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Never Waste a Crisis: How Canada Can Build the Digital Government of the Future

Category: AI, Technology and Innovation

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Practically overnight, thousands of bureaucrats had to pivot to working from home and processing millions of relief applications. They’ve been pushing out billions of dollars in support for Canadians impacted by the COVID-19 crisis – almost entirely through digital channels, a first for the government.

Hillary Hartley, Ontario’s Chief Digital and Data Officer, and her distributed team were uniquely suited to this new environment. Their model made it easy for them to immediately start working from home when it became necessary without losing ground. After Alberta launched Canada’s first COVID-19 online self-assessment tool, Hartley’s team got the code and launched a version for Ontario within three days.

While the current focus for governments is on mission-critical crisis response, conversations are happening behind the scenes about how to seize this crisis to digitally revolutionize and better serve Canadians. Hartley and Alex Benay, the former CIO of Canada and partner at KPMG responsible for digital and government solutions, joined the RBC Disruptors podcast to discuss how the pandemic has made getting government up to the speed of digital more possible than ever.

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Benay says it’s interesting to see so many efforts pushing past all the “excuses” that used to exist for why governments couldn’t go digital-first. New programs such as the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit are going online faster, for instance, partly because the underlying rules are simpler.

“EI has tens of thousands of rules, CERB has a handful,” he said, “You’re seeing governments – both from a programmatic perspective and a technological perspective – realize that digital first is the way to go now.”

That is, if we can overcome outdated operating models.

Benay said the government’s conception of the Internet hasn’t evolved from processes created roughly 20 years ago. Bureaucrats are focused on the people who need to implement services, rather than data that could be beneficial. And information collected is protected behind firewalls and silo-ed across departments.

The latter is partly the product of privacy restrictions. In Ontario, for instance, data collected for a government program is allowed to be used only for that program. Even within the same ministry, different teams have to write up mutual agreements to be able to share data. Hartley said Ontario might have gone “a little bit too far in thinking about privacy” and not enough on interoperability, or how information could be exchanged.

“Attitudes are shifting,” she said. “It’s a moment where we really need to ask ourselves and ask the public how we should proceed.”

It comes down to two core pillars.

One is ensuring policies and regulations adapt quickly to enable proper sharing of information.

The other is having the right digital infrastructure to support a new model of service delivery. At the heart of the two is balancing a digital first mindset with appropriate privacy protections.

Perhaps there’s no better example of a digital-first government than Estonia. Both Hartley and Benay point to two specific innovations that paint a picture of what a future Canadian digital infrastructure could strive for.

The first is Estonia’s X-Road or as Benay describes it, “their railroad of the Industrial Age, but for the digital age.” It’s a decentralized server that allows thousands of businesses, governments and people to connect and exchange information. The other is a secure digital identity issued to every Estonian, which might arguably provide better privacy protections than what’s available in Canada today.

So how might Canada build the digital government of the future? A few takeaways:

  • Distributed teams. They’re key to finding innovative solutions. To solve complex challenges, governments will need to work with people and networks in every corner of the world.
  • Digital isn’t a tool, it’s a culture. Digital transformations require a major shift of mindset toward speed and user centricity. And it starts at the top with leaders who champion a digital-first model and encourage diversity of perspectives on their teams.
  • Data is key. Governments need to focus on a new approach to data and privacy if they want to keep pace with the challenges and opportunities all around us. That doesn’t mean citizens will surrender control of our data, but there needs to be more flexibility, coupled with transparency, to solve a crisis like COVID.
  • Obsess with users. Increasingly governments are learning to act less like monopolies and think more like start-ups that aren’t afraid to test and learn from their clients – it’s the most fundamental principle of a digital organization.
  • Bold does not mean big. Use the success of the CERB roll-out, with its simpler business rules, as an example. Governments no longer need size to deliver results at scale. They can fund smaller things; focus on the half-dozen things that can make an impact and ensure the system doesn’t squash it.

