G, you cannot imagine that it won’t have that same sort of revolutionary change on the way that we do business. And there will be this notion of first mover advantage. There’s also more so than I think there’s ever been, John, that we live in this global economy. And so it’s important that as Canadian business leaders, we think about, you know, what are the changes and how do we embrace them and how do we use them to our advantage, not only here in our own market, to deliver better business results, better consumer experiences, but also how we use this as a catalyst for our future in the global economy.
Speaker 2 [00:24:59] I wonder, Claire, as we move towards close, how we can ensure that we have those productive gains? One of the challenges always with technology is that there is an enormous consumer appeal, and that’s terrific. But it’s also important to ensure that frontier technologies also go to the productive side of the economy. How do we ensure that 5G does indeed do that and leads to great and broad benefits for society?
Speaker 3 [00:25:26] One of the things I think of that is really critical is just how far reaching this networked technology will be. So we’ll talk about things like leveraging 5G to provide high speed Internet access in more rural communities who haven’t historically had access to that level of service. And we spoke previously about access to health care and applications of that sort. So I really do think that, you know, when we look at businesses, we look at consumer access. It’s about how we’re changing the game, how we’re reducing expense in some areas to explore and invest in other areas. And this is just this is going to be one of those examples. So whether it’s rural broadband access, virtualize health care or cost savings benefits that can be reinvested to explore new areas for businesses. This really is the moment in time that that’s critical for us to look at the future and to make investments and change for the future.
Speaker 2 [00:26:30] It’s interesting to think of this as a moment in time. And as I sit here looking at my phone, which may be the most important inanimate part of my life, and that’s probably true for many, if not most listeners as well. It’s hard to imagine future moments where the phone and devices will be even more powerful and more significant parts of our lives. But they will be because of the power of what we know they’ll be able to do in the years ahead. There can be downsides to that that we’re all familiar with. But the opportunity for society, for organizations, for business and communities is far greater than the risks. My guest today has been Clare Gillis, the president of Dell Mobility. Thanks for sharing your time and your thoughts.
Speaker 3 [00:27:18] Absolutely. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 [00:27:21] But I also like to thank Keith Ponton from IBI Group and Cyrus Tehrani, the chief digital officer for the city of Hamilton, for their perspectives on the potential of 5G. I’m John Stackhouse and this is Disruptors and RBK podcast.
Speaker 1 [00:27:36] And I’m Theresa Do. Thanks for joining us for this special look at the 5G revolution. It’s a fast moving world and we’ll keep you updated on the latest developments in the next season of Disruptors, which launches after Labour Day. Join us next time for another special summer episode where we check in on some of our favorite stories of entrepreneurial resilience from the past year. Talk to you soon.
Speaker 3 [00:28:05] Disruptors, an RBC podcast is created by the RBC Thought Leadership Group and does not constitute a recommendation for any organization, product or service. It’s produced and recorded by JAR audio. For more Disruptors content, like or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or visit rbc dot com slash disruptors.
As Canada emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, thanks in large part to the lightning-fast development of new vaccines, medical innovation has never been more fascinating—or more critical.
Biotech has quickly become one of the most important emerging sectors in the Canadian economy. Today, Canada’s 10 largest biotech companies have a combined market cap of $28 billion. Topping the list is Vancouver-based AbCellera Biologics, which debuted on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange with a record-breaking IPO late last year—making it Canada’s most valuable biotech company in history.
The company has developed what is now the leading antibody treatment for COVID-19, called bamlanivimab. It’s approved in 15 countries (including the U.S. and Canada), and has been administered to over 400,000 COVID-19 patients.
But AbCellera is more than just that one treatment. The company has formed more than 100 partnerships with 27 different partners to find antibody treatments for a range of ailments.
We spoke with founder and CEO Dr. Carl Hansen on the latest Disruptors podcast. In our exclusive interview, host John Stackhouse and Hansen explore everything from the origins of AbCellera, to how their antibody treatment works, and their big plans for global success.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Simplecast
Here are our three top takeaways from our conversation with Carl Hansen:
1. “We’re only at the beginning of this.”
The pandemic has accelerated the biotech industry as a whole
The biotech industry is experiencing a watershed moment, with a big influx of capital as investors wake up to the sector’s potential.
“If you’re outside of this space, you may not appreciate what a tremendous trajectory the industry is on right now,” Hansen said. He cited the 2003 announcement of the successful completion of the Human Genome Project, which mapped out human DNA to identify disease genes, leading to novel approaches to therapy and more effective medicines.
“Since that time, a project that took about $3 billion and 10 years to do, technology has moved so fast that we could do that hundreds of times in a week in a single lab,” he said.
These bursts of innovation quickly translate into real-world implications: patients are being treated with new and effective therapies.
2. “Biotech is a sector that’s difficult to succeed in.”
It’s an industry that requires large amounts of patient capital
Drug development has come a long way, with advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), modern molecular biology and genetic engineering enabling a greater understanding of how to leverage human genetics for personalized medicines. But, as Hansen pointed out, it’s still a very lengthy, costly and complicated process.
“Developing a drug all the way through from an idea to approval is something that requires investments in the hundreds of millions of dollars,” Hansen said. The typical timeline to initiate a program is somewhere north of a decade.
The global biotechnology market size is expected to reach US$2.44 trillion by 2028, according to a new report.
“If you made the analogy to the semiconductor industry, this would be like the 1950s—no one is yet understanding that we’re going to have supercomputers in our pockets—and biotechnology is on that trajectory.”
3. “Our goal is be the undisputed leader in antibody development in the world.”
AbCellera has big ambitions for global success – while remaining in Vancouver
AbCellera’s technology uses AI to identify potential therapeutics in human antibodies. Instead of trying to bring their own therapeutic products to approval, they assemble modern technologies to identify the molecule from our natural antibody response that can be moved forward into a potential drug.
With the success of bamlanivimab, Hansen told us that he wants to maintain and extend the company’s global lead for developing leading antibody technology for decades to come.
“What you’re going to see from us is R&D—you’re going to see technology, licensing and acquisition and probably most importantly, building out the capacity, the people, the systems, the infrastructure that allow us to have as big an impact as possible on the entire industry,” he said.
As a Canadian, it’s important to Hansen to do that important work right here at home.
In April of this year, AbCellera announced plans for a new 380,000 square-foot headquarters in Vancouver. They’ll also double their current headcount by the end of 2021, with a focus on software, engineering, and bioscience talent.
“The biggest ambition is to show the world that when you take a long view on technology and you get the right people in place, you can build an organization that people are proud to be a part of and one that has a real positive impact in the space and in particular in making it easier and faster to get therapies to patients,” said Hansen.
“And I do believe that that that starts with getting the people right and the technology and the mission of the company. And I feel like we’re on we’re on a great path.”
Speaker 1 [00:00:01] Hi, it’s John here. I’ve been studying and writing about Canadian business for a few decades now, and if there are half a dozen expressions that would capture that span of time, I got to think hollowing out would be one of them. Sure. We’ve seen the rise of some great Canadian companies. I’m thinking of Lululemon, Shopify, Cirque du Soleil. Over the decades. But we’ve also seen some other great names, Alcan and Nortel slide away because they didn’t have global scale. We’ve seen this in fairly blunt terms in the pandemic, too. When you think of the shortages of the last year, whether it’s PPE or foodstuffs or even toilet paper, it was often a function of global supply chains built for scale, built for efficiency, but not built for the kind of resilience that we need in more disruptive times like we’ve seen in a pandemic. We don’t have enough global champions rooted here in Canada. And as we move past this pandemic, we’re going to need to rethink our approaches to what used to be called industrial strategy for a post-industrial age when we’re going to need a lot more Canadian champions in a lot more of these emerging sectors that are going to shape our lives in the decades to come.
This is Disruptors, an RBC podcast, I’m your host, John Stackhouse. For all our supply chain challenges, one of the sectors set to emerge as a post pandemic winner is Canada’s talent rich biotech industry. Canada has had a world leading reputation in biotech for almost a century. It goes back to that famous discovery that we all studied in school of insulin at the University of Toronto lab in nineteen twenty two. And just last year, a Vancouver startup AbCellera Biologics developed what is now the leading antibody treatment for covid-19. COVID crystallized the vital importance of Canadian biotech, an industry that has the potential to develop the tools, treatments and vaccines to make the next time more manageable and less deadly. By early twenty twenty one, Canada’s 10 largest biotech companies and of Celera is tops among them, had a combined market cap approaching 30 billion dollars. The origin of AbCellera, just like Banting and Best’s treatment for diabetes, can be traced to a university lab. In AbCellera’s case, at the University of British Columbia. Back then, in twenty twelve, there were only six employees, one of whom is my guest today – AbCellera’s founder and CEO Dr. Carl Hansen. Carl, welcome to Disruptors.
Speaker 2 [00:02:57] Thanks, John. Good to be here.
Speaker 1 [00:02:59] Carl, you’ve been researching and working in the biotech sector for almost two decades, but I wonder if you could step back and describe with that benefit of hindsight, the state of the industry right now.
Speaker 2 [00:03:11] It’s something I think about a lot, in fact. And if you’re outside of this space, you may not appreciate what a tremendous trajectory the industry is on right now. You know, one of the things that comes to mind is I started in this field originally in engineering and then as a grad student, Caltech, and it was my second year at Caltech that to big fanfare, they announced the first draft of the human genome. So that was in two thousand, about 20 years ago. That’s a blink of the eye in the course of technology development. And since that time project that took about three billion dollars in 10 years to do, technology has moved so that we could do that hundreds of times in a week in a single lab. So the underlying foundational technologies for searching, for understanding biological systems have only just come of age. And what we’re seeing is a watershed moment across the entire industry. You’re seeing that in a big influx of capital and innovation that is now finally reaching patients with new therapies. I believe that we are only at the very beginning of this. You ask yourself, how much do we understand about biological systems? It is very, very little. And I really think over the next 30, 40 years, you’re going to see tremendous advances in our ability to understand and ultimately to treat patients.
Speaker 1 [00:04:27] It’s remarkable the way you frame it, that it took us the span of human history until 2002 to map the human genome. And then in just 20 years, we figured out how to do that in almost the snap of a finger. And what are we going to be able to do in the next 20 years?
Speaker 2 [00:04:44] Absolutely. If you made the analogy to the semiconductor industry, this would be like the nineteen fifties. Like we have the first transistors and people are getting excited about removing vacuum tubes. No one is yet understanding that we’re going to have supercomputers in our pockets. And biotechnology I think is on that trajectory. I’m not aware of any field or any discipline where the rate of data acquisition has gone up nearly as quickly as it has in biotechnology over the last 10 years, merely a factor of a million in the course of a decade, which is unprecedented.
Speaker 1 [00:05:14] What if the last 16 months taught you many things?
Speaker 2 [00:05:17] I mean, the last 16 months, obviously, the whole world got taught a few lessons about the importance of having a robust sector and what investments in technology can do when things hang in the balance for us. We had spent the last nearly decade in developing technologies to better search and analyze and explore natural immune systems to find antibodies, which are these naturally occurring molecules that our immune systems make, and then use those either to treat or prevent disease. So we’ve been doing that with a heavy emphasis on technology, trying to solve the hardest problems in drug development. And during the pandemic, we had the opportunity to step into the breach and apply that technology to in record time and find a therapeutic antibody to help treat patients. For me, what that really underscored was that what we had been pursuing for 10 years, this concept of heavy investments in technology, this concept of collaboration with other groups, was the winning formula in what was probably the most competitive antibody discovery effort that’s ever happened and an opportunity to prove the technology, to prove the team and really make it Celera, a household name across biotech. I mean,
Speaker 1 [00:06:25] it’s remarkable what you but so many other biotech companies have done in these these 16 months, and we’re still in the midst of it. What surprised you most about your own abilities to innovate over those? Over those?
Speaker 2 [00:06:38] Months, I’m not sure that we were surprised, I mean, we had been working on this problem for a long time, in fact, two years before the pandemic occurred, we had even had a program that was funded with an agency in the US, the Department of Defense, that was specifically trying to solve this problem of rapid pandemic response. So we had done the work. We knew we were ready. We believe that we would be able to come up with solutions faster than anyone else in the world. Maybe what surprised me was the massive impact that that could have in such a short time. It normally takes you 10 years. We work in an industry where it takes a decade to go from an idea through to an approved drug. In the course of the pandemic, we were able to solve the front end of that very quickly and then collaborate with Eli Lilly in the United States and also collaborate with government agencies, including the NIH and, of course, working closely with the regulatory agencies. And we’re able to shrink that timeline. Usually a decade before an approval, down to less than a year before this antibody had been through clinical trials, had been granted emergency use authorization, and as of today has been used in nearly half a million people in the US alone. We believe it saved tens of thousands of lives and tens of thousands of operations. So as a company, when you’re pursuing that mission all the time of finding drugs for patients and you expect it to be out in the future, to have that that whole experience compressed into 12 months is a tremendously satisfying and rewarding experience and one that really brought the team together and I think made everyone really, truly believe in what we’re doing in the long run, which is trying to do this again for other therapies.
Speaker 1 [00:08:17] And maybe I should stop you there and ask you to explain for our listeners who might not be biotech experts, what AbCellera does and how that differentiates from many other products, including vaccines that they may be familiar with.
Speaker 2 [00:08:34] So first off, AbCellera is a technology company. I often make a point of saying that we’re a technology company and not a biotech company. I make that distinction because most biotechnology companies are focused on bringing their own therapeutic products through the clinic and ultimately to approval. We set up a company very differently. We set up the company to assemble the best in class technologies, modern technologies from genomics, from competition, from cell biology, from engineering to make it much easier and faster at the front end of discovery to going from that scientific insight or that concept of what a therapeutic should be to the actual molecule that can be moved forward. Now, the way we do that is that we look through natural antibody responses, either in humans as in the case of covid-19 or in animals, and we sift through millions of different antibodies to find those that have those perfect qualities that make them able to neutralize the virus and also easy to manufacture and distribute as a drug out in the world. So that’s what we’ve been focused on. And the product that we were able to help develop during the pandemic is an antibody therapy that essentially can be given to patients and acts like synthetic immunity to stop the virus in its tracks, to keep people from getting sick, to keep them out of hospital and to keep them from dying.
Speaker 1 [00:09:56] You talked a bit about the pace of innovation through the pandemic, referencing largely US institutions and partners. But I wonder if you can give us a sense of Canada’s preparedness. We’ve seen a lot of restructuring of sectors, including biotech, over the decades, in some ways made us more competitive in other ways, made us perhaps less resilient. What’s your take on Canada’s position in terms of especially the biotech sector and our global positioning right now?
Speaker 2 [00:10:27] I don’t think that anyone would try to make the case that Canada was well-prepared for the covid-19 pandemic. And perhaps that’s not a terrible indictment because that was true broadly across the world. One of the things I would say is that if you look at the solutions that have been brought forward, the vaccine development, the therapeutics, the contact tracing, these have come from countries that have a very well-developed technology and biotechnology sector. And in many cases, those solutions, particularly things like the Moderna vaccine, the Pfizer vaccine, you can map their origins back to investments that were made in the US by the government, focused on finding new therapeutic modalities to treat cancer or even to treat vaccines. So Canada, unfortunately, over the past several years, I think I’d characterize as a nascent biotech sector what has happened over the past few months or year, I think has shown everyone the importance, not just for the economy, not just for creating jobs, not just for helping to do your part as a country in innovation, but also for national security and having your own supply chain and your own capabilities take care of your citizens. We could improve substantially some of the policies that. We have to make Canada more competitive for attracting investment for four growing businesses, also to make it more business friendly for sectors, particularly biotech, which are heavily regulated. And in many cases, Canada is actually a harder place to do business than in the US. And so with the stroke of a pen, with some good policy decisions, I think we can make a very big impact that would help to get more investment, bring more people into Canada doing biotech and probably most importantly, to make sure that companies that we have like AbCellera, can scale quickly and are incentivized to make sure that Canada remains their home base.
Speaker 1 [00:12:17] Carl, I want to go back to a point you just made about Canada being a harder country to do business in, one of the challenges for companies like yours is getting on the so-called lists of treatments. Not that that’s easy in the US, but what are some of the obstacles you face in terms of getting that kind of access in your home country versus the country next door?
Speaker 2 [00:12:40] There’s been a lot said about that, and I probably don’t want to go too far into all of the nuances of getting drugs approved and sold in Canada, in large part because that’s normally not an area that our company plays in and not one that we have a lot of attention to until recently. So if AbCellera typically would work on the front end of discovery and then we would work with partners like Eli Lilly to go through clinical development and ultimately through the commercial, one of the things that that I would highlight is that Canada has very little activity in terms of clinical trials. There are some differences between the requirements for starting clinical trials in Canada and the US. And those differences, at least in the covid-19 situation, have made it difficult to launch clinical trials in Canada. So there is, I think, a very strong case to be made to harmonize our way of evaluating drugs and launching clinical development with the US, since they are a much bigger player in this space and the proximity to Canada would make it a natural extension for those efforts. It’s worth highlighting what an opportunity that might be for Canada. So first of all, developing a drug all the way through from an idea to approval is something that requires investments in the hundreds of millions of dollars. So those investments go to the hospitals, the doctors, the data collection. And by making ourselves an attractive place to do clinical development, we would create a new industry that is new dollars coming into Canada and building up that research capability, which is so critical for the biotech sector. The other thing to point out is that there are diseases out there, unfortunately, for which we don’t have good drugs. And if you’re in Canada, it’s unlikely you’re going to be able to access those trials to get the early access to treatments that could really make a difference. To the extent we can make Canada a destination for clinical development, it would unlock value or drive investment to the country. It would bolster the environments and the expertize for clinical development of biotech. And it would be a win for patients who would be able to access those therapies more quickly.
Speaker 1 [00:14:44] I wonder, Carl, if you can shed a bit more light on your own strategic thinking for AbCellera, you’ve made a strategic decision to partner with leading drug makers. You’ve mentioned Eli Lilly and not be the drug maker itself. Maybe shed a bit of light on your thinking there and how you see things going forward.
Speaker 2 [00:15:01] We started the company back in 2012 and started it based on investments in technology development that I had been working on for about a decade at UBC and almost 20 years in my career. When we launched the company, it was really on on two main insights into the industry. And the first was that because the industry had been so focused on developing therapeutics, very little attention had been spent on refreshing and updating and improving the technologies that are the foundation for those early discoveries that lead to therapeutics. And when we really start to dig into that, we realized that most of drug development is still being done on technologies that were invented in the 70s and the 80s. And since that time, the entire world has changed. We have artificial intelligence. We have modern molecular biology, we have genetic engineering, and that is laid the opportunity or created the opportunity to reinvent that process.
Speaker 1 [00:15:58] Can I just stop you there for a second? That’s extraordinary that you’re working on tech platforms essentially from the 1970s, given the billions or over the span of time, trillions of dollars that go into the industry. Why was it so slow to evolve?
Speaker 2 [00:16:13] Of course, why? Questions are always difficult to compete in. The way I believe it has happened is in the early days, there were these technologies that were sufficient to solve the problems of the day and antibodies 30 years ago. This was not even a therapeutic type. And so people were skeptical that it would work. The early pioneers in that space had to solve a lot of problems and they worked with the technologies of the day. Once they did and it worked, they started to build infrastructure. They started to build processes and teams and ways of working that push that technology ever further. And that represented an ingrained way of doing the process and also a big sunk cost. Now, those companies, their business is to create drugs and bring them to the clinic. Their business is not to do technology development. And so at any point in time, if you looked at the current state of the technology, you would say, well, yes, maybe we could do it better, but we don’t have the teams and expertize and it would take a really long time to replace everything that we’ve done. And so there’s never a strong incentive to do it. Whereas a new company, a startup company, always has this advantage. In any industry, you do not have any such cost. You have a white page. And if you’re looking ahead, creating that vision for what a modern version of this would look like, you have the opportunity to build that right at the frontier of what’s possible. So that is the advantage of new companies all the time. It’s probably the reason that you often see small companies in the tax base, in the biotech space that reinvent processes that for many reasons should be done by the big companies. They have the people, they have the expertise, they have the capital. We set out to do that and build the company and the entire business strategy on this philosophy that long term investments in technology will fundamentally move the needle in how we develop drugs. They’ll open up new opportunities. They’ll make it faster, they’ll make it cheaper. And when we decided to do that, we made another decision that was quite orthogonal to what everyone thought was good business practice. We decided not to become a drug company, and instead we were going to build the platform or as we like to call it, the operating system and allow the entire industry to access that through partnerships. So we’ve worked now on well over one hundred programs or therapeutic development programs. We’ve worked with some of the biggest, most enabling companies in the industry right down to small startups. And the way in which we operate is they have a problem. They come to us, we work collaboratively. We bring their problem in-house. We apply our technology and we send them back the data and the sequence or the instructions for making the molecules that can then become drugs. And when those actually become drugs, we participate in the success by having a royalty on the final sales.
Speaker 1 [00:18:58] As you speak that way, Carl, we don’t always hear that kind of entrepreneurial hutzpah from scientists. You did a PhD in applied physics and biotech, as you mentioned from Caltech before, accepting a teaching position at UBC in two thousand and five. I think you’re still an adjunct professor at UBC. And I’m curious how you marry those two skills of science and entrepreneurship and whether they’re complementary or competing.
Speaker 2 [00:19:26] That’s a good question. I’ve been a scientist for many years, but I think I would more characterize what I have done as technology development. So I started my life in physics and engineering, realized after undergrad that I wanted to get myself into biotech and then began working back in two thousand. On developing technologies for biomedical research, one of the things that I learned very early on that path was that it is extremely powerful to have a healthy irreverence or credentialed expertize. So you must be willing to step outside of your comfort zone to attack problems wherever they may take you and be willing to be the novice and understand that you’re going to learn quickly. That’s an idea that I took back to UBC and we had grad students that had trained, let’s say in biology, we’re doing programing. We had programmers that were doing biology experiments. So when it got time to launch the company, the idea that we could then step into something we hadn’t done before, business or business development or H.R. or all these other things, that was not intimidating. If you’ve been a physicist that transitioned into genomics, making the transition into finance or something else, that’s just another thing that you need to learn. So I actually think in many ways that was good training for entrepreneurship. The other thing I’ll say about entrepreneurship is what it really is about is about being able to see the world with fresh eyes and to try to find the opportunities that everyone has missed for some reason. There’s a lot of work at the universities and locally in trying to somehow make a formula for creating companies and even to define what entrepreneurship is. In my view, no such thing exists. It’s really just about independent thinking and then being willing to commit to the path even when it’s hard, because the hard things are the ones that are ultimately going to be of value. That is something that I’ve been trying to communicate back to, would be entrepreneurs at UBC that you can’t create a company by consensus. You’ve got to actually have an idea. It starts with individual thought and then bring the right people around the table to make that a reality.
Speaker 1 [00:21:29] You can’t create a company by consensus. Those are words we can come back to. We’re going to take a quick break. But coming up, more of our conversation with Dr Carl Hansen of AbCellera on the future of biotech in Canada.
You’re listening to Disruptors, an RBC podcast. I’m your host, John Stackhouse. Key to the success of any entrepreneur is a keen sense of creativity. And in case you missed it, Disruptors recently dropped a special two part series on the subject with guests from iconic Canadian brands like Lululemon and Shopify, plus Richard Florida, the urban studies guru behind the book “The Rise of the Creative Class.” Find it wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome back. My guest today is Dr. Carl Hansen, the founder and CEO of AbCellera Biologics. I’m still intrigued with the idea of the new comer advantage and what newer firms can do that incumbents may not be positioned to. And often we see recapitalizations of sectors that that enable that. And in some ways, I wonder if we’re seeing that in biotech, if not a recapitalizations, certainly in a lot of new capital coming in, that should be allowing a lot of amplification as well as disruption. What do you think all that is going to lead to in terms of what the biotech sector can do, especially from the Canadian perspective in the 2020?
Speaker 2 [00:23:04] Well, obviously, the influx of capital, which is happening south of the border and also in Canada, is a huge tailwind for biotech. This is a sector that is very difficult to succeed in, and I mentioned it before, but the typical timeline from initiating a program, having a drug approved is somewhere north of a decade. If you factor in a failure, probably a couple of billion dollars on average per approved drug and certainly hundreds of millions for a program that is successful. So it’s an industry that requires investment. It requires long term investment in patient capital to ultimately create value, which only happens when we finally get therapeutics to patients. So all of that is very positive. Canada in particular, what I think we’re seeing is a renaissance of new companies that have been built in a different way from what we had maybe a decade ago. So a decade ago, we had some high flying companies, many of which were really focused on one or two drugs that they were moving forward. And when that works, it’s of course, it’s wonderful, but it’s always fragile. There can always be something that comes in and replaces it based on what was, I think, a real decline in our sector here in Canada. The new companies that came up really got built at a time when there wasn’t much capital and they found ways to bootstrap up and to take a more diversified and platform approach to building their business. So the new companies that we’re seeing are companies that are really focused on building the capabilities from which you can take multiple shots at doing drug development and then having those capabilities, being able to make deals with large pharma companies, with small pharma companies, to find revenue, to find validation until they get to that critical mass where they can start to develop their own drugs.
Speaker 1 [00:24:48] Curious what advice you might have for other Canadian companies, entrepreneurs especially wanting to get noticed by global investors and attract that kind of especially smart capital to whatever it is they’re doing.
Speaker 2 [00:25:01] It’s probably several things that I could say about that. Maybe the first would be that this is not something that you just flip a switch and you’re connected to these investors and you close these deals. These are relationships that need to be built over time. And so spending time in the big centers, taking the calls, networking, that’s a critical part of it. The other advice that perhaps is targeted really towards Canadians is to be wary of being too conservative in your plans, not bold enough in the vision that you’re you’re projecting. I’ve certainly noticed that if you’re north of the forty-ninth parallel, people are often criticizing you for being unrealistic and what you’re trying to achieve. And the same plan, if you pitch in in San Francisco, people would ask you why you’re wasting their time, because it’s not big enough. So if you are not setting the bar high enough, if you’re not going after that really big market, something that could be a global company, you are not going to attract the interest of the really best investors because they’re not looking for incremental. They’re looking for game changing ideas.
Speaker 1 [00:26:00] That’s great advice. I’ve heard from investors in Silicon Valley that whenever we hear a number from a Canadian entrepreneur, we usually add 20 percent because they’re always low balling it. That’s just the Canadian way. I wonder if you might share some reflections on the state of universities in this country. You’ve spoken very highly about UBC, which you’ve got a strong and long attachment to. And I’m wondering what we need to think about for the decades ahead in terms of the continued advancement of Canadian universities to be at the center of a thriving, globally relevant biotech sector or sectors.
Speaker 2 [00:26:37] I’ve actually thought a lot about that in my last two years as a professor at UBC, I had the unique perspective of being both an educator and an employer that was growing the company and had the opportunity to interview many, many employees. One of the things I would say, first of all, is that I don’t think there’s any requirement to revise the technical curriculum. If anything, we could take material out of the curriculum because most of what people need to know is the basis of science. Then they will learn what they need on the job. If anything, I think we need to better expose students to information about what is happening in the sector to make them first and what are the new technologies and what does it take to succeed in this space. So they get excited about it so they can better understand the relevance of what they’re doing. And perhaps third is spend more. Time emphasizing, if not developing those professional skills that are going to make the difference between being hired or not and that once you’re in an organization, ultimately determine how impactful you’re going to be and how high you can rise up in the organization. And so perhaps it’s not the most conventional view, but I think within the STEM fields, we’re probably have an overemphasis on the technical and not enough of an injection of the big picture and maybe even some of the liberal arts types of courses that help to round out a character and make someone a better a better employee and a better citizen.
Speaker 1 [00:27:59] And one of the common critiques is, you know, also is that we don’t commercialize enough, especially IP, whether it’s coming out of universities or other sources. What should we be thinking about as a country, especially coming out of the pandemic and with all the IP that we’re likely to see in fields like yours to ensure that more of it stays in Canada and becomes a stronger base for economic growth?
Speaker 2 [00:28:22] Well, intellectual property is critical. I think the very best way to get these technologies into the world is through the formation of companies getting more people interested in that space and providing the resources to help launch these companies, that it’s a hard thing to solve, but it’s one that gets better and better as you have local successes, perhaps a very practical thing that I think would make a huge difference, at least at UBC, and I suspect it’s true across the country, is that the technology transfer offices that manage this intellectual property and need to make those decisions on protection early on are woefully underfunded. If you look at the total budgets for discretionary funding, it’s a small fraction of what would be appropriate for a research organization of that size. I’m talking about low single digit percent, if even that high. So because of that, I’m sure we’re losing a lot of value that even when it gets picked up later by a company, perhaps it wasn’t filed as broadly as it could have been. That is something that’s easily corrected and that if we do it, I believe it’s going to keep more value here in Canada, both in terms of the IP and also the companies that are launched on it.
Speaker 1 [00:29:30] Tell us a bit about your own ambition for AbCellera. You started off with just six employees not so long ago and earlier this year it was just over two hundred. I think you’re planning to double that by year’s end. That’s pretty aggressive. You’re building a new campus in Vancouver. I’m wondering what gives you so much confidence about where things are heading to bet on this growth today?
Speaker 2 [00:29:50] I think we’re approaching three hundred employees and we’ll be well north of 450 by the end of the year. And the campus that’s getting built is three hundred and eighty thousand square feet, I believe, ballpark with additional plans to expand into manufacturing facilities. These are absolutely big plans, unprecedented, an unprecedented footprint here in Vancouver and of course, the creation of hundreds of well-paid, highly skilled, cutting edge technology jobs. One of the things that I am most excited about in the company is that emphasis on technology, our long term vision, is to become the undisputed leader in technology for therapeutic antibody development in the world. I actually think we are knocking on the door of that right now if we’re not already there, and to not just maintain, but to extend that advantage for decades to come. If AbCellera is a bold strategy on long term investments, on technology that could help to open up new therapeutic areas, make things run faster, and what you’re going to see from us is R&D. You’re going to see technology and licensing and acquisition and probably most importantly, building out the capacity, the people, the systems, the infrastructure that allow us to have as big an impact as possible on the entire industry. So I see that as a technologically advanced factory, the input of which is the problems of drug discovery and the output is innovation and the intellectual property that can lead to new therapies to treat patients. The biggest ambition is to show the world that when you take a long view on technology and you get the right people in place, you can build an organization that people are proud to be a part of and one that does one that has a real positive impact in the space and in particular in making it easier and faster to get therapies to patients and to do that in a way that reaches more people and is more cost effective. And I do believe that that that starts with getting the people right and the technology and the mission of the company. And I feel like we’re on we’re on a great path.
Speaker 1 [00:31:58] What an incredible vision. Incredible conversation. Carl, thanks so much for being part of Disruptors.
Speaker 2 [00:32:03] Thanks so much, John.
Speaker 1 [00:32:04] My guest today has been Dr. Carl Hansen, the founder and CEO of AbCellera Biologics. I’m John Stackhouse and this is Disruptors, an RBC podcast. Stay tuned in the weeks ahead as we bring you some of our favourite episodes from the past year and update some of the amazing stories of Canadian resilience. Talk to you soon.
Speaker 3 [00:32:32] Disruptors, an RBC podcast is created by the RBC Thought Leadership Group and does not constitute a recommendation for any organization, product or service. It’s produced and recorded by JAR Audio. For more Disruptors content like or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and visit rbc.com slash disruptors.
How many times did you visit a doctor’s office in the past year? If the answer is zero, you’re not alone. According to a recent study done by the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Ontario saw an almost 80% decrease in primary in-person health-care office visits during the early months of the pandemic. Meanwhile, virtual consultations with doctors skyrocketed across Canada.
The pandemic has accelerated digital adoption across the economy and society. Healthcare is no exception. Telemedicine holds the promise of enabling more Canadians to get the medical help they need, at a time when that need has arguably never been greater. As many as 40% of working Canadians experienced a decline to their physical health throughout the pandemic, according to a recent RBC Insurance poll.
To better understand the challenges, we spoke to three executives from telemedicine firms Maple (of which RBC is an investor), Well Health Technologies and Dialogue on our latest Disruptors podcast. All three firms experienced exponential growth during the past year and are cautiously optimistic for a more digital, patient-centric future for all Canadians.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Simplecast
Here’s some of what we heard:
Technology democratizes access to care, and helps make the system more efficient
Maple CEO Dr. Brett Belchetz is an emergency-room physician whose own experience of giving quick medical advice to friends and family over FaceTime inspired the vision for his company. Maple’s platform enables patients to connect directly with doctors in minutes via a smartphone or computer. Belchetz says telehealth provides a more convenient option for less-urgent medical needs and care, and frees up capacity for those who require in-person care.
“Every time I went to work in the hospital, I would see patients waiting eight hours to see me for three minutes of my time for really simple needs, like a prescription renewal, treatment of a urinary tract infection, or to have a rash looked at,” he said.
Changing the system is very complex and difficult, but telehealth has proven its worth
As CEO of the fourth-largest operator of health clinics in Canada, Well Health Technologies’ Hamed Shahbazi understands the challenges in driving change or pushing for the adoption of new technologies in an already overwhelmed health care system.
“I think a big reason for the lag in digitization and modernization is just how busy and burdened this group is and how little time they have for change management — and that’s where COVID was both treacherous and valuable,” he said.
According to Statistics Canada, most Canadians (91%) use the Internet and 75% also use social networking websites and apps, making telehealth a great option for care with fewer logistical efforts. A 2015 Harvard Medical School study estimated that, on average, a typical visit to a doctor takes over two hours — of which only 20 minutes are spent face-to-face with the physician. Virtual care offers a convenient and accessible solution for both patients and physicians in the comforts of home.
Digital health enables better communication and proactive insights
A 2018 study showed that around 40% of Canadians track one or more aspect of their health using connected care technologies, with 68% saying smart digital devices have allowed them to maintain or improve their health condition. Proponents of digital health believe that if they can measure an aspect of their life on a regular basis, they can improve it.
Digital tools may also be particularly valuable when it comes to treating mental health care. Montreal-based Dialogue launched a “high touch” mental health program before the pandemic, where every patient is assigned a doctor and therapist, along with a dedicated case manager for maintaining regular contact.
“This multidisciplinary team works with that patient to bring them to remission as quickly as possible, and then we maintain ongoing follow-up to make sure that these people don’t dip or don’t go back to some of those mental health issues that we know can be recurring,” said Anna Chif, the company’s co-founder and chief strategy and product officer.
“I think medicine overall is moving from, ‘I’m sick, I’m getting care’, to, ‘here are some behaviours you can change and here are some tools to do that’ in order to ensure that you don’t go down a path that leads you to sickness,” she said.
Speaker 1 – Theresa Do [00:00:01] If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably found yourself becoming hyper aware of your health over the past 14 months. Is this just a cough or is it the cough? The pandemic has made us experts and what symptoms to look out for — covid or otherwise. It’s also forced us to reconsider how we seek help. In the “before times”, the answer was simple: book an appointment to visit your doctor could take a couple of weeks, but eventually you’d have a time to show up at their office. Since covid, we’ve been turning to the digital alternative to in-person. Telehealth, basically, any way to get advice from qualified professionals or access your health records from anywhere has taken off. Consider this. In February 2020, fewer than a quarter of family physicians in Canada made themselves available by email, and just four percent provided video visits. Three months into the pandemic, virtual care represented more than 70 percent of the ambulatory care provided. What was once a slow moving part of the Canadian economy is now one of its most competitive and innovative.
This is Disruptors an RBC podcast, I’m Trinh Theresa Do, sitting in for John Stackhouse. In the first half of this episode, we’ll welcome an expert panel to discuss the state of digital health in Canada and get them to crystal ball what the future might hold for this fast changing sector. And in the second half, we’ll talk to the co-founder of a Montreal based telemedicine company that promises to put a human face on digital health care. While the digitization of health was well underway prior to 2020, the pandemic changed the rules of engagement almost immediately. Experts were projecting that 30 percent of all the ambulatory encounters in North America would be virtual by next year 2022. Compare that to just two percent at the start of 2020. Of course, those numbers are actually even higher in the middle of last year because so many of us were afraid of going to the doctor’s office or you know, even leaving the house. So where will those numbers land once a new normal or new comfortable reality is established? To explore this question and many others. I’d like to introduce two of the leading players in the Canadian digital health industry, Dr. Brett Belchetz is co-founder and CEO of Maple, a national virtual care provider connecting patients and health care practitioners for online medical visits. He’s also a practicing physician in Toronto and former management consultant with McKinsey and Co. Welcome to Disruptors, Brett.
Speaker 2 – Dr. Brett Belchetz [00:02:50] My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 [00:02:52] And also here with us today is Hamed Shahbazi, the founder and CEO of Well Health Technologies. A serial entrepreneur, Hamad also founded payment solutions provider Tío Networks, which was sold to PayPal in 2017. Hamed, welcome to Disruptors.
Speaker 3 – Hamed Shahbazi [00:03:06] It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me, Theresa.
Speaker 1 [00:03:08] Before we get into the state of this fast moving and complex industry, I’d like to understand how you both got into it in the first place. Brett, you’re an E.R. doctor. That’s probably a very busy and demanding job. So why did you decide to launch Maple back in 2015? And how do you balance that while still doing some shifts at the hospital?