The government will continue to play a huge role in propping up Canada’s economy throughout this crisis and using digital channels to do so. But the momentum can’t slow once the urgency fades. As we move into the 2020s, governments are going to have to move faster and be smarter in taking on challenges. If they are able to use the COVID-19 crisis as a catalyst for adopting digital tools and platforms, we could see a future in which every citizen is digitally enabled to receive the services they need as soon as they need them.

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Mike is a serial entrepreneur, and founder of League, a Toronto startup focused on providing a digital alternative to traditional health insurance. Janet is the managing partner of Real Ventures, a Montreal-based VC firm. She’s also the first woman to head a major VC outfit in Canada. In today’s episode we discuss:

  1. Steps that every business needs to consider to overcome this pandemic
  2. The future of work in Canada, and how we can use technology to transform a lot of processes
  3. The impact this crisis will have on our ecosystem and how we can prepare for a very different future

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The COVID-19 crisis has shattered the way we live our lives and experience the world around us. Economies have been frozen in time, causing reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and remarkable improvements in air quality around the globe. Once the health crisis resolves and economies re-start, will we continue the same habits of consumption and production?

Wednesday, April 22 marks Earth Day—an opportunity to reflect and set a path forward. As I reflect on the pandemic and the climate crisis, I am reminded of the conversation I had with iconic Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky and gaming executive Vikas Gupta, who are pushing the boundaries of photography’s next frontier, using augmented reality, virtual reality and photogrammetry to create immersive, three-dimensional visual experiences. They joined us in January for RBC Disruptors, where we spoke about how technology is transforming the photographic experience—and the way we understand our impact on the planet.

Burtynsky is celebrated around the world for his unconventional landscapes, shot from the ground and the air, showcasing the enormous and enduring impact of human beings on the world around us. He has captured the urban sprawl of Los Angeles, an oil field left for dead in Azerbaijan, the spectacular imprint of China’s Three Gorges Dam, and a tire pile 40 million deep—which soon after went up in flames.

Highway #1, Los Angeles, California, USA, 2003

SOCAR Oil Fields #10, Baku, Azerbaijan, 2006

Then came the advent of digital, which allowed him to stitch together hundreds of photographs to create his renowned prints, massive in scale and detail. He began to collaborate with filmmakers and produced three major documentaries.

“This is what I call photography 2.0,” Burtynsky said. “I was able to do all the things I couldn’t do before—and get a better quality image.”

Marble Quarries #1, Carrara, Italy, 1993 (detail)

Oxford Tire Pile #1, Westley, California, USA, 1999

Wan Zhou #1, Three Gorges Dam Project, Yangtze River, China, 2002

Now, what he calls Photography 3.0 is opening up new doors for truth-telling.

At a chance meeting, Burtynsky connected with Gupta, a digital media and gaming veteran who’d worked with brands like Disney and Electronic Arts. They wondered: what would happen if you applied some of the principles of gaming to photography? If you actually transported people to some of the most extraordinary places and moments in time? Together, the two founded AVARA Media to find out.

One of their first AR experiences, part of the acclaimed Anthropocene project, made waves with a 3D augmented reality rendering of a historic event in Kenya: the massive burning of 100 tonnes of elephant tusks, designed to deter poachers in the country—and recreated at full scale from 3,000 photographs.

“To me, it was like an absolutely new form of photography that has again been born by digital,” Burtynsky said.

The leap could be as significant as the shift from black and white to colour photography.

“As an artist, it’s like a jump of that magnitude. Now you can use the same tool and bring out a three dimensional world in which you can walk around.”

Building Ivory Tusk Mound, April 25, Nairobi, Kenya, 2016

Inspired by the stickiness of gaming, AVARA Media is building an immersive augmented reality technology platform that puts people face-to-face with the biggest environmental and ecological issues our planet is facing—and shows how they can be part of the solution.