Speaker 2 [00:03:28] I would say my experiences in the hospital are actually one of the primary drivers for what led me to start this company. Every time I went to work in the hospital, I would see patients waiting eight hours to see me for three minutes of my time for really simple needs, like a prescription renewal, treatment of a urinary tract infection, to have a rash looked at. And at the same time, what I was noting is that my friends and family members, they didn’t have to have that unpleasant eight hour wait in the emergency room. So my friends and family members, they got to text me and they got to FaceTime me and I was able to solve most of their issues in a matter of a few minutes while I was at home and while they were at home by text message or by FaceTime. And that made me realize there was an opportunity to bring that kind of convenience of health care to everybody in the country. And that was really the moment that led us to say, let’s build that platform. We didn’t see anybody else that was doing that. We didn’t see anything like that in Canada. Let’s build that ourselves and let’s bring that kind of convenience to all Canadians. When we started Maple, I was working a full time set of emergency room shifts at the same time as running Maple. And typically I would run Maple from 8:00 a.m. until six p.m. and then go to the hospital in the evenings. And that was not an enjoyable life and not very good for friends and family relationships either. That’s definitely been dialed back over the years. And so typically I’ll do a couple shifts a month, typically on weekends, just to keep my skills up. But by and large, my Monday to Friday schedule is all about the business.
Speaker 1 [00:04:46] Hamed, when you founded well, in 2010, it was a network of yoga studios, I believe, licensing, the Deepak Chopra brand. And you’re a long time tech entrepreneur. So what was the appeal of health and wellness and why did you ultimately pivot away from yoga?
Speaker 3 [00:05:00] I had a relationship with Dr. Deepak Chopra and thought that it was really a phenomenal opportunity to bring his practices and teachings, especially the consciousness-based meditation and yoga practices that he was teaching in his Lucosta centre down in California. And Tio was sold in 2017, and I was pretty busy operating that business. I’ve always been interested in, I’ll just call them wellness technologies. I think yoga is a wellness technology. So is meditation. So exercise. And I’ve always been kind of a bio hacker and an entrepreneur at heart. And I think the journey as an entrepreneur often leads you to a place of wanting to aspire to greater and greater impact. And there’s no more juicy opportunity for impact, if I could use that word, than health care, because I think it’s sort of the original impact investment sector and the opportunity to tech enable businesses with something that really gave me confidence to understand that I didn’t need to necessarily be a doctor like Brett to make a difference, I could make a difference by bringing whatever gifts and talents that I had, but also bringing together talented people like Brett. My experiences in medical clinics in British Columbia definitely were instructive and helpful to understanding that there was a lag in health care digitization and modernization — and a tremendous opportunity to get involved with that and really push that along. And a recognition that no sector evades digitization, so this is going to happen at some point in time. And what a great opportunity to be a part of. And so while, Well, does have telehealth services like Maple, we also do a bunch of other things. We own health care clinics and allied health and primary care. We have secondary care practitioners. We have electronic medical records, services. We have billing and back office, just a whole suite of, I’ll just say, practitioner empowerment and enablement technologies and tools.
Speaker 1 [00:07:01] And that’s a good lead in actually, I’m curious if you can give our listeners a quick description about where Well and your respective offerings, where do they fit into the broader health care landscape in Canada?
Speaker 3 [00:07:11] So much of health care is driven by those workers, those frontline workers, the physicians. And I think a big reason for the lag in digitization and modernization is just how busy and burdened this group is and how little time they have for change management. And I think that’s where covid was both treacherous and valuable. Stepping back, that’s what, Well, really set out to empower the two most important subjects in the health care equation, the patient and the doctor. And we started our focus on the doctor and other health care practitioners. So, again, the vast majority of all the different products and services that we have, even though they’re organized in different business unit, that’s really sort of the unifying principle that they’re assisting physicians in and supporting their business.
Speaker 1 [00:07:58] Brett, I’d like to turn to you with the same question. Can you give us a quick overview of Maple and how it fits into the landscape in Canada as well?
Speaker 2 [00:08:06] If you go back to the premise as to why we started the business, the number one thing we were solving for was that it was very, very difficult to get access to primary care, specialty care, etc. And so our entire system looked at this problem set, which was contrary to what is the common misconception in Canada, that we have a lack of access to care because we don’t have enough doctors. In fact, the problem is that we don’t use our existing physician workforce well. If you actually look at the statistics of physician workforce utilization in Canada, what you’ll find is that 50 percent of primary care doctors and 50 percent of specialists actually do not work full year full time. So there’s tons of hours up for grab. And there’s many, many reasons why we’re not using all of those physician hours that are available. I would say that probably the number one driver of that is the way the physical health care system is designed, is that it makes it very hard for a physician to want to work or to be able to work full time. If we go back to what we do, we built a platform that really allows us to tap into all that excess capacity to make it available in the virtual world to patients that are across the country. So we’re able to blow away wait times that you would see and shift based systems that you see in the physical health care system. So our average wait time in that system is about two minutes, so from the time a patient clicks to say, I need to see a doctor, they’re typically speaking to a doctor in about two minutes time.
Speaker 1 [00:09:22] Hamed, your company has bet big on bricks and mortar. Well is the single largest operator of primary health care clinics in B.C. and the fourth largest operator in Canada, I’m sure your background in payments was very helpful in handling medical claims processes for physicians and other practice management needs. My question is, why was it important for, Well to be in the practice management clinic operations business?
Speaker 3 [00:09:45] Well, again, had a bit of a different mission and objective than Maple. And for us, we were really wanted to invest and grow in areas that we felt would also be benefited greatly by digitization and modernization. So in our view, there was a really valuable opportunity to help progress the plain vanilla medical clinic and to make it the clinic of tomorrow. And what does that really mean? That means elevating the software and workflow and tools and capabilities of clinicians and practitioners. It also means elevating the cybersecurity. It means improving the payment technology – it means so many of these clinics were operating in the Stone Age. And and so it just seemed like a really valuable endeavour, both from a value creation perspective, but also from a purpose perspective. Given how many of these clinics are out there and the need for them to continue to be there.
Speaker 1 [00:10:42] I want to quickly turn to the use of technology in your work, in providing access to services and improving health care outcomes, but also lean into the physical question, the bricks and mortar question, which will always be a mainstay in health care. And Brett, I understand you’re driving towards an omnichannel health experience. Can you tell us more about that?
Speaker 2 [00:11:01] I think from clinical experience, I can tell you that about 50 percent of problems are pretty transactional and don’t require me to touch a patient, but 50 percent of problems require me to do something that is physical. And so speaking about omni channel, then the question is how do we then enact an omni channel strategy for a company such as ourselves that exists only in the virtual world? And I think for us it’s not about building out our own chain of clinics. I think there are many people that have excellent powerful chains of clinics and we don’t need to replicate that. There are companies like Hamed’s company that they have a fantastic presence in the physical world, our partnership with Loblaw and Shoppers Drug Mart, who made a very large investment in our company in the fall of 2020, they have one of the largest physical presences in the country in terms of a physical footprint of health care clinics. And many of those clinics are able to be increased in terms of the level of care they’re providing. So I think in terms of omni channel, where we go is we’re awesome I think in the virtual world, I think we’ve created a great experience there. But those who have really done a great job perfecting the in-person experience, what we want to have is a system of very well orchestrated handoffs between the physical and virtual world. I don’t want to go and build a chain of physical clinics. I want to work with those who’ve done it and I want to coordinate that very well.
Speaker 1 [00:12:11] Concerns over data and privacy have been very big topics recently, especially so. I’m curious, how do you allay the concerns and objections from some patients, doctors and others in the sector about how privacy is handled? Brett, I’ll turn to you.
Speaker 2 [00:12:26] End to end, it starts with, we have a very basic set of requirements in Canada around what our privacy law requires. There’s some very well accepted standards around what you have to do in terms of data security. And we have to make sure that we very transparently communicate how we adhere to all of those requirements under Canadian privacy legislation. And certainly, I think in the early days of digital health care in Canada, there were a number of players that were not properly adhering to that. And even during the early days of the pandemic, we saw the use of platforms for virtual care that did not adhere to Canadian privacy legislation requirements. We saw many health care providers thinking that they could use FaceTime for a health care visit, which you cannot for a number of reasons. I think the other side of it is, when you look in the digital health space and especially in the United States, what you’ll see is there are many, many businesses whose entire economic model is based on the monetization of patient data. And that is quite problematic. I think while there is a certain segment of the population that is probably OK with that, I think many patients would feel very, very concerned about the fact that they are viewed as an asset to be monetized and especially with their health care information. We as a company, for instance, have taken a philosophy from the beginning that we will never monetize your patient data, we will never sell your data to others. We will never let others profit off of your data.
Speaker 3 [00:13:42] Yeah, so I would echo what Brett said. I think he laid it out really nicely. And we have precisely the same philosophy. We do not monetize patient data under any circumstances. We also have, you know, a ton of data. I think that’s a really important statement for a player like us to make. We have the third largest EMR in the country on a portfolio of telehealth assets, which is something I haven’t really talked much about, which is a sizable portfolio, depending on what metric you use. I’m sure we’re somewhere in the top three, but we probably have well over 20 million consumers in our combined EMR databases, and that’s not even considering some of the other assets that we have. So we have a tremendous amount of data. And to us, it’s incredibly important to draw a hard line, a very clear line about that.
Speaker 1 [00:14:32] Where do you see things going post pandemic? What opportunities are there for entrepreneurs and leaders like yourselves who want to improve the way health care is delivered in Canada? Brett, we’ll start with you.
Speaker 2 [00:14:44] So I think we’re really at a crossroads as we come out of the pandemic. I think we’re in a place where we’re either going to achieve remarkable gains in terms of where we go or we’re going to see things back track. Unfortunately, a lot of where we go will depend on what our governments decide to do next. We’ve had an attitude for a little while with government is that we want to sort of have our cake and eat it too, which is we’re going to be able to reduce our capital spending on hospitals because we’re going to move a lot of care to be virtual, but we’re not going to fund the virtual infrastructure. So now we can just take a lot of money and save it. And I think that’s where the attitude was. And I think you’re starting to see a growing realization on the part of government here in Canada. And you’ve seen a lot of announcements of investments in virtual care where they’ve started to say, in fact, we should fund virtual infrastructure the same way we fund physical. We want patients and doctors and allied health care providers to have very strong and good experiences in virtual. We want it all interconnected. So we are actually going to realize that we need to dedicate similar to what Kaiser did, very large amounts of funding that we’re going to save in the hospital system to virtual care. At some point in time, every entrepreneurial company, no matter where you’re born, has to say what’s the most receptive market for us? And I want it to be Canada because I’m very proud Canadian. I want our government to create awesome digital infrastructure. But in the end, we as a company are going to go where there’s opportunity and I hope it’s here, but if it’s not here, we’ll go to where the opportunity is.
Speaker 1 [00:15:59] It sounds like some cautious optimism, but still big questions ahead. How about how about you, from your perch, what does the future look like?
Speaker 3 [00:16:05] When I ask people, what do you think is the most important factor in maintaining good health? You’d be surprised. The answer, access to quality health care rarely comes up. It turns out your behaviours, your lifestyle is what really drives the greatest influence in terms of where you go from a health and wellness perspective. The problem is a lot of people just don’t know how to act. They don’t know how to eat. They don’t know that there are gently eroding their good health over time. Patient empowerment platforms that bring your data together demonstrate how you’re doing against those benchmarks and nudge you gently and maybe sometimes not so gently are incredibly important.
Speaker 1 [00:16:49] As we’ve said, this sector is very complex and there are a lot of challenges facing us. But from our conversations today, both of you have expressed a lot of optimism and enthusiasm for the challenge. So thank you both for being here today on our show. Hamed and Brett, I really appreciate your time.
Speaker 3 [00:17:07] Thanks, Theresa. I really appreciate it. And thanks to Brett as well.
Speaker 2 [00:17:10] And thank you so much for having me. It was a real pleasure and also a pleasure chatting with you again Hamed.
Speaker 1 [00:17:15] My guests today have been Brett Belchetz, CEO of Maple, and Hamed Shahbazi the CEO of Well Health Technologies. Coming up, we’ll talk to another leader in the telemedicine space about how they aim to humanize the delivery of telehealth services.
Midpoint – Speaker 1: You’re listening to Disruptors, an RBC podcast. I’m Teresa Do, filling in for John Stackhouse. Key to success of any entrepreneur is a keen sense of creativity. And in case you missed it, Disruptors recently dropped a special two-part series on the subject with guests from iconic Canadian brands like Lululemon and Shopify, plus Richard Florida, the urban studies guru behind the book, The Rise of the Creative Class. Find it wherever you get your podcasts.
PART 2
Welcome back. As our previous panel laid out, digital health is a vibrant sector full of opportunities, but some Canadians are still hesitant to log on, preferring the in-person intimate experience that they get with their primary care provider. The question is, can digital health care providers offer the same sort of intimate care that your local doctor or clinic can? Can virtual care show love? To answer that question, I’d like to introduce Anna Chif, the co-founder and chief strategy and product officer for Dialogue, a Montreal based telemedicine company. Dialogue promises to, quote, humanize health care and offer a more personalized approach to digital health care delivery. Anna, welcome to Disruptors.
Speaker 4 – Anna Chif [00:18:56] Thank you. Thank you so much, Theresa.
Speaker 1 [00:18:58] So the story of health care is ultimately the story of human beings. And everyone’s journey through the health care system is a very personal one. Anna, can you tell our listeners the story about your grandmother and how it is you came to found Dialogue back in 2016.
Speaker 4 [00:19:15] So, you know, I always speak about the founding of Dialogue as an alignment of stars. We came, we’re three co-founders. We were part of Diagram and we all came to working on Dialogue from a very personal experience and mine that still inspires me today and gets me out of bed is, in early 2016 I was taking care of my grandmother who was in palliative care. She was struggling from from a cancer that took over her body and was exchanging with my mother quite a bit, kind of the shifts in staying with her. And every time we had a question, we, it was a struggle to get answers. And I vividly remember this one night where she was very sick and I tried to get a hold of her doctor. And the nurse of our oncologist basically said, look, like he can see her, but you need to bring her to the emergency room. And I was like, it doesn’t make sense, it’s 2016, and there’s got to be a different way. And that to me was like this deep motivation for building a service and a product that has empathy and care at the core of what we do. And today we serve thousands of individuals every day. And what I think about the fact that some of them come with these sorts of issues that couldn’t be answered five years ago, I think it’s just it’s something that today is still really, really motivating, at least, you know, to me personally.
Speaker 1 [00:20:40] My my grandmother, she passed away last year. And I remember before she passed, she was in and out of the hospital because of her diabetes, which gotten very severe. But I remember there was one acute point where she was so afraid of going back to the hospital because it felt very inhuman — you wait there for hours and then you see a doctor for a few minutes and they kind of look at you, they look away and they leave the room. And I remember that being so heartbreaking because you want to care for them. You want them to have the best possible health they can where they are. And and yet sometimes our system doesn’t allow for that.
Speaker 4 [00:21:16] And you know, what’s really kind of special, I would say, in Canada is that the providers that we have, the doctors, the nurses that work in our health care system, the reason they do it is because they care for people. So what to me is so special about technology and virtual care is just this ability to redirect a portion of the population being treated differently so that the people who really need this in-person care get it and get that attention, and that it’s not just a few minutes coming from a physician who probably has the best intentions, but it’s just not set up in a way yet to tackle every person.
Speaker 1 [00:21:51] You’re based in Montreal, which was ground zero for, unfortunately, casualties in the first wave of the pandemic, especially among seniors and long term care homes. How did those first few months affect you personally, especially as someone working in the health care sector?
Speaker 4 [00:22:06] One of the investments that we’ve done earlier on at Dialogue is investing in smart triage, so we have, we call her Chloë. It’s it’s an automated medical assistant. So what we did is within a few days, hackathon style, we made that Chloe available to all Canadians. And that was before every government had their own guidelines and regulations. And so everybody, especially when it hit and all of Canada went into confinement, people were looking for information. So what we did is we made Chloe accessible to everybody and we were redirecting based on symptoms and questions and province or location, we’re redirecting patients to the right next step in the right information. At some point, we’ve welcome a million users in a week. So we had to scale up our platform and make sure that all these people could gain access if they needed to the platform. And the other part of the story, and that’s something we hear in the news quite a bit related to the pandemic, but we see it in the numbers. It’s mental health issues doubled on our platform between 2020 and 2021. It’s massive, right? It is, thankfully, getting more and more destigmatized because I think more and more people are living it. But the number of people who come on the platform at the brink of burnout because either their employer is cutting employees and shutting down or putting everybody on temporary leave or some other sectors like the virtual care sector that are booming and that are expanding so fast that how can you keep up with that scale up and the remote work and kids at home and young kids at home. I had a covid baby. And so just personally learning to manage having a baby that didn’t see anybody, not being able to see my family, my family, not knowing him, you know, working throughout that. And I think it’s just it just brought these virtual medical services to be much more human and to use that approach in every single interaction.
Speaker 1 [00:24:08] You hear of people who are more comfortable speaking about their struggles in the comfort of their own homes. And yet there are also others who have trouble connecting with practitioners over the screen. So how are you approaching that?
Speaker 4 [00:24:21] So that’s a really great question. And we actually pre pandemic launched a mental health program that we called a very high touch mental health program. So what we did in that program specifically was, every member who would come in, who would have access to that specific mental health program with any health or wellness concern, we would surround that patient with, first, a case manager who acts as an accountability partner or somebody who follows up, but also a doctor and a therapist. And different people react to different things. So it’s not just therapists in person or in video or not. Some people are much better reacting to medication because of the way they are. And they trust more the kind of, the external solution or medication then working through painful realities that they’re going through, and so it depends. So we would have this multidisciplinary team that works with that patient to bring them to remission as quickly as possible. And then we maintain ongoing follow-up to make sure that these people don’t dip or don’t go back to some of those mental health issues that we know can be recurring. But you’re absolutely right. That approach is not for everybody. And one of the new programs that will be launching in 2021 is actually Internet based cognitive behavioral therapy. So something that is much more patient led and that also can address a wider scope of mental health issues. Often a lot of individuals don’t perceive themselves as suffering from mental health issues. They might say, you know what, I’m just having a really stressful time and so getting into that direction of having cognitive behavioral therapy that you kind of do on your own pace becomes really interesting and important.
Speaker 1 [00:26:06] I’d like to pivot towards the broader approach of the company. There was a strategic decision to target employers for your services rather than going directly to patients. Why was that decision made?
Speaker 4 [00:26:17] Our platform has always been this B2B. So what is B2B mean? It just means that when we make the platform available, we make it available to employers for their employees or through channels. It could be insurers such as Canada Life, Sunlife and others. It could be student associations. The reason we took that approach is that we always believed and that I think resonates quite well with just the Canadian health care system, is that a patient should be empowered to use a service whenever they need when it comes to their health and wellness. And so we don’t have this notion of the individual paying for consultation. And it also doesn’t create this obligation on the medical side to deliver something. So we have a team that we recruit, that we train, that we train the Dialogue kind of empathy way, but we always make sure that what the team does for any given member or patient is the best thing for that patient, despite somebody coming in and saying, well, I want antibiotics. So there isn’t that that expectation. So for us, having the employer pay made it more accessible and also remove that odd dynamic where because I paid you as an individual, I’m now expecting that you do what I paid you for. It also allowed us to train our staff in a certain way, very much around empathy and follow ups and follow ups are obviously free because it’s all included as part of what your employer offers to you. And it’s also a way to focus for us. I think every company picks an angle of focus and for us, making sure that we work with our clients to ensure that as many employees as possible in those organizations use the service is our focus.
Speaker 1 [00:28:07] You mentioned the Dialogue way a couple of times. And I’d love to ask you more about, that, how does that approach stand out and what goes into developing that empathy?
Speaker 4 [00:28:18] You asked me for stories, so I’ll start with a story. So we, when we were getting started, we had this nurse, Chloe, and by the way, our medical automated assistant is called Chloe after this wonderful human being. But she was she was a nurse that was working on Dialogue. She was our first nurse. She joined us before Dialogue even had a name. And for her, the reason she went into nursing is because she deeply cared about every individual. And at the very beginning, when we had two patients a day and then 20 patients a day, she was handling every single one of them. And she knew those patients and she was following up. And I remember we were sitting in a cafe with her and I said to her because we hired a second and a third nurse, and I said, Chloe, we need to we need to codify what you do. We need to like, write it down. And that list and that cafe became this initial training that we started giving every single member that was coming in. And so back then, there wasn’t a Dialogue way. It was just that’s how we wanted to treat every single person who came on the platform. And as we hired more people, we started screening for people who deeply care, who see medicine as a way to improve and make people’s lives better and happier. And over time, this bullet list on a piece of paper drawn in a cafe turned into a real training that every single professional who works on our platform today, whether it’s a care coordinator, a doctor or a nurse practitioner.
Speaker 1 [00:29:48] What challenges do you see over the next 14 months in scaling this platform and now that you’ve gone public, bringing more and more Canadians onto it?
Speaker 4 [00:29:58] So certainly one of the challenges and opportunities is to make sure we prioritize the right products and services for our members and make sure that people continue using it and continue coming back to Dialogue. From the early days, when, we said don’t Google it, Dialogue it, because when you Google something, it’s quite terrifying. And when you come to Dialogue, it’s quite reassuring. So I think it’s continuing to build that, to build that habit. I would say those will be the right challenges. How do we continue scaling that, offering the right products? And quite frankly, I certainly don’t want to take it as a given that our Dialogue way or that our culture is something that is nailed forever. I think as we continue scaling, as we’re bringing more and more individuals as part of the team, that is certainly top of mind.
Speaker 1 [00:30:44] So then my final question following on that, is where do you see virtual care going in Canada next year and beyond?
Speaker 4 [00:30:52] From a Dialogue standpoint I think it’s going more and more into this proactive and predictive type of medicine where patients come in, maybe share some information and over time, we’re able to give them something more relevant and capture issues at the very, very kind of nascent point of them, as opposed to treating issues that have been lingering for years. So that’s definitely somewhere I see both Dialogue going. But I think medicine overall is moving from I’m sick, I’m getting care, to: here are some behaviours you can change and here are some tools to do that in order to ensure that you don’t go down a path that leads you to sickness.
Speaker 1 [00:31:34] A much more proactive balanced, holistic way of living and approaching one’s health care. That is so fascinating, Anna, thank you so much for your time and for this conversation.
Speaker 4 Thank you. Thanks, Theresa.
Speaker 1 My guest today has been Anna Chif, the co-founder of Dialogue. I’d also like to thank Brett Belchetz, the CEO of Maple and Hamed Shahbazi, the CEO of Well Health Technologies. I’m Teresa Do and this is Disruptors, an RBC Podcast. Join us next time when we’ll talk to some of Canada’s leading indigenous entrepreneurs about the skill sets required to create the leaders of tomorrow. Talk to you soon.
Speaker 4 [00:32:16] Royal Bank of Canada is an investor of Maple (RBC holds Class A Common).
Disruptors, an RBC podcast is created by the RBC Thought Leadership Group and does not constitute a recommendation for any organization, product or service. It’s produced and recorded by Jar Audio. For more Disruptors content, like or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and visit RBC Dotcom slash disruptors.
Space is having a moment right now.
In February, NASA’s robotic explorer made a historic landing on Mars. In April, Space X successfully launched its inaugural crewed mission to the International Space Station. And in 2023, a Canadian astronaut will join Artemis II, the first crewed mission to the moon since 1972. High above the pandemic turmoil playing out on Earth, space has once again become an engine for excitement, activity and human ambition.
It’s also big business. Space industry investments reached USD$25.6 billion in 2020, the third highest in the decade, according to a recent report. Morgan Stanley estimates that the global space industry could generate revenue of more than USD$1 trillion by 2040.
In the latest episode of Disruptors, co-host Trinh Theresa Do speaks with several leading voices from Canada’s space industry, to gain their insights on what lies ahead for our country’s space sector. The consensus? Canada is well positioned to lead into the next galaxy, so to speak. Here’s some of what we learned.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Simplecast
Space isn’t a new frontier for Canada – our strong reputation precedes us
Over the past sixty years, Canada has punched above its weight in space, having made early decisions to focus on robotics and satellite/earth observation technologies. Through the development of the Canadarm and other innovations, it built and still enjoys a world-leading reputation in those fields.
“Canada chose strategically a few decades ago to become strong in radar-based earth observation, based on our challenges as a country and our desire to monitor all of our large, broad coastal areas with three maritime coasts,” said Mike Greenley, CEO of Brampton, Ont. based MDA, who’s iconic Canadarm graces the back of our five dollar bill. “I would say I’m a bit biased, but I think that was a wise decision. You can’t be part of everything but you need to pick your shots and then stand behind them.”
Lower launch costs are opening opportunities for new entrants
The decreased cost of launch has enabled a new generation of startups to enter the space economy. Where the cost to launch into space was once USD$18,000 a kilogram, it’s now down to $3,000 a kilogram—and could fall as low as $500, according to projections.
One company taking advantage of this shift is Silicon Valley startup Swarm Technologies, whose tiny communication satellites promise affordable global connectivity.
“The market, in terms of our customer base, has grown considerably over the last four years, so the pull on the demand side is actually growing and has grown since we started, which is awesome for us,” said Sara Spangelo, Swarm’s Winnipeg-born co-founder and CEO.
The future is bright with news of the Canadarm3
Today, our space sector employs 10,000 highly skilled workers and generated $2.3 billion for Canada’s economy in 2017. The advent of commercial space has brought with it new opportunities and a surge of entrepreneurs who are investing significant resources into exploring the unknown, said Manon Larocque, Executive Director, Strategic Policy and Domestic Affairs, at the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).
What began decades ago with the Canadarm design and operations on the international space station is now extending well into the future, with December’s announcement that MDA would develop a third-generation, AI-based Canadarm3, destined for “Gateway,” a NASA-led lunar-orbiting international space station.
“Space challenges us to think about our place in the universe, it pushes us to further explore, constantly innovate. Right now is a perfect time to be doing this with some global opportunities on the horizon,” said Larocque.
Unidentified [00:00:06] Hey, it’s Theresa,
Speaker 2 [00:00:13] did you tune in back in February when Perseverence hurdled through the thin Martian atmosphere to become the latest spacecraft to reach the red planet? It was really, really exciting to be able to watch the landing in real time and then two months later, to see NASA’s Mars Ingenuity helicopter make history as the first paragraph to fly on another planet. But this is only the latest in a string of big happenings beyond Earth’s surface — from Space X’s inaugural crewed mission to the International Space Station, the first human launch from American soil in nearly a decade, to news that a Canadian will join the U.S. and Artemis two in 2023. You could say things are really taking off with the launch of about one. In September of 1962, Canada became the third country to put an artificial satellite into space. And over the past six decades, Canada has developed a world leading reputation in robotics and satellite and earth observation technologies as we approach our seventieth anniversary in space. The question is, what will it take for Canada and Canadian companies to continue to be seen as leaders in space? This is Disruptors, an RBC podcast. I’m Trinh Theresa Do sitting in for John Stackhouse. In the first part of the show, we’ll talk to one of the pioneers of Canada’s robotic sector, a company that put this country on the extraterrestrial map. We’ll talk to the Canadian engineer behind an upstart satellite maker based in Silicon Valley who’s now making waves around and above the world. But first we ask an expert, what are the opportunities for Canada in space right now?
Speaker 1 [00:02:00] My name is Manon Larocque. I am the executive director of Strategic Policy and Domestic Affairs at the Canadian Space Agency, CSA. It is an exciting time right now to be in space. There has been a lot of changes in business models, namely with the advent of commercial space. So more and more space entrepreneurs that are looking at what can be done in outer space and are investing significant amount of resources to go and explore space, explore the unknown. In Canada, we have been active in the space world for many, many years and have certainly recognized how space provides a unique vantage point from which to observe Canada, significant land mass and coastal areas to connect Canadians as well. Space challenges us to think about our place in the universe, pushes us to further explore, constantly innovate and the right. Now is a perfect time to be doing this with some global opportunities on the horizon.
Speaker 2 [00:02:57] Canada’s history in space dates back decades, but there is a definite sense of momentum right now. And one of the companies that’s been there from the start is Brampton, Ontario based MDA. Just last December, it was tapped to develop a third generation A.I. based Canadarm three. It’s the most advanced robotics technology yet and destined for Gateway, a NASA led lunar orbiting International Space Station is an exciting new technology that promises to open up a whole new world of opportunities. To discuss that and more, I’m joined today by MDAs chief executive officer Mike Greenly. Mike, welcome to Disruptors.
Speaker 3 [00:03:33] Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here.
Speaker 2 [00:03:35] So, Mike, you’ve spent more than twenty five years in the defense and security sector before joining MDE in twenty eighteen. Why did Space appeal to you?
Speaker 3 [00:03:44] Actually, Space has always appealed to me. Back when I was a student in university, I was actually in a co-op program. I did work terms, defense research labs and the defense research labs where we’re doing analysis and research work with the the first six astronauts the candidate ever had. So very, very early in my career, I got to work in space and and study what it means to go to space and study space sickness and space orientation. And that kind of got in my blood right from the start. And then I spent a lot of time in defense and aerospace, like you said, and now I get to come back to space and have a great run here with NBA.
Speaker 2 [00:04:17] That’s perfect. You are so well positioned to tell the storied history of our sector. And MDA is considered a legacy company within the sector, responsible for a lot of the reputation, the esteem that Canada has built up over the years. Because if people know anything about Canada’s efforts in space, it is the Canada arm with the Canadian flag emblazoned on its side and appearing in countless photos and videos. How important has the Canadarm been to the development of our domestic space sector?
Speaker 3 [00:04:46] I think it’s been really important. Like you say, it’s become the iconic kind of sort of brand icon of Canada’s participation in space. Canada was the third country to go into space. People don’t know that we didn’t go into space by going to the moon. Everybody else was trying to get to the moon. But we started doing business in space, putting communication satellites up. That was then followed by Earth observation satellites. And we started to do economic activity and nation building capability in space because Canada is such a large and diverse nation, such a large piece of real estate. If you want to be able to observe the goings on around Canada and our borders, it’s easy to do that from space. If you want to bring communication or TV signals and everything to such a large country, then it’s easy to do that from space. In addition to the inspirational element that comes from participating in space exploration, going to the moon, having an international space station, having an astronaut corps, and then, like you say, that iconic Canadarm on that space station. It has become when you survey poll Canadians and I’ve I’ve sat behind two way mirrors and listened to focus groups about Canadians talking about space. Everybody knows the Canada arm. It’s on the back of our five dollar bill. It’s become a very important iconic element, but it represents that that full, broad range of participation in space that I just described.
Speaker 2 [00:06:01] I’d love to dig into the company a little bit more because MJ is more than just the Canadarm, along with robotics and space operations. You’re involved with geo intelligence and satellite systems. Can you share with our listeners how these business lines work together in support of the company’s mission?
Speaker 3 [00:06:17] We are an advanced technology provider across the space sector. That’s what MDA is where we’re based in Canada. We’re a Canadian based company, but we’re a global technology provider around the world, across the space sector and almost every element of space except launch. When you look at what happens in space, we have. At the first level, this space to earth economy and in the space to earth economy, we have communication and earth observation and earth observation. We put up satellites to observe the Earth and we sell and deliver images of the activities on Earth to customers around the world. Every day. A large body of work in the satellite systems business is building communication satellites that go into geosynchronous orbit to bring us our TV and broadcast signals, for example, and then new constellations in low earth orbit, which are going to start to bring us broadband Internet and the Internet of Things and 5G communications in observation around the Earth in robotics and space operations. It’s all about that space exploration. We put robotics on the space shuttle and flew one hundred missions. We put robotics Canadarm2 on the International Space Station like we’ve been talking about. We’ve operated that for 20 years. And now, as you said, we’ve been contracted for Canadarm, three artificial intelligence based robotics for Lunar Gateway, the new space station that’s going to orbit the moon. It’s my secret wish someday that NDA will be the community mobile communications provider to the activity on the lunar surface.
Speaker 2 [00:07:40] And perhaps that day is not too far off. I’d like to stay on the satellite systems for just a moment. It’s an increasingly competitive area with more and more being lost every day. How is Emdur continue to innovate over the past 50 plus years? What keeps your technology fresh?
Speaker 3 [00:07:56] MDA, the world’s largest independent merchant supplier of satellite technologies across the satellite industry. So as a result of that, we get to supply satellite technologies to a wide range of satellite companies, and that really keeps us fresh and current. So everything that’s happening in the satellite industry and digital intelligence satellites, in addition to low earth orbit satellites, we get the opportunity to bid satellite technologies into those programs. So we’re constantly advancing our antennas, our electronics, our payloads and our complete satellite production capabilities towards a wide range of customers in the satellite business around the world. Some of the biggest trends these days that we’re dealing with is that the digitization of satellite satellites transitioning from analog to digital so the satellites can now become a reconfigurable in orbit. You don’t just put it up to do one purpose and operate in one way.
Speaker 2 [00:08:51] I’d like to pivot slightly now to talk about some of the innovations that we’ve been seeing with regards to the space sector. And one is the entry of big tech into the sector. And recently, MDA and Microsoft announced a partnership to reimagine space missions using mixed reality. Can you describe for us what that is and why it’s important for future space missions?
Speaker 3 [00:09:11] I’m sure in that particular project we’re using definitely mixed reality to be able to not only participate in the design, obviously when you design something in space, you’re putting robotics on a space station that’s going to be orbited by the moon. Our current space station is is four hundred kilometers away. The new space station, Lunar Gateway will be four hundred thousand kilometers away. And so we have to design systems that are going to go up, get installed remotely and operate the first time and operate every time thereafter. So the ability to be able to design that and visualize it and experience the operations of it, mixed reality represents an excellent environment for that. In addition, we’ve been using that same environment for training, training of the astronauts so that they can have a wholesome, immersive experience in learning how their robotics operates and then be able to control and visualize the control of those robotics use and mixed realities. That’s what we’ve been doing lately, collaborating with with Microsoft in that area.
Speaker 2 [00:10:11] So that sounds to me like foundational technology to one day venture into deep space exploration. Is that correct?
Speaker 3 [00:10:19] No, actually, it can apply to that as you’re using those mixed reality environments to be able to do design and use training, then potentially you’re creating environments that have the opportunity for next generation control systems in terms of your ability to use those types of environments for operations in deep space. And there will be growing opportunity for operations in deep space. It’s not just like we talked about in the 1960s to go on space exploration, visit the moon and come home as we return to the moon in the next few years. We’re going to live there now and we’re going to start to have on orbit assembly, on orbit manufacturing in orbit between the Earth and moon. We’re going to have habitats on the moon where we live and and grow food in mind and create fuel and everything. The level of in space and deep space operations will be greatly expanding. And these are all fundamental technologies to be able to expand that.
Speaker 2 [00:11:11] Yes, that is fascinating and so exciting. In April, MDA had its IPO, which is the latest event in a long string of expansions and growth overall in what feels like this new space economy, which is slated to grow to a trillion dollars by 2040. As you know what’s changed over the past few years, that’s driving investment in the space sector.
Speaker 3 [00:11:31] Now, it’s one of the biggest things that’s changed. Over the last number of years has been a decrease in the cost of launch. So if we go back to the nineteen seventies and eighties and nineties, it was about eighteen thousand dollars a kilogram to be able to launch something into space. Right now, we’re down to about three thousand dollars a kilogram. And the folks in the launch business are trying to get that down to five hundred bucks. And so the cost of getting something into orbit is dramatically decreasing. And so I think that’s the biggest enabler of activity in space. With that, it now opens up literally a new economic frontier. Businesses can now, if they have an idea of a business that they can run in space, they can get into space and they can run that business because the cost of launch has decreased. So now we’ve seen venture capital into space based companies double every year for the last three years to go back to twenty eighteen. It was around three and a half billion a year that twenty nineteen it was five point seven billion a year and then twenty twenty was eight point nine billion a year. And so there’s hundreds of new space companies that are being created around the world now every year who can conceive of what can I do in next generation earth observation. What can I do a next generation communications? How can I secure communications in space? What manufacturing space so they can’t manufacture on Earth in a gravity based environment? What kind of chemical reactions could I cause or metals could I create? So people are consuming all of these ideas and if they can get financing for those ideas, they can get into space.
Speaker 2 [00:13:02] Stories about space have often been about a geopolitical race in the space race. It’s a competition. The first man to the moon. But the International Space Station and we’re Canadarm two currently lives is a project of cooperation, including between some terrestrial adversaries like the US and Russia. Can you share a little bit more about why cooperation and collaboration are so important in the space business?
Speaker 3 [00:13:26] I think it’s important because space is hard. So I hope hopefully I’m not making it sound easy and that it’s getting more affordable to get into space. It’s still a very hard, complicated engineering challenge to create technologies that can go into orbit, that can work the first time and work every time and can last in that very harsh environment. So the benefits of having experience in space are still extremely important. So collaboration is necessary because it is difficult. And I think that because of that challenge, SpaceX has developed a culture where it is naturally collaborative, it has transcended and continues to transcend terrestrial geopolitical conflict. And people do work together. We are seeing a new space race of sorts in terms of all the activity going to the moon over the next few years. We see the United States through the Artemis program kind of repeating a type of International Space Station type of a thinking, working with multiple countries to be able to set up capacity on the lunar surface. It includes Gateway, that new space station we talked about, the Canadarm three will be on. It will also include the habitats and vehicles and communication networks and medical capabilities to take care of people living on the moon. Everyone needs to work together for that because we’re trying to do large, complex things in a short period of time. China and Russia have recently signed a collaboration agreement. They’re going to work together as two countries to put a lunar base on the moon.
Speaker 2 [00:14:49] Canada is a relatively small player in the space sector, especially compared to big players like the US and Russia, France, China or Japan. So what has allowed this country to stand out, get noticed and get contracts?
Speaker 3 [00:15:04] We’ve been strategic in picking areas where we’ve been strong. So Canada has been historically a strong country in the area of communications and became strong in space based communications. Canada chose strategically a few decades ago to become strong and radar based Earth observation was based on our challenges as a country and our desire to monitor all of our large, broad coastal areas with three maritime coasts. It makes sense to do that with radar based satellites from space. So we strategically chose to go there and stay in a world leadership position in space exploration. Canada chose robotics as an area that was wisely chose. I would say I’m a bit biased, but I think that was a wise decision. You can’t be part of everything, but you need to pick your shots and then stand behind them.