Now, instead of just looking at a rainforest landscape, you can immerse yourself in it—and even pick up a plastic water bottle floating down the river. Or travel to Indonesia, the native habitat for the endangered Sumatran tiger, and help create a digital ecosystem in which the animals do not go extinct.

The thinking is that by immersing you into the action, and gamifying the task, digital behaviour will transform into actual behaviour. Just maybe, people will think twice before buying that next plastic water bottle.

“We want to inform, impact and influence people so they ultimately become change agents towards a healthier planet,” Gupta said. “The idea around this is to inject enough game theory and gamification that there’s mass, mass appeal.”

Last year, the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and Canadian Geographic Education, with support from the RBC Foundation, partnered with The Anthropocene Project to develop an education program to expand its reach among youth and get into classrooms all across Canada. Through virtual and augmented reality, video and immersive lesson plans students can experience the history and science of different environments, and see with their own eyes the impacts of human activity, in places such as landfills. The new education program finally launched in Canada last month as part of Canadian Geographic Education’s new Online Classroom.

Technology may have made the world of photography a much more crowded space, but for Burtynsky, it’s opened up doors and worlds – and a whole new photographic art form.

 

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Over the coming weeks, we will begin to see the extent of economic damage caused by the pandemic and the necessary lockdown of our society. This quarter alone will likely see the biggest economic decline any of us have witnessed, with job losses and business closings that could affect our communities and country long after the virus is contained.

In moments like these, it’s natural to think only about the immediate challenges, but we also need to think about the next stage of recovery, so we don’t lose that opportunity when it comes.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, I’ve talked with dozens of clients – from the country’s biggest companies to retail mortgage holders – and worked closely with my global peers and our governments to understand the complexity and risks we’re facing. Many of us are now recognizing we are unlikely to see a V-shaped economic recovery, as we were hoping just a few weeks ago, and will need to work hard in the coming months to bend the downward curve back to a narrow U.

It won’t be easy. Even if social restrictions are largely gone by summer, the economic scar tissue will remain and take time to heal. To its credit, the federal government has put together critical relief packages, worth more than $100-billion, and more will be needed from Ottawa and our provinces.

Now it’s time to execute, without a moment to lose. Over the coming days, we need to pull together as Team Canada to get these historic commitments to owner-operators, innovators, social entrepreneurs and families in every corner of the country and the economy. Many companies have just days left to keep their payrolls intact. Many families will struggle to make ends meet in the coming months.

The purpose of these historic investments, though, is about more than surviving today; it’s about shaping the economy of tomorrow. And that means moving from defence to offence, as the best Team Canada always does.

To make that shift, we need to think about the next normal, as there won’t be an old normal to return to. Global trade migration is not likely to go back to the old model. International movement won’t press a “resume” button any time soon. Shoppers, diners and tourists may choose to stay away from each other for a while. Even the sharing of technologies and innovations may not flow again like they did only a few months ago.

For a relatively small country such as Canada, which has benefited in so many ways from an open world, those are significant challenges. That doesn’t mean we should give up on globalization. But it does mean we need to think, for the first time in decades, about how to be more self-reliant in the areas that matter most to our competitiveness and prosperity.

Here are some of the tools we have to do that:

Capital

Canada has a strong balance sheet, one of the world’s best. The federal government is starting to leverage it more ambitiously and will need to continue to do so, which means Canadians need to be comfortable assuming more collective debt. We also have many of the world’s strongest banks, insurance companies and pension plans, each with good, well-regulated balance sheets that can be harnessed for our economic recovery. Canadians have worked hard since the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 to strengthen those foundations and to preserve and protect capital; now is the time to get that capital to work and invest in the entrepreneurs and innovators who can build the markets and supply chains of tomorrow.