Speaker 2 [00:15:49] As we mentioned earlier, MDA has a contract to develop and construct Canadarm three, which is a part of our contribution to the Lunar Gateway program. And two years from now, a Canadian astronaut is going to be part of the first manned moon mission and more than 50 years. What is the opportunity for Canada in space in the next decade? How far can we go?
Speaker 3 [00:16:09] We can we can go as far as we want. But so certainly, like you say, we’re putting Canadarm on Gateway. That’s caused a couple of astronaut missions, one in a couple of years to go around the moon. Like you said, there’ll be further missions out to Gateway in the future. There will be the opportunity for Canada to participate in the colonization of the moon. Canada will have the opportunity to pick areas where we contribute to technologies on the lunar surface. I would expect that the. Those contributions would start to cause women and men from the astronaut corps in Canada to start to go down to the lunar surface and live and work there as we go through the next decade. The same pattern will repeat itself as we look out towards Mars to be able to participate in those missions in the 20 30. So Canada continues to on the space exploration side. Canada continues to have a strong opportunity there if you look at that space to earth economy. I think that Canada could have a great opportunity to significantly contribute to space based communications, to be able to bring broadband Internet to people no matter where you live. It’s the ultimate equalizer. There’s a lot of room for growth still to come before Canada.
Speaker 2 [00:17:11] Seems like the final frontier is just a jumping off point. Mike, thank you so much for this conversation. Thanks for the time. My guest today has been the CEO of MDA, Mike, recently, but don’t go anywhere. Coming up, we’ll look at that space to earth economy that Mike just talked about and examine the role of satellites in building a world of affordable and accessible high speed communications. You’re listening to Disruptors and RBC podcast. I’m Teresa Doyle, filling in for John Stackhouse. If you’ve been tuning into Disruptors lately, you’ve probably heard our two part special series on creativity, which featured the CEO of Cirque du Soleil, Daniel Lamarre and Gil Moore from the rock band Triumph, among other stellar guests. But we also want to draw your attention to the companion research led by the RBC Economics and Thought Leadership team that looks at creativity as an emerging power, skill and labor markets and how we can leverage it. You can find the link in the show notes of this episode and be sure to like and follow disruptors wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome back. Today, we’re talking about space and Canada’s important slice of this ever expanding universe. While legacy companies such as MDE continue to innovate in some of the entrepreneurial space ventures, especially in satellites that are increasingly getting noticed, big players like Elon Musk’s SpaceX or Jeff Bezos Blue Origin get most of the headlines. But there are a bunch of fast growing players in the satellite industry that are also making waves. One of them, Swarm Technologies, a Silicon Valley based company co-founded by a Canadian with 30 employees on Earth and over 90 satellites in space and swarms lofty mission to bring high speed Internet to underserved countries and markets around the world. A revolutionary development that truly would be one giant leap for humankind. And joining me now is Swarms co-founder and chief executive officer, Dr Sara Spangelo. Welcome to Disruptors.
Speaker 4 [00:19:18] Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 [00:19:20] Tell us a bit about swarm’s technology, the world’s tiniest two way communication satellites. What are they being used for and how do they stay out of harm’s way up there?
Speaker 4 [00:19:29] The concept of small satellites is not new. Satellites have been shrinking over the past many years. Maybe in the 80s and 90s, satellites that were about a thousand kilograms were launched to do connectivity missions, imaging, et cetera. And we’ve seen those satellites generally shrink for a variety of reasons. So obviously electronics have been miniaturized. Turns out your cell phone is smarter than most satellites in space today. And then access to space has also become more available, particularly for these smaller payloads. So in the early 2000s, the concept of a CubeSat, which is about the size of a loaf of bread or a shoebox, about ten by ten by thirty four centimeters, started to become pretty popular. And a lot of people were building science and exploration missions that were this small when that was seen as very revolutionary. At that time, rockets started to make space for these small payloads so they could go up as secondaries or piggyback on those rockets and then actually got to work on some of those CubeSat missions while I was in grad school and about five years later realized that we could do something really novel if we could make the satellites even another 10x smaller in size. You’re right. We developed the world’s smallest two way communication satellites. They’re about the size of a grilled cheese sandwich. So if you took that loaf of bread and you slice it into 12 pieces of bread or 12 grilled cheese sandwiches, you got a swarm satellite
Speaker 2 [00:21:00] for companies that are outside of the space sector. What do you think they should understand about the utility of satellites?
Speaker 4 [00:21:06] First of all, satellites are extremely powerful. I think a lot of us forget that the GPS that we use every day, all the time is using a satellite. And then what we’re bringing to market is this lower cost connectivity piece. So right now, I think businesses tend to think, oh, I’m within cellular range. I can connect my device back to the Internet, I can bring back data through a cell phone tower. And if I’m out of cellular range, I’m just out of luck. There’s no way I can connect. Like when I go for a hike and I’m out of cell, I assume I cannot not send a message back home that I’m in trouble. And that could be an agriculture sensor truck, a ship, railway, whatever. And what’s changing with swarm and the whole industry is that we are allowing people to connect regardless of where they are on the entire planet. So now you should think that connectivity is available anywhere that you are at all times. And at a price point that is for the first time affordable on the order of four US five dollars per device per month, which is less than a Netflix subscription.
Speaker 2 [00:22:09] How has the space sector changed and how is the opportunity grown for startups like you? I know you mentioned you’re in the Bay Area. I’m sure that also lends itself to a lot of collaboration and support just in the region.
Speaker 4 [00:22:21] The last four years, I think from a just from a launch perspective, there have certainly been an increase in access to space. So there are more players. Now, Rocket Lab has really come into its own. Companies like Astra and Relativity and Virgin are on the brink of offering services, which will help us as well. Prices have lower due to space x’s innovations, and they’re kind of launch program. And then there’s been startups that have continued to act as third party integrators for more difficult launch opportunities like Sølve, which is in India, Viega, which is through the French government. There’s a lot more opportunity and access to space that is more accessible to startups. The price has come down a little bit, not as much as I would have liked to have liked it to. And then I also think that the market, in terms of our customer base has grown considerably over the last four years. So the interest in connecting assets and devices. Doing kind of Iot Internet of things, which is really just a fancy word for M to M machine to machine, which was termed in the 80s, which is just tracking assets around the world. It’s a it’s actually very simple concept. I think there’s more interest in that because operators of logistics systems, supply chains want to know where their assets are and want to do a better job of kind of improving operations, reducing environmental impact, reducing CO2 emissions. And then there’s a lot of interest in environmental monitoring, fire monitoring, covid vaccine monitoring to make sure they stay at the right temperature. So I think the pull on the demand side is actually growing and has grown since we started, which is awesome for us.
Speaker 2 [00:24:06] Sounds like you’re perfectly in the zeitgeist.
Speaker 4 [00:24:09] We’re lucky. We’re really, really lucky.
Speaker 2 [00:24:13] If I can if I can take a step back in time. A lot of kids say they want to be astronauts when they’re young, but you actually followed through. What inspired you to pursue that career? Starting from a very early age in Winnipeg?
Speaker 4 [00:24:26] My failed astronaut candidate, I did get an opportunity to apply, but didn’t make it all the way. Obviously know I was interested in space and astronomy and exploration and aviation when I was little. My dad was really into aerospace and had started his pilot’s license. So I think he was always inspiring us to look up and be curious about how planes and space worked and then just love looking out at the stars. And just like, where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? Or these existential
Speaker 2 [00:24:56] questions?
Speaker 4 [00:24:57] Yeah, yeah. That kind of makes you want to explore. And then I think a key, pivotal moment for me was the opportunity to go to space camp when I was in grade eight in Quebec and got to just do all of the fun space camp. Things are simulated ISIS missions with EVAs and pretend we were astronauts, pretend we were Chris Hadfield. Go in the machine that spins around to see if you’ll get sick, which I think is just for kids, because they didn’t actually do that in the training. And that really just motivated me to pursue certain academic things, studying mechanical engineering and aerospace engineering and doing my pilot’s license and my scuba diving and trying to be in really good shape and, you know, checking all those kind of astronaut boxes. Then there was an opportunity to apply in 2017. And I was 30 and I was like, I’m not I don’t know, I’m not going to be an astronaut. But I was like, Sara, it’s your childhood dream. You have to apply. So I applied. And that was a pretty cool experience to participate in that as well.
Speaker 2 [00:25:55] So you did graduate studies in the states and we worked, I think, both at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and Google X. A lot of Canadians similarly in the industry end up south of the border to seek out these opportunities. In your view, what can or should Canada do to actually foster a bigger domestic space center? And what would it have taken for you to have stayed in Canada?
Speaker 4 [00:26:16] I think for me, I wanted to have the opportunity to definitely study space. And that was more prominent at the University of Michigan, particularly with some of the coursework, and then eventually have an opportunity to go on to work at NASA. And that was kind of a personal goal, I think that continuing to invest in the educational opportunities, for example, having more aerospace specific programs, I think there was like an option when I went to the University of Manitoba, whereas Michigan has an entire aerospace department. So it’s quite a bit different scale and then continuing to grow out the professional opportunities as well, whether that’s more startups that are doing space work. And I know there are some fantastic startups like Kepler. I think it’s in Toronto that is doing connectivity with Los Altos as well. And there are many other startups pursuing the space and then having maybe bigger companies pursue opportunities to do aerospace work as well. Could be good career opportunities for individuals.
Speaker 2 [00:27:20] I’d like to turn to the question of innovation next and building on the dynamic of the partnership between commercial players and government players. There’s a lot of innovation that comes from the private sector. And you’ve mentioned you could move faster. There’s a lot more things happening in organizations like the CSA or NASA rely on these corporate partners to do what they do. But in your view, what limits, if any, do you see on the commercialization of space? And what’s that dividing line between private enterprise and the public interest?
Speaker 4 [00:27:51] Yeah, well, that’s a great question. I, I don’t really see any limits in the long term in terms of what the private sector can do. I mean, look at SpaceX. They’re doing what NASA has only been able to do for decades. So I think there are no limits. I do think that some of the regulation around the private sector can be stifling and slow the commercial sector down. And I think that the government has moved at a certain speed and the regulation has been acceptable for that speed. But the regulation is not necessarily acceptable for the speed at which small companies like Swarm or others can move. So I think a combination needs to be made for, oh, wow, these guys got funding one year and they’re going to launch nine months later. I actually think that naturally these private and public interests are very aligned because the private sector is generally providing services for the public, whether that’s connectivity or GPS or imaging. And I think that that alignment will eventually snap everything into place where, for example, the price of connectivity needs to come down because the public is only going to spend five dollars a month or one hundred dollars a month, depending on the type of service. I think as long as the companies are founded with a good intention, whether it’s, you know, communications or safety or reducing fires or whatever, I think that it is serving the public good.
Speaker 2 [00:29:21] I’d love to stay on this access to space angle a little bit because it’s still pretty expensive to put people up there think Virgin Galactic sells tickets for two hundred fifty thousand dollars each. It’s funny, my partner the other day told me that before he turns 40, he wants to go to space. And I’m like, well, at those prices, that means we can’t afford a house. But OK, do you think that space travel will be commonplace for non billionaires in five, 10, 15 years?
Speaker 4 [00:29:48] I don’t know. I think it’s it’s maybe it will be one of these, like throw things like people that like to jump out of planes or go skiing or these really like dangerous, expensive kind of. Why would you do that? Most people are thinking, I think it’s going to be in that category and it’ll be accessible for the wealthy and the pretty wealthy. I’m sure the price point will come down. Maybe it will become 50 K, which still seems like kind of insane to me. You know, a good good chunk of an annual salary. I think, you know, if you survey your friends and family, I’d say probably 80 percent of them don’t want to go. So I don’t think it’s going to be like a super tourism going to Europe type of thing that everybody wants to do in the summer. But I think it will be there for those that want it. I certainly wouldn’t go in the first hundred rides. I like to see the reliability statistics.
Speaker 2 [00:30:42] Yeah, let the other people test it out first.
Speaker 4 [00:30:44] Yeah. Yeah. I’m not know. I got a lot to do on Earth.
Speaker 2 [00:30:47] I have one final question I’d like to tap into your hopefully optimistic side a little bit. What is the one thing that you’d like Canadians to take away from this conversation and from your own experience and wisdom about what the possibilities for Canada are in space?
Speaker 4 [00:31:06] You know, I never thought that I would be able to go away for school and then I would be able to work at NASA and I would be able to work at Google and I would start a company and I would grow a team and put up satellites like this. Is this crazy life now compared to where I started and I think of all Canadians felt like, hey, I could build something, I could have an impact in this world, whether it’s in space or whatever they’re passionate about. There’s no barriers for me. And whatever my dream is of starting a company or starting a program or inspiring others, I can do that. I think that it would be incredible to see what all of those Canadians would accomplish. And I also think Canada is an amazing springboard. Like I have no student debt. That’s amazing. I have an amazing education. I had an amazing childhood. And I have amazing friends and family that are super supportive. So just be grateful that you’re from Canada. It’s a really, really special place and amazing educational and other opportunities. And, you know, don’t let anything get in your way. You never know what you can accomplish.
Speaker 2 [00:32:17] Be grateful and don’t let anybody get in your way. I love that. Sara, that is such an inspiring note to end on. Thank you so much for this conversation.
Speaker 4 [00:32:26] You’re welcome. This is really fun. Thank you.
Speaker 2 [00:32:28] My guest today has been the co-founder and CEO of Swarm Technologies, Dr Sara Spangelo. I’d also like to thank Mike Greenley MDA and Manon Larocque from the Canadian Space Agency. I’m trying to raise dough and this is Disruptors and RBC Podcast. Join us next time when we’ll talk to some of the leaders in Canada’s exploding telemedicine sector about why they think the future of health care services will be online. Talk to you soon.
Speaker 4 [00:32:59] Disruptors an RBC
Speaker 5 [00:33:00] podcast is created by the RBC Thought Leadership Group and does not constitute a recommendation for any organization, product or service, it’s produced and recorded by Jar Audio for more disruptors, content like or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and visit RBC Dotcom Slash Disruptors.
Creativity has always benefitted from constraints—but Canada cannot be one of them.
In our last piece, we identified creativity as the new “it” skill, essential for our country’s enduring prosperity. But how can we weave creativity into the very fabric of Canadian culture? Fortunately, our education system and business communities recognize the importance of this new skill, and are working to foster it.
The Disruptors team spent months interviewing experts on the importance of creativity for a special two-part podcast. Here’s how our guests believe we can maximize our creative output as individuals, companies, and as a country.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Simplecast
Creativity starts at a young age, but needs nurturing along the way
“Students are amazingly creative and our job in the education system isn’t to make them more creative, it’s actually to keep their creativity alive,” said Josie Fung, executive director of Rotman’s I-Think. She pointed to Ontario’s play-based kindergarten approach as an important step forward.
I-Think’s work is focused on systemic change in education through integrative thinking—that is, using creativity to find new solutions to problems. As students move into post-secondary school, creativity should remain an underlying value of the system, allowing space for real-world problem solving.
“The really cool thing about creativity is that it’s an unlimited resource,” said Janet Morrison, president of Sheridan College. “It’s constantly renewed and it can be improved upon through education, experience and stimulation.”
It’s ok to fail and learn from your mistakes in the name of experimentation
Shopify can attribute much of its success to hiring smart, creative people with a “growth mindset.” Brittany Forsyth, the company’s outgoing chief talent officer was employee #22 at the firm, and had a front row seat to its exponential growth. In our chat with her, she emphasized the importance of hiring for potential versus qualifications.
“It starts with giving permission,” she said. “It’s about telling everyone who’s joining, ‘you’re going to fail and it’s actually OK to, as long as you don’t make the same mistake twice or over and over again.’ We give permission to do these key things, such as experiment, fail, grow.”
Think big picture and stay focused on the mission
Tom Waller, Lululemon’s chief science officer and SVP of advanced innovation, shared his insights about not getting too complacent.
“The important thing that we had to do was to not get too good at being Lululemon, to not get stuck in that identity that others would start to describe,” said Waller.
The most important thing is to be able to back up a little bit from the business model and look harder at the overall purpose, he noted. “The business model encourages us not to change. The purpose encourages us to change.”
Use the crisis as a catalyst to chart a better path forward
The pandemic has given us all ample time to reflect on what matters most – our health. It’s also accelerated change, and in turn, a reassessment of our values and purpose. It’s a time that has brought forth new opportunities.
“A lot of incredible things are forged in the crisis,” said Waller. “A lot of amazing inventions are formed under crisis, so I think that crisis is the one of the greatest opportunities to apply creativity.”
Speaker 1 [00:00:01] Hi, it’s John here,
Speaker 2 [00:00:02] along with Teresa from RBC Thought Leadership Team. John, can we do one of those recaps like they do on Netflix? Sure.
Speaker 1 [00:00:10] Unleash your creative spirit.
Speaker 2 [00:00:12] OK. Previously on Disruptors. I’ll do that one again.
Speaker 3 [00:00:18] Previously on Disruptors. There is no commerce without creativity. I’ve always
Speaker 2 [00:00:23] thought that creativity, imagination absolutely have to be embraced by the larger business community.
Speaker 1 [00:00:29] My view on creativity, how we teach in the business school is start by what’s the objective? What’s the purpose? What’s the thing we’re trying to do?
Speaker 5 [00:00:37] I don’t think that there’s any difference between creativity and argument. I see creativity as a form of argument.
Speaker 3 [00:00:42] I don’t think that someone’s created and they just they just wake up when the sun shines on them. I just don’t believe that’s how it works.
Speaker 2 [00:00:51] In the last episode, we started to make a case for creativity as the it skill of our time and for a renewed emphasis on creativity coming out of the pandemic. But now it’s time to dig deeper into the how
Speaker 1 [00:01:03] exactly how can we maximize our creative output as individuals, companies and as a country? And how can we weave creativity into the very fabric of Canadian culture from the classroom to the boardroom and beyond? This is Disruptors, an RBC podcast, I’m your host, John Stackhouse,
Speaker 2 [00:01:33] and I’m your co-host, Trinh Theresa Do, but please call me Theresa. Thanks for joining us for part two of our special series on creativity.
Speaker 1 [00:01:44] Once again, we have some scintillating guests lined up with really, really powerful insights to share about creativity and how to foster it. We’ll hear from Shopify, Ubisoft, Lululemon and more. But where better to begin than with a conversation about creativity in the classroom?
Speaker 2 [00:02:02] Our first guest is the head of a nonprofit focused on system change in education through what’s known as integrative thinking. It’s a concept born at the Wharton School of Management, and it’s all about using creativity to find the best possible solution to any problem.