Trade

We’ve been able to take for granted the free flow of critical supplies, from medical equipment and drugs to food and agriculture products. That may not be so true in the next normal. Our governments, leading enterprises and academic institutions need to determine how to best develop and protect more resilient Canadian supply chains. Of course, a more self-reliant Canada could become a more expensive Canada, as we don’t have a significant domestic market. We’ll need the best of our innovators to develop and apply technologies to drive the next generation of productivity gains, and with it a new Canadian competitiveness.

Technology

The crisis has given many organizations the chance to see how to work differently, and connect with customers differently. If we harness new technologies across all sectors – including government – we can accelerate our shift to a more competitive and inclusive economy. And we can ensure these technologies help us better prepare for future public-health challenges. It’s not just organizations that need to evolve, though. Using its balance sheet, Canada has the chance to invest in the next generation of infrastructure – satellite-driven rural broadband, for instance, and smart cities – that will foster more ingenuity, resilient communities and secure livelihoods. We need to see the coming recovery as a digitally driven recovery, powered by data and engineered by Canadians with skills to take on the 2020s.

Skills

To make this shift, we need to transform the way we learn and train, so our companies and communities are better equipped for a new paradigm of disruption. Through Royal Bank of Canada’s $500-million Future Launch commitment and Humans Wanted research series, we’ve spent the past few years engaging employers, educators and students to focus on the future of work. Our schools, colleges and universities have responded with important strides that make Canada’s education system among the world’s best. But if we’re teaching and learning after this crisis as we did before, we will have failed.

Youth

Unfortunately, a new generation of Canadians will be bearing the economic scars of the COVID-19 crisis here for many years. If we get behind them now, they can help lead the recovery and the rebuild. As a digitally savvy generation, they’ve been fast to adapt to this new normal. It’s why RBC has committed to keeping the close to 1,400 students we offered summer jobs to, even though some won’t have workplaces on Day 1. That’s okay. Most will be working from home and help us reimagine all we can build together. They are the future; they can help take us there.

Over these trying and tumultuous months of this crisis, I’ve been inspired by RBC’s 85,000 employees who have transitioned a global operating system with remarkably little disruption. Beyond just doing things differently, I see us doing things better, which will be critical to ensuring a successful recovery that accelerates into a vastly changed world. That’s why I’ve asked every one of our leaders to keep notes on what they’re learning and how they’re thinking about the next normal.

I’ve stressed to them two words: speed and scale. We need those twin forces to drive our business forward. We need them in public policy, too, to develop solutions at the speed of our shared problems and to ensure solutions get to a scale we’re seeing elsewhere in the world.

Over the coming weeks, we will need to move faster than we may be comfortable with and strive for a scale that’s bold and ambitious. We’ll also need to keep pace, even as we’re confronted by questions that give us pause about how we can collectively move from crisis to recovery.

We will need to lay out plans for re-engagement, to determine which parts of society can open up first and how we can approach that narrow door without sparking a social stampede.

We will need to invest aggressively in mass testing for COVID-19 and adopt new approaches to monitoring, to better understand where the virus is and how best and most humanely to contain it.

We will need to protect all Canadians as we come to grips with the prospect of co-existing with the virus, domestically and globally, before a vaccine or effective treatment is developed and produced at scale.

How we respond to those questions and work together in the weeks ahead will be remembered for years. How we rebuild from there will be remembered for generations.

We know this crisis is already different and deeper than anything we’ve seen. We should also know it can be the beginning of a new economic chapter for Canada, one that allows us to thrive and prosper in a digital age.

We’ll need to work together – something Canadians are good at, even under stress. We’ll need to think about offence as well as defence. And we’ll need to see this not only as Canada’s challenge but also Canada’s moment.

That can be our next normal.

This article originally appeared in the Globe and Mail.

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In 1837, Thornton Blackburn, an escaped slave, launched Toronto’s first taxi company, and turned The City into a thriving enterprise that generated a small fortune for Blackburn and his wife Lucie — and yet somehow has been forgotten to history.