Speaker 1 [00:02:18] Josie Fung is the executive director of I think at Rotman. And if you’re not too familiar with the Rotman School of Business, it’s certainly one of the leading business schools in Canada and among the best in the world. And it went through its own kind of creative revolution a number of years ago under a former dean, Roger Martin, who was able to transform the way management and business is taught in this country by really getting to the core of how we think. And Josie is now trying to take that a step further through the school system. She believes schools in Canada, right across the country, have had to narrow a view on creativity for way too long.
Speaker 4 [00:03:03] Historically, the education system, like the rest of us, probably put creativity in the bucket of artists. Certainly when I was growing up, that was the sense is that you went to art class to be creative. But now I think what the education is seeing is that students are amazingly creative and our job in the education system isn’t to make them more creative. It’s actually to keep their creativity alive. I have a three year old at home and what that means is like letting their imagination run wild. Something happens along the way between being three and being 18 years old, where you suddenly feel like you can’t be creative anymore. And so I think that’s what the education system is is trying to refocus itself on. About 10 years ago, Ontario came out with play based kindergarten, and I think that was a really big signal to the system to value. What does playing creativity mean? How do you infuse that into the education? We’re starting with kindergarten, but how do you actually infuse it throughout the system?
Speaker 2 [00:04:01] Josie, I mentioned integrative thinking right off the top, and it’s part of the guiding methodology for, I think, as well as the Rotman School. Could you explain what it is for those who aren’t familiar and why it’s so important,
Speaker 4 [00:04:13] so integrative thinking? Is this idea developed by Roger Martin, who said, when you’re stuck in a place where you trying to make a decision, you could go down path A or you could go down path B.. Conventionally, we feel like our job is to simply choose between the two. But what if instead we didn’t think of ourselves as as needing to choose but to actually our job is to actually create to create a new and better idea that is created from elements of both Path A and from Path B. And on a practical level, what that means is the recognition that there is no one way to do things and that our job is actually to be constantly searching for new ways to approach the problems that we’re constantly facing.
Speaker 1 [00:04:55] So if integrative thinking is, as Roger himself says, a creative act, how can we ensure students maintain that creative mindset as they enter the workforce and are faced with, frankly, some of the constraints that can come with the corporate world
Speaker 4 [00:05:11] when it comes to creativity? In our experience, what we’ve seen is creativity is actually thrives on constraints. And the key is actually the mindset of thinking what your job is. The best way we can foster young people to be thinking about their rule is being creative and imaginative. To create new ideas is to ask them instead of asking, are you doing the job you’re being told to do, or are you solving the problems that we need to solve in the world? Instead of thinking smaller, we actually need to be thinking bigger. When we started our work with I think we thought that if we gave students kind of open reign on creating ideas, that would be the way for it. And what we actually heard is that by giving a little more structure, by giving a few more constraints, it actually helped channeled their creativity.
Speaker 2 [00:06:00] If I can ask you to step back, Josie, and look at the big picture, when you think about the broader world and Canada’s place in it, how do we compare to other nations when it comes to creativity?
Speaker 4 [00:06:11] I think Canada’s up there, but I think we have some choices ahead of us. If we don’t act carefully, what makes us be really successful and have a lot of potential for being high on that creativity index is our diversity in a given classroom. Sometimes we have as many as 21 different languages being spoken in that classroom. Just imagine the number of experiences these students have, the perspectives they have, the experiences that they’ve drawn from their families, the more we can bring that. Around the table, the more we have the opportunity to create new and amazing ideas, I think that future capital is a place where there’s a hub of innovation. And instead of thinking about tech and innovation hubs being localized in one geography, it’s a nation of creativity. It’s a nation that generates all sorts of ideas that fuel the world,
Speaker 1 [00:07:03] ideas that fuel the world. You know, for an energy power like Canada, maybe we can also be a creative energy power. It’s an inspiring vision, Teresa.
Speaker 2 [00:07:13] Absolutely, John. But, you know, there are sectors where Canadian creativity is already fueling the world, like the animation industry. And that’s thanks in large part to one school in particular. Found it right here in Ontario in nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 1 [00:07:27] If you’re a fan of Toy Story and who isn’t, you can find the roots for many of Hollywood’s greatest animation productions over the last generation. Right here in Canada, Sheridan College has been called the Harvard of Animation Schools, with grads going on to key roles at companies like Pixar, Disney and DreamWorks. We had a chance to chat with Sheraton’s President Janet Morrisson and began by asking her how she defines creativity.
Speaker 5 [00:07:54] From my vantage point, it’s a way of thinking. It’s a way of problem solving, a way of contemplating ideas, alternatives, possibilities, all to the purpose of moving the world forward. As I think about it, it really enables people to experiment and drive, change, even, frankly, when knowledge runs out. And the really cool thing about creativity is that it’s an unlimited resource. It’s constantly renewed and it can be improved upon through education, experience and stimulation. So so I think regardless of how you define it, it’s increasingly acknowledged as fundamental to the planet’s social, political and economic future.
Speaker 2 [00:08:37] Jennet is creativity something students have to have when they walk in the door on that very first day of class? Or can it be taught?
Speaker 5 [00:08:45] I think creativity can be innate to some. For others, though, my experience has really affirmed that it can be learned and that can happen through formal educational environments or through curation and lived experience. You can really honestly teach creative problem solving and human centered design, for example, that at the end of the day help people confront complex issues and the challenges they’ll inevitably face regardless of their profession.
Speaker 1 [00:09:15] How do we take advantage of this moment? The frenzy of change and adaptation caused by the pandemic to put a renewed focus on creativity?
Speaker 5 [00:09:24] Well, as the world around us is being disrupted, educators, me included, really need to evolve our programing and our curriculum, which is what we teach and our pedagogy, which is how we teach it to cultivate or curate creativity and innovation, because I think there’s a crisis of innovation in the world right now. And if we assume that creativity is foundational to that, it makes that imperative all the more clear. The key piece that I’m always mindful of is that creativity rests on ideation and distillation and so really encouraging yourself to think freely outside of the box, blue skying, some people like to say, and then working diligently to distill, iterate and ultimately prototype depending on what the process is.
Speaker 1 [00:10:21] You can’t have a conversation about creativity and innovation in Canada without talking about this next company in 2004, it was a startup that sold snowboards online today by Market Cap, its Canada’s most valuable company, an e-commerce platform. The powers, more than one million businesses across a hundred and seventy five countries.
Speaker 2 [00:10:44] And we’re talking, of course, about one of Canada’s great success stories, Shopify. And part of the reason it’s been so successful is its ability to scout and hire smart, creative people. Brittany Forsyth is Shopify as outgoing chief talent officer. Brittany, welcome to Disruptors.
Speaker 5 [00:11:00] Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 [00:11:02] Shopify has been called one of Canada’s most innovative companies. What’s the relationship between creativity and innovation?
Speaker 5 [00:11:10] Creativity is the space in which you play, and I think innovation is the outcome that results from the creativity, actions or effort that gets put in. When I think about creativity, I think about it being the environment that you create. I think about the behaviors and beliefs that one holds. And I think the innovation, like I said, is the outcome. It’s a measurement of how creative you’ve been able to be and how bold you are in the execution of it. What I love about the creative space that we’ve formed in Shopify is that we have built an environment that allows for risk taking, that allows for curiosity and resourcefulness, that allows for reactions, because generally when you’re being creative, you’re removing constraints, you’re removing the barriers that sometimes hold us all in to just repeat and do the same thing over and over again. And with all of that comes a lot of failures as well. But I think that’s en route to innovation.
Speaker 1 [00:12:03] I wonder, Brittney, about the key characteristics of creatives, the ways in which you measure a person’s creative capacity. What qualities do you look for in potential employees?
Speaker 5 [00:12:15] Curiosity is foundational. The ability to acquire information and get curious and actually build zeitgeist knowledge. So to look for information that’s going to challenge you, that’s outside of all of our echo chambers or bubbles to really challenge us and to think anew is really, really critical to be able to then imagine a future that’s different than what is. We also look for people that have a past track record of being curious and impactful and thinking outside the box. And I would say the third point is probably just a growth mindset. So a constant learner, someone that is able to give themself permission to wake up smarter every day. Once again, they’re challenging themselves. They’re looking for information that’s going to teach them something new. They’re looking always at the awareness of what they know and what is the underlying assumptions that are driving things and challenging that to drive it forward.
Speaker 2 [00:13:13] Once you find these people, you bring them in. How do you develop them? How do you empower them to continue to grow and learn and contribute back to the company?
Speaker 5 [00:13:22] I think it starts with giving permission. It’s about telling everyone who’s joining you’re going to fail and what does it mean to fail? And it’s actually OK to as long as you don’t make the same mistake twice or over and over again, it actually then allows for learning and growth. And so we talk a lot about these mental models early on. We educate a lot about them, and we give permission to do these key things, such as experiment, fail, grow. It’s OK to say you were wrong yesterday and you’re right today to change your mind. And we create a permission, but a psychological safety around that to say, OK, this is going to happen in the environment. And more importantly than just saying it actually is the fact that we do this so many people and so many companies can say it and onboarding. They actually, I think too often lean too far to aspirational like values, culture, values or beliefs. And then after they say that, you walk into them real life of a company and it all falls short because no one’s actually living it. So on morning, we talk a lot about it. We give permission. But then once you’re in the Itoh Shopify, we do things such as Happy Days and we’ve had numerous hack day projects become like critical builds of Shopify. And the cool part about it is, had we not created this space for experimentation, for anyone to come up with the best solution, we would have never had these. And so you need to create opportunities for everyone to raise their hand and say, I have this great idea and not just shut it down right away.
Speaker 1 [00:14:53] Brittny, you’ve been at Shopify eleven years and hard to imagine back then it only had a staff of twenty people. You’ve witnessed explosive growth. I’d love to know more about how you’ve been able to maintain the startup mindset and culture and not get too comfortable or complacent.
Speaker 5 [00:15:10] Yeah, I mean, and so my story is unique. I’ve been on the exact team for about five years now in this role, but I have done many other things and actually led to. All the way through, and so the reason why I highlight that is not like to talk with the title. It’s actually the fact that I was the most unlikely, unorthodox person that should have been in that role. And one of the things that was said to me was like, your lack of doing that means we’re going to solve in a new way. And I think that’s a key to creativity and unorthodox is to challenge the status quo. And don’t get me wrong, I’m still surrounding myself with people that have done it. I like seek advice. I have a great network of people and amazing mentors. But I think that that naive ness at time or the lack of the scar tissue or the experience actually drives a new solution that maybe wasn’t possible. And I think that in the company by zoom it out for me, the fact that we have the growth mindset, we hire for people that are able to learn, we don’t just hire people that can do the job today, allows for more growth opportunities and allows for us to take chances on high potential people, which also drives new solutions and thinking outside the box. And so I always say we hire teachers and students. Each person is a teacher and a student, but it’s bringing in the right new teachers and the right students that can advocate and challenge each other. The best thing about Shopify hands down is the people who you work with, how much they’re going to challenge you, how much you will learn from each other and drive yourself and everyone else around you further as a result of it.
Speaker 2 [00:16:43] My last question for you, Brittney, if I can ask you to zoom out even further, which countries would you consider to be the most creative in the world and where does Canada stand among them?
Speaker 5 [00:16:53] Oh, that’s such an interesting question. I think each country has its assets to what would drive towards creativity. And I guess I’ve seen this firsthand with the founder, Tobi being German. He brings a lot of the German culture, such as direct feedback, challenging opinions right off the bat. And I have a very Canadian culture, which is like I like to give a lot of praise and then speak in the the criticism. And so there’s I mean, these are obviously stereotypes. So like take this with caution. But I think Canada has all the potential in the world and I think a lot of great things are going to come from it. And I think it’s about getting just more and more cultures and backgrounds into that because we are very diverse. So I think it’s all about inclusion of bringing more and more together.
Speaker 2 [00:17:40] What an uplifting note for us to end this conversation on Britney. Thank you so much for your time today and for joining disrupters.
Speaker 5 [00:17:47] Really appreciate it.
Speaker 2 [00:17:49] We should mention shortly after we recorded this interview, Britney announced she’s moving on from Shopify. But that doesn’t diminish what she told us about culture and diversity as a fuel for creativity. And it’s no coincidence Canada’s cultural mosaic is also part of the origin story for the next company. We’re going to talk about
Speaker 1 [00:18:07] as if it needs any introduction. Lululemon is a world famous athletic apparel and wellness brand. But, you know, it started out as a part time yoga studio in Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighborhood to this day. The company calls itself yoga inspired.
Speaker 2 [00:18:24] But where does creativity come into play and how is it fostered? To find out. We sat down with Tom Waller, Lululemon, senior vice president for Advanced Innovation and chief science officer. Tom, welcome to disruptors.
Speaker 3 [00:18:38] Thank you. It’s really a great pleasure to be here.
Speaker 2 [00:18:40] So Lululemon is a fitness and it’s a wellness company, but we’re talking about creativity today. So I’m curious, how would you define creativity within the context of what you do?
Speaker 3 [00:18:51] Well, creativity always needs an input into my job and within the company that I work for. What we have focused on is ensuring that we have a space, a platform that allows us to consider that we’re not done yet. I’ve brought a multidisciplinary scientific focus, which we call the science of field. And the science field physiologist becomes now a jumping off point for every category, product service experience that we might want to create. We think about how can we really engineer the sensory experience and facilitate a new kind of human connection? And can we do that in such a way that we can predict a successful outcome? And so maybe that, as you might, a set of constraints on it and it seems to accelerate creativity. It’s not creativity, craft, creativity, sake, it’s creativity around a really specific set of problems that we think we’re uniquely qualified to solve.
Speaker 2 [00:19:48] I’m very interested in that experiential aspect that you mentioned, and I’m hoping you can walk us through that journey because it sounds like creativity was woven into the DNA of the company from the very beginning. But how did that play out?
Speaker 3 [00:20:03] Yeah, I mean, I was full disclosure, I was absolutely attracted to Lululemon because of one very specific thing, which was the innovation was everywhere. It didn’t feel like it was something that they needed to add. It was something that they needed to amplify. They had a tolerance for ambiguity that was just. Palpably different. Very, very unique, and so the opportunity that I saw was to create a new way of extracting that innovation or that innovative capability. The important thing that we had to do was to not get too good at being Lululemon, to not get stuck in that identity that others would start to describe. And we would like it when when we got the kind of offers of recognition that we were having an impact in the world. And and as we got defined by observers and third parties, whether that’s Wall Street or media, it was important that we didn’t start to believe that that hype, that what was really important, it was that we believed in our vision, which was, you know, our impact on on just wellbeing as a holistic access point for all people deserve.
Speaker 1 [00:21:11] I want to go back to something you said about the science of feel. I love the emphasis on feel. And I think it’s a concept that resonates with us so much more now thanks to the pandemic when we don’t have to dress up and go out to the office. In your experience, Tom, what role do crises like Colvard play in fueling creativity?
Speaker 3 [00:21:32] These are big questions. A lot of a lot of incredible things are forged on the crisis. A lot of amazing inventions formed on the crisis. So I think that crisis is one of the greatest opportunities to apply creativity. I think that not all of us have necessarily have the gift of space this last year. I think so many of us have had to focus on security of all of our livelihoods of businesses. So, yeah, I mean, I take great pride in the in the reality that I have been able to spend time looking at this situation and acknowledging that this is a time to be creative, because those of us that create now really do have a different level of influence in the future that unfolds. I think the fact that it’s been a health crisis is really interesting because we’ve all had a brush with mortality. We’ve all really assessed our values and what our daily lives look like because they’ve got a little bit smaller. So the adjacencies of those things and the experiences that we have are now not separated by travel or trips or massively different context of the different spaces and places that we choose to visit. So we’re able to really scrutinize what matters.
Speaker 2 [00:22:59] So coming out of the pandemic, looking at the years and decades ahead, how do other companies and business leaders need to think about creativity? What would your advice to them be?
Speaker 3 [00:23:09] I think the most important thing is to be able to back off a little bit from the business model and and look a little harder at the purpose of the business model encourages us not to change the purpose, encourages us to change. So for any company looking at themselves, it’s being able to tease out what are the primary assets that that could be applied in in in more ways than the business model might suggest. Whenever we start anything new, it’s making sure that we don’t compare it to something that’s mature. Let’s say if we wanted to start a new category, we’re looking for a rate of change in that category. We need to compare that to the same time that an equivalent category was also at that stage. And so we compare rate of change to rate of change, not rate of change to maturity. And I think it’s one of the difficult things of being an innovator or taking that creative step is the comparisons. And if comparison is so often the thief of joy, the challenge that we face is that we are likely to squash new, small things in favor of the big safe things. But it’s the new, small, risky stuff that is an exploration of maybe a reapplying the assets in a new way that will probably, probably is the next. So you just got to measure it differently. There’s no one size fits all. Apparently there’s no silver bullet or magic formula. Every company has its beginnings. There is the beginnings of a lot of the really valuable things to mine and understand and recontextualize, which means that every company has a different set of metrics that they should look at as to how they know how to grow into new potential successes.
Speaker 2 [00:24:52] Tom, I have one last big question to ask. In your opinion, what are the most creative countries in the world and where do you think Canada ranks among them?
Speaker 3 [00:25:02] I think that Canada has a history of really impressive creativity. I came here not just because of Lululemon, because I could I could see something in Canada, I could see something in it its potential as a place to be creative, a place to innovate. So I think Canada ranks. Very high in potential, and wouldn’t it be a shame if we don’t fulfill that?
Speaker 1 [00:25:35] Our next guest is from what might just be the biggest creative industry of all, as we learned during our episode about EA Sports back in January, the video game sector has now eclipsed the movie and music businesses combined,
Speaker 2 [00:25:50] as Julianne Laferriere is the producer of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla at Ubisoft Montreal. It’s the latest title in a blockbuster franchise that spans centuries of civilization, weaving together history, myth, music and more. We asked him how he views the daunting task of managing an entire team of creatives.
Speaker 3 [00:26:12] I think conductor is a good metaphor for another one I really like is the skipper of a boat, because when you’re on a boat, you know, you’re a crew, you know your boat, you know where you’re heading, you know, hopefully. But you never control the weather. You don’t control the waves. You don’t control the wind. So there’s a lot of improvization, you know, there’s a lot of things that you have to react to the environment that you’re in. And this is what a game producer has to do. You know, you’re wandering in the great unknown because there’s a lot of things that you don’t know when you’re you’re starting your journey and you have to be quick on your feet to react and also, you know, inspire your team to reach this fabled shores that you’re all aiming for. You have to hope for the best and plan for the worst. You have to be and a risk management mindset of what can go wrong. And if it goes wrong, what’s what’s mine, what’s my strategy? What’s my game plan? You know, the road ahead is not charted. So you have to chart that road by, you know, trial and error, trying some things, making mistakes, and then, you know, learning from those mistakes and moving forward. And that’s that’s for me, that’s what’s important because it is pure creativity.
Speaker 1 [00:27:27] Remember, at the start of the series, we opened with a clip of Richard Florida calling creativity the skill that matters. Well, that was just one snippet of a much larger conversation. And we’d like to share it with you now because it’s a perfect way to wrap things up.