More than 180 years later, most Canadians would be pressed to cite the Blackburns or name a single black entrepreneur. Even though 1.2 million Canadians identify as black, representing 3.5% of the population, a Black in Canada survey found only 2,000 black-owned businesses of significant scale. (It’s not just a Canadian problem. In 2018, a U.S. study found just 1% of venture-backed founders were black.)

For Black History Month, RBC Disruptors talked to two entrepreneurs who are trying to do something about it. In 2018, Isaac Olowalafe Jr., a Toronto real estate investor, and Abdullah Snobar, executive director of Ryerson University’s DMZ start-up zone, launched the $1-million Black Innovation Fellowship to provide entrepreneurs with access to networks, seed capital and business partners like Shopify. Snobar stressed one word: “access.” According to the Black in Canada survey, black entrepreneurs say their biggest challenges are marketing (51%), networking and learning opportunities (51%) and finance (48%). Olowalafe says the tech sector is perhaps the best opportunity, given its rapid growth and concentration in cities like Toronto. “Ryerson is known for tech and diversity,” he told us. “How do we bring the two together?”

The opportunity for the country is enormous. While close to a quarter of Canadians identify as visible minorities, only one in eight small and medium-sized businesses is owned by one. Across every sector, role models are key. As Lola Adeyemi, a Nigerian-born, Toronto-based food entrepreneur, found, “One of the struggles when I started the business was having somebody who looked like me, has been through the same struggles as an immigrant like me.”

 

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Entire industries and careers are being created or overturned, and the disruptors tend to be entrepreneurs and innovative organizations whose greatest asset is mindset.

We launched RBC Disruptors in 2015 to explore how this new tribe is using technology to change everything around us. Since then, we’ve profiled 50 remarkable organizations – Shopify, Slack, Ritual, Apple and Amazon, among them – and gained some remarkable insights.

If they had a playbook, they’d call it B.L.A.S.T.

  • Build … a culture that balances speed and resilience.
  • Learn … in order to grow.
  • Adapt … by changing constantly to user feedback.
  • Scale … by isolating pain points for users and scaling solutions.
  • Trust … your partners to take you to the next level.

Here are 21 lessons our Disruptors learned from blast off:

Build

Incumbents plan then build; disruptors build then plan. But neither gets far without a cultural rudder.

#1 Slack: Your first building block is culture

Stewart Butterfield’s world-beating communications tool, Slack, started as something else and kept changing. Something that didn’t change was his culture: it’s rooted in empathy, for the user. Butterfield only hires people who are obsessed with users, which means they have to be good listeners, asking questions and seeking answers. “If someone asks a question in a customer support ticket, it is completely unacceptable to say ‘they’re an idiot because they couldn’t figure this out,’” Butterfield says. “It’s ‘what are we doing wrong that they couldn’t figure this out?’”

#2 Apple: Make your customers feel loved, or at least liked

Everybody wants to go hang out in places where they feel welcome, or like they belong, or that people really like them or love them.

Being connection-obsessed helps many disruptors leap ahead of bigger competitors. It’s why so many cite Apple as an inspiration, even though it’s now the incumbent. It still obsesses over experience. “You have to figure out what your unique experience is,” says Angela Ahrendts, the retail guru who oversaw the Apple Store’s global expansion. Her driving belief: “Everybody wants to go hang out in places where they feel welcome, or like they belong, or that people really like them or love them.”

#3 PagerDuty: Build through diversity

At PagerDuty, a Canadian-founded startup based in San Francisco, nearly two-thirds of its leadership team are immigrants. Moreover, half its engineering leadership team are women, as is half the executive team. To get there, the company often deferred hiring decisions – at the risk of short-term growth – to get the right mix of people. “We think about diversity and difference as upside,” PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada told us. “All the data points to better business outcomes – better respect, better results, better shareholder returns, better customer offerings.”

#4 1-800-GOT-JUNK: Paint a picture

Only after Brian Scudamore joined the Young Entrepreneurs’ Organization did he see how to get his business, 1-800-GOT-JUNK, to the next level. “I didn’t have the clarity of vision to get where I wanted to go. I asked myself, ‘what could pure possibility look like if nothing was in my way?’” He painted a word picture and put it on the wall:

  • We’ll be in the top 30 metros in North America.
  • We’re going to be on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
  • We’ll be the FedEx of junk removal.

That clarity of purpose allowed him to hire the people he needed to fill in the picture, and in seven years the company went from sales of under $2 million to more than $100 million.

#5 Lightspeed: Culture is about buildings, too

The physical environment matters. Google transformed Silicon Valley culture not with free food or flex hours but a campus-like culture that inspired curiosity. When he was building Lightspeed in Montreal, Dax DaSilva developed office spaces that were inclusive beyond the physical environment. His use of artwork speaks to Lightspeed’s culture of diversity and inclusive thinking. “The company has built out of culture just as much as code,” he says. “That’s always been our credo.”

Learn

Fail fast has become one of the most misappropriated lines of this current age of disruption. Innovation is not about failure. It’s about learning, at times through failure.

#6 Hubdoc: Hire for curiosity

As he was building Hubdoc, an app that helps businesses automate their bookkeeping, Jamie Shulman looked at his most successful employees and noticed a common denominator: “curiosity, being interesting and interested.” The company needed more curiosity, so he redesigned its hiring process. Today, the first recruiting round for sales staff is a simple sales call: the candidate has to call in and sell the company on their own product. The second round has nothing to do with sales: candidates have to come in and give a presentation about their passion, whether it’s fly fishing or the Dave Matthews Band.

#7 Ritual: If it doesn’t make you cringe a little, you’re not learning

Ray Reddy works with a simple assumption: Version 1 never works. His company Ritual started as a food-ordering app for individuals but then noticed it was used more by groups. Why? Coffee and lunch are very social things. The result was Piggyback, Ritual’s super successful feature that allows users to jump on co-workers’ orders for free delivery. That was the easy part. The first three versions of Piggyback failed because the Ritual team didn’t appreciate how office groups worked. His team cracked the feature based on those learnings and today more than 150,000 teams around the world use Piggyback. It’s a reminder of why so many disruptors talk about MVP, or minimal viable product. “Just do it as simply as you can to get a learning or a data point and then we’ll go from there,” is how Reddy sees it. How do you know when you don’t have a learning culture? When you release products that don’t make you cringe a little. “That’s when we’ve probably spent too much time on it,” he says.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=gae0_1S-92U%3Frel%3D0

#8 Clearbanc: Always be iterating

Michele Romanow is now famous because of Dragon’s Den, but her real success lies in a string of start-ups she’s built going back to university. A caviar farm. A coupon app. And now a platform for entrepreneurs to raise money. In none of those cases did she have a eureka idea. In innovation, there’s no eureka moment – just an endless cycle of iterations of building, breaking and improving. “I totally reject this notion of a Big Idea, and there’s lots of research to back this up. It’s where I see a lot of companies getting hung up. I promise you, when you have good ideas and great companies, they all start incredibly small.”

#9 Spin Master: Be open to ideas from anywhere

As a start-up from Toronto, Spin Master competes with the world’s biggest toymakers for the next great idea. The company can’t do that on its own. “It’s all about being open to ideas, from wherever they come from,” says Ronnen Harary, Spin Master’s co-founder and co-CEO. That requires personal relationships with hundreds of inventors worldwide, as well as an ability to scour the market for old favourites, such as the century-old Meccano or the 60-year-old Etch-A-Sketch, which in the right creative environment can be turned into something young again.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=gArdOoJfx8U%3Frel%3D0

#10 Singularity University: Crazy ideas can be the best ideas

Singularity University co-founder and CEO, Rob Nail, told us that exponential thinking means looking to the future of your industry 10, 20, 30 years down the road. It’s about growing 10X, not 10 per cent. Nail left us all feeling inspired to think bigger about how we work and how we innovate. He also spoke about embracing crazy ideas. “If those crazy ideas just so happen to be the future of this business 10 years from now, you need to set up a structure, a team or a process that will allow those to come in, or at least experiment with them in some way,” he said. “If you look at the horizon, all the systems set up 100 years ago are being tested – we are going to see fundamental change.”