Speaker 2 [00:27:44] Richard is a noted urban studies theorist, best known for his book The Rise of the Creative Class, published in 2002. So we figured a good place to begin our chat was to ask him how attitudes toward creativity have changed since then.
Speaker 3 [00:27:57] Well, it’s funny. I feel like it’s it’s come full circle. If you look back at the criticism of the book, it was, you know, creativity doesn’t really matter and talent doesn’t really matter. What’s happened is that now, two decades later, all of that has been reversed. Creativity is more valued than ever before. You see it now when you talk to business leaders, you see it now. When you talk to community leaders, it’s the skill that matters. I remember looking at LinkedIn a few years ago, and it was the number one skill you had to have was creativity. And moreover, when you look at how communities compete, people are working from home. And communities around North America in the world are competing for talent. You know, to be honest, I wouldn’t have predicted this. I think if anything, I was hopeful. But yeah, yeah, it seems to have become kind of the norm. What was once the U.S. has now become the norm.
Speaker 1 [00:28:52] One thing I’m wrestling with, Richard, is our need to be together to fuel creativity. The pandemic has disrupted our ability to mingle, and mingling is kind of a jet fuel for creativity. How do you square the isolation that we’ve all experienced and maybe getting used to with the need to commingle to be creative?
Speaker 3 [00:29:13] What’s interesting, John, is in a nearly 40 year career as an academic, not once have I ever encountered the role of pandemics or infectious disease in abating the tide of urbanization. If you look back at history and certainly the past couple of centuries, the arc of urbanization has just gone straight upward. That tells me something that the force of people mingling, the force of density, the force of people forging, community clustering because clustering and creativity, these two things go together. And they’re not just about arts and culture and bohemianism. They are the basic motor force of economic growth. That force has powered human societies advance and culture in innovation and economics for all of time. Cities will survive. They will be fine. Even New York City, which was proclaimed dead back in March, is now seeing record sales of condominiums. Again, what I think is going to happen is that instead of going to an office and plugging your laptop into a cubicle, that the city or neighborhood will become more of what the office used to be. So your day at the office will be more like maybe you go two times a week, but it’ll be more like a local business trip where instead of just going and sitting in an office space, you’ll go to meetings, you’ll meet with colleagues to grab a coffee with friends. So I actually think this sense of commingling in getting together and density and social interaction will become more important, not let we spending less time in an office isolated and more time in our communities, our business community, our innovation communities, our ecosystems, mingling and getting together and getting stuff done.
Speaker 2 [00:30:49] Working remotely does bring challenges, as most of us have learned over the past year. Do you see the quality of creativity being reduced as a result of our increasingly virtual world? And how do companies and communities ensure that creativity stays in the spotlight in the future?
Speaker 3 [00:31:06] Well, I think for these community is really the big question is how do you build remote work ecosystems? It’s something I’m working on in my consulting. And I think what we’re looking at is not a place where remote workers all work isolated in their homes. I think we’re talking about new kinds of communities, still the third places in coffee shops and coworking spaces where remote workers mix and mingle. Going back to the 1920s after the Spanish flu, the emergence of Greenwich Village as an artistic and creative center occurred after the Spanish flu because creative Laucke there for this kind of density. I think now we’re finding that you can create a kind of analog to that in smaller communities. I certainly see it when I travel, when I travel before the pandemic. Creatives need a combination of interaction and isolation. This is why creative people like to be there, not extroverts. They don’t need human contact to be stimulated. Creative people are high in introversion. They need a lot of isolation. They did a lot of crime alone. They need a lot of time without interruption and disruption. But at certain times they want energy. They want other human energy. They want somebody to bounce an idea. If they want to go get a coffee, they want to go to a bike to for a bike ride or walk into Rabin to recharge their energy. So there’s a lot of stimulation creative people get for the natural environment. And if you tell them to report to the office and strap on a suit, they’re going to say. We’re going to go to a place that and I think what I’m seeing among high performance organization and high tech companies in the state’s leading edge companies here saying we’re going to allow people to work remotely who want to. And at the same time, we’re going to build spectacular office facilities. I mean, the Office of the Future, I’ve been working on this. You know, wellness space is meditation spaces, outdoor spaces to me, you know, coworking spaces and conference spaces, the likes of which we haven’t seen. I think the office becomes a perk as well and quite experiential, no longer a place just to work. I think this is the big change. The big change in the pandemic is the way people work. And they’re not going to back this old way, this old industrial age idea that people go to an office at night and come back and five is over for those who have the privilege, the skill and the privilege and the talent to demand that, that’s what we’ve got to really start to think about.
Speaker 1 [00:33:20] Well, we have no shortage of things to think about after that incredible flood of insights that have been shared with us during these conversations. Our thanks to Richard Florida and all our guests for joining us on this deep dove into creativity. Teresa, I wonder what stands out for you the most from everything we’ve heard?
Speaker 2 [00:33:39] John, I loved our conversation with Shopify as Brittany Forsyth. The notion of creativity will abound. If you have the right people in place, people who are able to learn, not just people who can do the job today and people who are able to challenge each other and learn from each other and drive each other for. That was really inspiring. What about you?
Speaker 1 [00:34:01] I’m taking a lot of notes from the educators we heard from. You think of shared in college, celebrated globally for all it’s done over the decades with animation. But you find the same creative juices at play in all of its programs, from phys ed to skilled trades, where creativity really is the jet fuel of skills for the years ahead.
Speaker 2 [00:34:22] Yeah, it’s so interesting to see the journey of creativity from the classroom to the workplace. And I want to touch a little bit on our conversation with Tom Waller from Lululemon, who hones in on the strategic elements of creativity, which is not for creativity sake, but for the set of problems that you’re trying to solve that a company or a group of people are uniquely qualified to solve. And that’s centering around the problem and understanding what the objective you have in mind is. Also reminds me of our conversation last time with a jackal from the Creative Destruction Lab.
Speaker 1 [00:34:59] Yeah, we heard pretty much from every guest that creativity is a team sport, if you will. You need to bring together a lot of people and diverse groups of people if you want to really be creative in this kind of world and this kind of economy. And it’s going to be even more challenging. But maybe in other ways it will take off in the years ahead when we’re all going to explore different ways of working with hybrid models, where we’ll be working probably a bit remotely and a lot together in different ways in the years ahead. And I was really struck by some of the comments that, Richard, Florida is a great student of creativity and author about creativity, shared with us at the end, going back to the 1920s, the roaring 20s, when communities like Greenwich Village really thrived as people clustered together to take advantage of new technologies. You just think of how radio and television were taking off in the 1920s that fueled a whole new creative age. The 20s, the second roaring 20s can be equally creative, with people still coming together in the Greenwich villages of this century to collaborate to share ideas with diverse groups of people and to challenge each other to solve the epic problems that are right in front of us. We’re going to need a whole lot more creativity in the years ahead. And it was great to hear from such a diversity of Canadian organizations that are ready and set to take on this new creative age.
Speaker 2 [00:36:38] It’s a new era, the soaring twenties. I love it.
Speaker 1 [00:36:41] The soaring 20s that’s yours to retire,
Speaker 2 [00:36:44] consider it officially coined. And John, keep in mind, this podcast is just a companion piece to our much larger research hub on creativity, which will be online at RBC Dotcom Slash Thought Leadership once it launches in early May.
Speaker 1 [00:36:57] It’s an incredible resource and I’m so proud of the team for all the work that’s gone into it. I hope those of you listening to the series find it as valuable as I did and that whatever you’re doing today, that you make it creative. I’m John Stackhouse
Speaker 2 [00:37:10] and I’m trained. Teresa Doe, this is Disruptors and RBC Podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Bye for now.
Speaker 5 [00:37:23] Disruptors and RBC podcast is created by the RBC Thought Leadership Group and does not constitute a recommendation for any organization, product or service, it’s produced and recorded by Jar Audio for more disruptors, content like or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and visit RBC Dotcom Slash Disrupters.
The pandemic upended our lives and, at least temporarily, closed us off to so much—everything from the office and our friends to international travel. It also forced most of us to adapt quickly to new ways of living and working. Small businesses had to think outside the box to retain customers. Large businesses had to move whole workforces online. Universities had to educate students dispersed far and wide. In that way, COVID opened our eyes to the critical importance of being able to envision a new path forward.
You can think of creativity, then, as the new “it” skill. For an individual, it could be a differentiator in a job search. On a broader level, it’s at the core of an organization’s competitive advantage, and of a country’s enduring prosperity.
“For a businessperson, if you don’t have any creativity, what is going to happen one day, is that whatever you do will become obsolete,” Cirque du Soleil CEO Daniel Lamarre says on our latest Disruptors podcast.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Simplecast
The Disruptors team spent the last few months interviewing experts including Lamarre and University of Toronto professor Ajay Agrawal on the importance of creativity, for a special two-part podcast. What we learned: there are ways to embrace and nurture creativity in every line of work.
Start with a well-defined goal
It’s key to have an end goal in mind, or at least a clear understanding of the problem you’re looking to solve.
“Goals can be a great energizer to creativity,” says Agrawal, who founded the University of Toronto’s Creative Destruction Lab.
In his work advising early-stage technology firms at the CDL, Agrawal stresses the importance of individuals taking the required space and time to explore different solutions.
“Give people the resources that they need in order to explore solutions to the goal and to have the kind of mental space they need in order to explore areas outside of what might be their initial domain of expertise,” he said.
See constraints as a positive
Constraints on the creative process come in many forms. Rather than viewing them as impediments, it can help to see them as critical variables. In other words, how are you going to get around time or resource limitations and other challenges? Having guardrails around the creative process can help teams maintain focus and push beyond comfort zones.
“The minute you set constraints, now the creative mind gets to work on how do I achieve the goal, conditional on these constraints?” Agrawal said.
Think of creativity as a muscle that can be strengthened
Gil Moore, former drummer of Canadian rock band Triumph, thinks determination has a lot to do with creativity. “I don’t think that someone’s creative and they just wake up and the sun shines on them—I just don’t believe that’s how it works,” he said.
Being talented helps, but creativity also comes from practice, and learning.
“I never really believed that I had any particular skill—I always believed that it was learned. I think a lot of times a great, creative moment is just that culmination of that effort and the skills that have been developed,” said Moore.
Stay tuned for the second episode in the Creativity series featuring conversations with Lululemon, Shopify, Ubisoft, Rotman’s I-Think, and more, that explores creativity as utility in the classroom, workplace and for the country. In the coming weeks, RBC Economics & Thought Leadership be publishing original research about the emergence of creativity as a critical skill for the 2020s, one that is vital to help propel the country into a new era of economic growth and innovation.
[00:00:01] Hi, it’s John here, along with my co-host, Teresa.
[00:00:05] Hey, John, it’s great to be here
[00:00:06] and great to air quotes. See you.
[00:00:09] Likewise. So I have a question for you. Shoot. Do you consider yourself creative?
[00:00:15] Oh, no. That is such a tough question. But you know what? I think all people are creative. We just express it in very different ways. And you know what? We’ve seen that through the pandemic, whether it’s health workers or teachers or creative artists, all connecting with people in very different and difficult but ultimately creative ways.
[00:00:36] Even before the pandemic, the world was grappling with an accelerated digital revolution that was radically altering the way we all live, work and interact. And we’ve been seeing companies completely reinvent themselves and reorient themselves to address the challenges they’re seeing. And a surprising new power still is emerging.
[00:00:56] Creativity is more valued than ever before. It’s the skill that matters. I remember looking at LinkedIn. The number one skill you had to have was creativity.
[00:01:06] That was Richard Florida, the urban theorist whose book The Rise of the Creative Class, predicted this moment way back in 2002. Our team has spent the last several months interviewing experts like Richard about the importance of creativity. We’ve talked to the companies that are harnessing it most effectively and the academics who are teaching it most passionately to create an entire hub of knowledge, advice and examples of creativity.
[00:01:34] Yeah, it’s it’s been a really fun project to get to do. We managed to create our own definition of creativity, and we also explored how that mix up your unleashed bursts of creativity and innovation. We dug into how it manifests in people, organizations and the economy. And we looked at labour market trends, including the demand for it in sectors that have been most disrupted by the pandemic.
[00:01:58] And Teresa, before we go any further, maybe an uncreative question, certainly a one-on-one question, what is creativity?
[00:02:05] So according to our definition, it is novelty plus value.
[00:02:10] So when I stop on the local street to talk to a sidewalk artist about whatever they are drawing on the sidewalk, is that creativity?
[00:02:19] Well, if it is something new, then that is creative. And, you know, even if you don’t particularly find it interesting, but maybe the person behind you does, then that’s valuable.
[00:02:29] And maybe just the fact that we’re talking about it is all the value that sometimes you need. But creativity is about much more than art is about much more than the expression of the human spirit. Through our research at RBC, we are increasingly convinced that creativity is going to be a critical skill through the 20 20s right across Canada. And we think that our economic prosperity may even depend in the coming decades on that very ability to harness creativity. This is Disruptors and RBC podcast, I’m your host, John Stackhouse,
[00:03:13] and I’m Teresa Do RBC’s thought leadership team. And it’s our pleasure to welcome you to the first episode of a special two part series on creativity.
[00:03:29] I’m so excited about some of the guests we’ve lined up, folks from Shopify, Ubisoft and Metalworks to name just a few, but to kick off the series of conversations, it’s a real pleasure to introduce the head of a company that calls creativity its defining ideal
[00:03:45] from set creators and costume designers to choreographers and composers. Cirque du Soleil s headquarters in Montreal is filled with craftspeople and specialists and all sorts of creative fields to research.
[00:03:56] It was such a treat to sit down with Cirque’s CEO, Daniel about twice, actually, since we ran into some tech issues the first time. But as he told us, the show must go on. It takes a creative type to say that, I guess. But when we did get rolling, we began by asking him how he defines creativity and how important it is to what Cirque does not just in the big tent, but as a business every day.
[00:04:26] Yeah, for me, creativity is the ability to make or otherwise bring into existence something new, whether a new solution to a problem, a new methodology or a new device, in our case, a new artistic show. For me, my belief is that there is no commerce without creativity. For an artists, there will be a lot of creativity without commerce. But for a businessperson, if you don’t have any creativity, when is going to happen? One day is that whatever you do would become obsolete. And that’s very, very important that you were able to reinvent yourself with creativity, because if you want to remain relevant, if you want to keep your leadership, it’s very, very important that all the time you bring people, creative people, to reinvent yourself. That’s why it’s so important to invest in research and development. That’s why it’s so important to be on the lookout for new ideas, new concepts, new products
[00:05:33] all the time. That’s a beautiful way of describing it. It’s hard in my mind to imagine a Canadian organization, maybe a global organization that is more creative than Cirque du Soleil. It just embodies creativity in so many different ways. Danielle, give us a sense of how you approach creativity at Cirque.
[00:05:51] First of all, you have to create a creative environment, which means in our case, if you if you walk in the building, you will see a lot of pieces of art. If you walk in our studio, you will see artists rehearsing. It’s very, very important that it doesn’t matter if you work in finance or H.R. If you work at Cirque du Soleil, we want you to remember who you’re working for and what is the purpose of what you do. And I strongly suggest that this formula should apply to any type of industry, that when you work in the building of an organization, it should feel and breed the nature of the business you’re in.
[00:06:37] Cirque du Soleil has been successful for many, many, many years. How is the company been able to sustain that creativity over the decades?
[00:06:46] That’s the daily challenge of an organization like us, because I don’t want people to feel when they will see the next show of Cirque du Soleil that they had seen it before. So the challenge is all the time to be on the lookout for new artists. So casting is very, very important to us. The other thing is we’re always on the lookout for new technologies in order to develop new scenography, new technologies and activities. So all those ideas are coming out from challenging each other about new technologies, new type of new type of music, new type of costume. And that’s how you remain relevant in our world.
[00:07:31] And who I’m curious within the organization contributes to those ideas. Do you solicit them from top all the way down, or how do these ideas get manifested?
[00:07:41] Yeah, I like to think that we have five thousand pair of eyes and ears and we encourage our people to always feed us with something, the discomfort, because sometimes it might be by reading a book, seeing a new movie, a hearing and your piece of music, or just seeing something on YouTube or on social media that could be attractive to us. And that’s why we like to have people challenging each other within the entire organization. Because even if you were in H.R. and Finance again, you might see something on social media that could be very attractive to us. And that’s what we like to do, is to create this environment where people feel legitimate to bring their creative ideas to other people within the organization.
[00:08:41] Cercas always struck me as kind of like the United Nations, it attracts people, creators from every corner of the world. I’m wondering if there are places that tend to develop more creative people than others.
[00:08:53] We like to think that Quebec is definitely a good place because we’re good as inventing new things here. The reality is, to your point about being a United Nation type of cast, I truly believe that’s one of the uniqueness of our organization, because when you walk in the cafeteria, you have the feeling that you are at the United Nations cafeteria, which is great because you have people coming from 50 different nationalities coming here with their own culture, their own ideas, their own backgrounds
[00:09:31] could probably locate itself in any number of different cities, in any number of different places around the world. What is it about Montreal that allows you to flourish? That enables Cirque’s creative dynamism?
[00:09:45] First of all, as you know, there is the influence of the French culture and also the North American culture. They don’t have the feeling that there are Montreal. They have the feeling that, as we said earlier, that there are United Nations. But more importantly, foreigners feel very welcome in Canada. You have a feeling when you come into our creative studio that you’re at home. And that’s one of the big advantage that we have as Canadians. So as we have here in Montreal, having created a very unique artistic infrastructure that brings people from around the world to come and work with Cirque du Soleil because of the approach that we have, but also because of the unique facilities that we have. Hollywood is for movie. Montreal is for circus arts.
[00:10:40] What do you think Canada needs to do to foster more of that creative energy in that artistic spirit over the next decade, especially as we come out of the pandemic?
[00:10:50] I think as a country, we’re still very well-positioned, but we’re very nice. Therefore, we’re too often in the shadow of our, you know, us neighbor. And I think what we will need in the future is to be much more aggressive about affirming our culture, affirming our values and taking a much more leadership role in the world.
[00:11:22] Which countries in the world. Do you think are the most creative? And where does Canada rank among them
[00:11:27] or the best were the best. And thus the way we should be thinking, are we the best? I have nothing to support that. But I think we should say and I think we should affirm that and we should fight for that place. Know we have created in Montreal an event which is called C to Montreal, which is which is a creative event that is happening every year. And I’m one of the founder of that activity. And when we founded C to Montreal, this idea was to become the Davos of creativity. And that’s the way you can brand yourself as a country by doing some statement, creating some event that will confirm your positioning. And I’m a strong believer that we can have the brand. Canada can have the brand of being the the best place in the world for creators.
[00:12:28] So that’s such an inspiring vision. It’s a fantastic start to our series. I like the idea of an acrobat in the lobby. It is what you would expect of a circus, but it also tells you what organizations can do to inspire creativity in their own way, in their own business. But for every employee, doesn’t matter if you’re the bookkeeper or a front line artist or performer walking through that front door, you can’t help but feel creative and probably be inspired through the day.
[00:12:57] Yeah, and it goes to show if you give people permission to be creative, they totally can be
[00:13:02] coloring outside the lines, I think is the expression we all need to do it more.
[00:13:07] What’s next? So Circus, the company that’s embodied creativity from the start. But we also wanted to hear from what you might call a, quote, old economy business. So Kyla Lee is the face of Vancouver’s Acumen Law. She’s a tough talking defense lawyer who specializes in driving related offenses,
[00:13:26] but she’s also young Mayte and author, blogger, podcast, tick talker and singer songwriter. She admits there are some people in her industry and maybe it’s more than some who frown at this approach to social media and other. Content platforms, but she doesn’t see a big difference between creating content and arguing a case in court.
[00:13:47] I think creativity is argument when you’re creating something, when you’re putting a piece of art or a photograph or a video or any type of perspective out there, you’re advocating your position, whether it’s your position about a belief or a feeling or a legal position, and you’re creating an educational video, whatever it is that you’re creating is your argument about the thing that you’re doing, the creative work about. And so I don’t think that there’s any difference between creativity and argument. I see creativity as a form of argument. Kyla, who I honestly consider as a Renaissance woman of sorts, she makes a great case for why more, quote, old economy businesses may want to consider trying to inject a little creativity into their processes.
[00:14:37] Teresa, creativity has always been important. It’s probably how we evolved, but people might wonder why it matters now, maybe more than ever, especially as Canada looks beyond the pandemic and into some exciting and scary decades ahead. To find out more, we reached out to a bona fide expert on innovation.
[00:14:57] Ajay Agarwal is the professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. He also co-founded Next Canada, a support program for the Next Generation of Entrepreneurs, which we featured on this podcast before.
[00:15:11] A is one of those Renaissance people who you were describing. But for this series, Teresa, we’re most interested in his work at the Creative Destruction Lab, which he founded at the U of T in twenty twelve. Welcome to Disruptors.
[00:15:25] Thanks very much, John. It’s a pleasure to be here.
[00:15:28] Let’s start with how you define creativity and how do you teach it in a business school.
[00:15:33] So we think of it as the process of developing solutions to problems that are better than the existing solutions and so better can be defined in a variety of ways. It can be it’s cheaper, it’s faster, it has less environmental impact. It’s more inclusive. There’s all kinds of ways for setting up the parameters for how we measure what good is. But once we set up those parameters that the creation of better solutions to problems. And so my view on creativity, how we teach in the business school is start by what’s the objective, what’s the purpose, what’s the thing we’re trying to do. And so from a creativity perspective is what’s the most efficient way that we can achieve that goal. And so when we work on creativity in the business school, effectively, the very first step is identifying what it is we’re trying to achieve in the first place. And and that sounds really easy and it’s surprisingly hard. Like, in other words, many organizations that I go to meet and tell me about all the innovation programs and I’ll say, what’s the goal? How do you know if you succeed? And you’d be surprised many times. They can’t answer the question
[00:16:41] just to build on that. Do you think that that comes from a problem where creativity is difficult to measure?
[00:16:48] Yes, if you don’t have a goal and that’s one of the reasons I think Terry said that universities are really sort of this very important institution in society because at universities there’s an environment for people to be creative and innovate. With no application in mind, it can be literally their curiosity. So curiosity driven research, which is very, very important for an overall research ecosystem. But to bring that into a commercial setting, it’s really important to have a goal and to have an outcome so that you can basically give creativity, some direction and some guardrails.
[00:17:25] You deal with a lot of tech companies through the creative destruction lab. But I’m curious, is creativity different in tech companies than in other businesses?
[00:17:36] Well, I think the kinds of businesses that I work with, John, they’re usually very small. They’re very often pretty revenue. And so the reason that there are different is that they don’t have all the bureaucracy that a larger organization has. And so they have a little more freedom to explore and they can really be problem focused. The creativity there comes in these small firms in the latitude that they can explore a very wide search space, often without a lot of bureaucratic limitations in terms of the different solution types that you might want to explore to solve the problem, that these smaller tech companies are able to do quite a like a large and unrestrained search.
[00:18:22] That’s so interesting when you think of a large organization that wants to embed more creativity into its culture, it wants to build up more innovations. What are your thoughts on their efforts to replicate that sort of startup like environment that is separate from what some people call corporate antibodies to the creativity process?
[00:18:44] Yeah, that’s a great question. Is so important, I would say so. That’s the number one question that I get when I meet with executives of large organizations. They come and they visit Creative Destruction Lab. They see how works and they say, how can we replicate or get something like this inside organizations? My view is there’s three key things. Thing number one, set a really well-defined target or goal step to give people the the resources that they need in order to explore solutions to the goal. Sometimes that is, you know, people need some time. They need some free time. If they’re kind of expected to keep doing their full time jobs, it’s hard for them to have the kind of mental space they need in order to explore areas outside of what might be their initial domain of expertize. And then third is ways to recognize success along the way.
[00:19:37] I imagine some creative types see setting goals as restrictive, even controlling of their creativity, and I think as a Google 20 percent time where the company allows employees to spend 20 percent of their time on almost anything, much of it without goals, can actually be limiting or restrictive to creativity.
[00:19:56] Well, first of all, I would love to see the data on the on the Google 20 percent. I wouldn’t be surprised if the people that have been most successful through that program are ones who set goals for what they were going to do with their 20 percent. I think goals can be a great energizer to creativity because the minute you set constraints now the creative mind gets to work on how do I achieve the goal conditional on these constraints. So right now, for example, we’ve created a not for profit spin from creative destruction left in response to covid-19, which is focused on creating a rapid screening solution.
[00:20:31] But how has the crisis challenge different approaches to creativity and which approaches seem to be excelling in this environment?
[00:20:38] Well, I guess the primary distinction has been not being able to work shoulder to shoulder with people, and a lot of creativity requires collaboration. I’ve done a fair amount of research on the role of collaboration in creativity and innovation and how how collaborations actually become increasingly important over time as fields have become more and more complex than in order to really understand the frontier of the field, you need to collaborate across multiple people who are experts in different areas. It’s very hard to be an expert across multiple areas now, and so the more need for collaboration. So I would say for covid, the biggest thing has been learning to do all this collaboration online, so much going digital. And so for us, that’s been the biggest shift.
[00:21:26] I have one final question before we wrap up. As we come out of the pandemic and look to the years and decades ahead, how do we scale creativity in our workforce and our economy, especially for people who might not think that they’re capable of being creative?
[00:21:42] That’s a great question. So, first of all, I think of creativity as a process and a process requires often a team. And so a team has people with different skills. And so I find that everybody has the potential to play a role in the creative process. It might be a different role, but there is a role for everybody in the creative process. That said, it’s not a free ride. In other words, every role requires developing the muscle to play that role. So think of like anybody can play soccer that maybe they can play at a at an elite level, but they can play. But there’s different positions and you might be more suited to be a defensive player or an offensive player, depending on a variety of characteristics about you. But regardless, even if you have a predisposition to be a defensive player, you still have to develop the muscle, the skill set to play that role. And that’s true. And creativity in the creative process. One of the muscles to develop is the ability to identify what assumptions am I relying on and are those even right. And so that just is a skill. And people with practice learn to do it. And so all of a sudden, somebody who never had really thought of how to identify one of the underlying assumptions and then how do I challenge them with some practice, they start developing the muscle to be able to do that.
[00:23:02] Thanks for being on
[00:23:03] disruptors, John. Thanks for having me. It’s a real pleasure to be here and speak with you and Teresa.
[00:23:10] So, Teresa, as Canadians, I guess we all need to start hitting the mental gym and working out those creative muscles.
[00:23:16] I am so ready. I have been wearing yoga pants for most of the past 12 months anyway. And speaking of which, we’re going to chat with Lululemon in part two of the series. But to follow up on Jay’s thoughts on the role of creativity in a post covid Canada, I want to share something we heard from Sarah Diamond. Right.
[00:23:35] That’s perfect timing. Sarah is president emerita of what’s called Canada’s University of the Imagination, the Ontario College of Art and Design University or Oxford. You in Toronto? We had a great conversation with her about the explosion of creativity we’ve witnessed during the pandemic. But she also pointed out an interesting challenge, namely, it’s one thing to be creative and quite another to get paid for it.
[00:24:02] For me, one of the real fundamentals here is to think through how we ensure that there’s a living wage for artists and how we integrate artists into the strategic thinking of our world. Post covid-19. So the public realm, public space artists should be really part of thinking through that physical world that we’re in. And they should be paid to work with developers, with designers, with architects, with the people creating the virtual infrastructure of cities to to think about what that world can be. I do. I think we’re going to want to be outside, we’re going to want to be in that physical world of contact with each other. So how do we think about enough support for the arts that we have very strong, creative, not for profit environment as well as what I’m sure will be really the growth of for profit cultural enterprises?
[00:25:05] Our next guest knows a lot about the intersection of creativity and business and about the importance of supporting artists. He’s an artist himself, a Canadian musical icon, at least if you’re of a certain age, right?
[00:25:18] John?
[00:25:19] Yeah, Teresa, I am of that age.
[00:25:27] So Gilmore is the drummer and vocalist of Triumph, the Mississauga based power trio founded in 1975. He’s also the founder of Canada’s biggest recording studio and premier entertainment arts for metalworks.
[00:25:40] I met Gil for the first time last fall when I visited metalworks in Mississauga just to the west of Toronto. It’s this incredible hub of creativity. And as Gil and I were walking around the music studio and then the music school and then the production centers where he develops stage concepts, but also these pioneering tech approaches to maybe how we’ll see concerts in the years and decades ahead. It got us both talking about how music and more broadly creativity is not just getting us through the pandemic. It can be a real fuel for the recovery. Gil, it’s great to speak with you again. Welcome to Disruptors.
[00:26:25] Nice to be here, John.
[00:26:26] Gil Teresa has already aged to find herself. So I’m going to take this question on myself and take you back to nineteen eighty one, which I’m proud to remember, and a song called Magic Power, which had some of the most amazing lyrics of that time. It begins with the lines. I’m young, I’m wild, and I’m free. Do you need to be young, wild and free
[00:26:51] to be creative? I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s any any boundaries on creativity age wise. In fact, I feel more creative now than I did when I was younger, if only because I think about things more. So you’re tend to meander in your thoughts down different pathways when you consider things in a more complex way that leads to creativity, I believe. I think it’s a natural creativity when you’re younger, when you’re really, really focused on one thing, you’re seeing kind of the future through a straw. Nothing is bad. I think it’s good. It’s good to really drill down and try to get good at something. Whatever it is could be mathematics. It could be playing hockey. I don’t care what it is. I think it’s terrific to have focus. But I think over time you need to have a bigger lens. I think that broader lens and deeper thought leads to more creativity, although I will say that focus of youth, it leads to sometimes an explosion of ideas in a small area guild.
[00:28:02] Take us back to your youth. When did you realize you were creative?
[00:28:06] I don’t know that I did. I always thought I was pretty slow learner.
[00:28:10] Isn’t that often the case with creative types?
[00:28:13] I think that’s all over the map. I think, for example, if you have someone that’s a virtuoso, which I was not, then you can see the explosive growth in their talent. And it is kind of like a natural repository of of creative juice that just flows. They have this mojo that the ninety nine out of one hundred people don’t have. And then you have the rest of us, you know, as Gordon Lightfoot once famously said, you know, it’s it’s ninety five percent perspiration and five percent inspiration. I would find that through repetition and through gaining skills that you’re then able to harness creativity. If you don’t have any skills and you haven’t really harnessed any energy in a certain direction, you can’t be very creative because you’re you’re you’re sort of flummoxed at that point. You’re like, I want to I wish I could have that, you know, but shoulda, woulda, coulda eventually loses out to someone who really, really does the ten thousand hours. And then through that process of the ten thousand hours, this is where the creativity starts to emerge.
[00:29:29] Could you expand on that, Gil? I’m thinking of someone like you who found success with your skills in the broader mainstream market, let’s say, compared to maybe someone with comparable skills, but who ends up being a busker. What’s the difference in how you achieve that success?
[00:29:46] Well, this gets into this interesting conversation about what creativity really is. And if it was just all about creative skills. I’m just talking about music right now. It would be easy to define success because you would be able to look at the performance capabilities. I’ll call them the athletic capabilities that are kind of commodities that you can grade. But that isn’t what happens. What happens is the circumstances, the way the ball bounces, so to speak, come along that have nothing to do with those those skills. And that’s where I think you get the. Opportunities, I think that the music world and I and I really apply this to just about anything is it is a bit of a Snakes and ladders game. So if you are super creative, it might allow you to actually see the ladder, whereas someone is has creative skills in a certain area like, let’s say, musical skills, but they don’t have the creative skills in business to see the difference between a snake and a ladder. So that’s why I think you end up with people that are phenomenally talented, phenomenally creative, that are massive failures, and you also see mediocre talents that don’t seem to have, you know, the eye of the tiger in terms of creativity but are tremendously successful. And then there’s those that seem to have it all.
[00:31:18] What is that secret sauce that makes someone incredibly creative?
[00:31:22] I think determination has a lot to do with it, which is not what most people would say. I don’t think that someone’s creative and they just they just wake up and the sun shines on them. I just don’t believe that’s how it works. I believe that the result of determination and perseverance have a lot more to do with creativity than one might surmise, particularly if somebody is thinks of themselves as not being creative. So they have a job that is really mundane and repetitive. They can be very creative in that job and not even realize that they’re creative because they think of creativity as art, music, some form of the creative arts. That to them is is they’re unfamiliar with it. They feel intimidated by it. Let’s say another example would be I don’t think athletes necessarily think they’re creative. I think athletes are incredibly, incredibly creative people. If you look almost almost anywhere, whether we talk about Tom Brady and you think about those split second decisions that he’s making before he launches his pass, those are creative. Those are subjective decisions. I mean, that requires that visualization, I suppose, of that ball, whatever is in his head at that moment, if he’s visualizing how he releases the ball or how it lands and hits the net, you know, great golfers are like that. They visualize their shots. And so look at look at that through the creative one sports, the business I was reading about Warren Buffett today. What does Warren Buffett know about creativity? Well, I would say he knows a lot. So a lot of people would say, what are you talking about? He’s an investor. Investors aren’t creative. Well, I would say, hell, yeah, they are. You know, the really good ones. I think that knee jerking and quick reactions are lead to failure in life and in business, having patience and being able to listen to others, process the information and then make what I’m going to call a measured response. And by that, I don’t mean slow and I don’t mean becoming bound up and calcifying. I just mean that patience to really digest the information, let it resonate, let it marinate and allow you to make a creative decision.
[00:33:58] Speaking of marinating or stewing, maybe it feels like we’re in my two hundred and forty of the pandemic, which has led to an explosion of creativity and a lot of ways. But it’s also led to a lot of pain. How much of a role do you think pain or hardship place and creativity and what implications does that have for where we are and
[00:34:20] where we’re going? I think pain and hardship lead to creativity. I think fear leads to creativity. I think hardship leads to creativity for different reasons. I think it’s spread into us. You know, it’s it goes back to the flight or or flight response in animals like that is almost has to turn on the creative spigot instantly. Where I think we get into a situation where creativity is extinguished, it’s not in the mode of pain or despair. It’s in the area of anger. And there’s a lot of anger that goes along with a pandemic. People are angry about this and they’re angry about that. I think the minute that the human mind switches into anger mode, that the ability to create goes right out the window. I have never found that if I let emotion, the emotion of anger kick in, that I have anything creative to say or any creative juice whatsoever. At that moment, you just become a cement block.
[00:35:25] So how do you businesses avoid that inertia, especially at a time when, like you said, so many people are feeling frustrated or stuck because of the pandemic?
[00:35:35] I don’t think that businesses, even if they’re creative businesses like metalworks, can remain static. You know, life’s dynamic businesses has to be dynamic. Innovation in everything is the key to moving the needle. So I never feel like, oh, we got it. No, we never we never got it. We’re at a certain base camp on the mountain. There is no God at like the summit of the mountain is still somewhere where we’re headed. We don’t know exactly how we’re going to get there. We hope we know. We think we have a map, you know, oops, we made a wrong turn. These are all the fundamentals of business there. They’re creative necessities of. Business, all businesses, no matter whether what business, RBC and banking, they have to iterate their banking model. And that’s, you know, needs to be powered by creativity for you to read or die. That’s how I see the processes of business
[00:36:34] iterate or die. Spoken like a true rock star. Gil, this has been a great shot. Thanks so much for your time.
[00:36:41] Thank you, John. I enjoyed every minute of it.
[00:36:45] Teresa, we’ve heard more than a few rock stars on disruptors over the years. Granted, most of them are from the tech space. And now we’ve had a real rock star, Gilmore, the drummer of Triumph. I was really struck by what he said about the importance of repetition to creativity. I kind of thought, you know, coming from the music world, he had say that most creative types, certainly musicians are kind of born that way. And he stressed that, no, you practice, practice, practice, and that’s how creative types, they’re not born. They’re made.
[00:37:18] Yeah. That that really resonated with me about the importance of having learned experience and knowledge to be able to generate more complex ideas. And it also reminded me of what AJ said about how collaboration is so important, because you can’t be an expert in multiple areas now like you might have been able to before. And so the need to work with other people, you know, the notion that creativity is a team sport are so fundamental to be able to think about how to embedded into our economy.
[00:37:48] And of course, it’s a real team sport when it comes to the circus. It was fascinating to hear Daniel Lahmar from Cirque du Soleil talk about how they approach creativity. And it surprised me how they see it embedded in every job in the organization, not just the people we see on center stage under the big tent, but the finance. And our teams back at headquarters in Montreal are as much a part of the creative enterprise as the performers. Maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise, but it’s a great message to all of us that creativity is something that exists probably in everyone. And we certainly need to find ways to draw it out from everyone if we’re to thrive as organizations or teams or even as individuals heading out of this pandemic. How we do that is going to be the subject of Episode two in our two part series. Teresa, who do we have lined up for that?
[00:38:43] Oh, we have so many fantastic people lined up. I am really excited to hear from Shopify. You know, they are Canadian, darling, and to be able to talk to one of the key founding members of their exponential growth, that is going to be awesome. How about you?
[00:39:00] I’m keen to hear from Ubisoft, the gaming company. Of course, gaming is all about creativity, but it marries narrative storytelling and technology in ways that I think every sector, every organization should be learning from
[00:39:13] in the 20s. Yeah. So we made a compelling case for creativity in this episode. And then we get to hear the how and different parts of the economy for the next. It’s shaping up to be a real good series.
[00:39:23] Well, as those creative types often say, stay tuned until next time. I’m John Stackhouse
[00:39:29] and I’m Theresa Do. This is Disruptors and RBC podcast. Talk to you soon.
Disruptors and RBC podcast is created by the RBC Thought Leadership Group and does not constitute a recommendation for any organization, product or service, it’s produced and recorded by Jar Audio for more disruptors, content like or subscribe or ever you get your podcasts and visit RBC Dotcom Slash Disruptors.