Adapt

#11 Shopify: Always be listening

Perhaps Canada’s greatest disruptor is Shopify, whose digital retail platform supports more than 1,000,000 businesses worldwide, from artisans to giant consumer goods companies. A decade ago, it barely existed. Today it’s worth $36 billion. COO Harley Finkelstein says Shopify was able to make some crucial changes by using digital tools to connect with users. Such use of social media and paid search have empowered startups to contend against established players on a more equal footing. “It’s no longer about who has the most capital,” Finkelstein says. “It’s now who has the most creativity.”

https://youtube.com/watch?v=8WvtQ9BIwp0%3Frel%3D0

#12 Cloudflare: Whose problem are you solving?

One of the top tech leaders to come out of Canada is Michelle Zatlyn, co-founder and COO of website protection service Cloudflare. The company became a unicorn – worth more than $1 billion – by helping small organizations protect themselves against cybercrimes. As she puts it: “You go back to the fundamentals. Are you solving a meaningful problem that somebody will pay for? If you are solving a meaningful problem, how big is that problem?”

#13 Hootsuite: Don’t act small

The connection-driven economy allows entrepreneurs to use digital channels that make it easier and cheaper for buyers and sellers to find each other and do business. Any player can act any size in this space. “I want to build the best product we can, talk to our customers relentlessly and figure out what their needs are,” says Ryan Holmes, the founder and former CEO of social media dashboard Hootsuite. “If we do that, we get rewarded for it. And if we fail to do that, then we get punished and our competitors get rewarded. It’s as simple as that.”

https://youtube.com/watch?v=rJ9POgUmE28%3Frel%3D0

#14 WattPad: Data is the thing

Wattpad started as a story-sharing service, and quickly became a platform for 45 million users. CEO and co-founder Allen Lau expanded the social platform to include Wattpad Studios, a venue for Wattpad’s global community to develop movie and TV scripts, and Wattpad Brand Solutions, for writers to connect with businesses wanting copy. Lau’s secret weapon is a user community that is fiercely loyal. He may not have Facebook’s mass, but he’s able to track engagement in ways few others can. Take the typical novel that’s developed on Wattpad: with two billion data points collected daily, the company tracks what’s popular, gives personalized recommendations and can even tell what pages or chapters cause readers to tune out. “We get lots of signals about why a story is fascinating,” Lau said. “If you look at the entertainment industry, this is what they’re looking for.”

Scale

#15 iNovia: Think in the billions

Patrick Pichette is a Montreal-born finance expert who helped run Bell Canada and then moved to Silicon Valley to serve as CFO of Google during its hyper-growth years. One of his responsibilities was to vet all those side projects Googlers are encouraged to do with 20 per cent of their time. He was told by executive chairman Eric Schmidt to use a simple filter: ignore any proposal that didn’t aim for at least a billion users. Pichette retired from Google in 2015, and has since brought that growth mindset to the Quebec investment fund iNovia.

#16 Andreessen Horowitz: Growth is a mindset

One of the world’s most successful venture capital firms, Andreessen Horowitz, looks for entrepreneurs with growth mindsets. Even though that term has become a cliché, especially for consultants, it differentiates the real disruptors from many other very good entrepreneurs. Angela Strange is a Canadian who works as a General Partner at a16z, as it’s known, and sees that mindset much more in the Valley than in Canada. “It’s not even ambition,” she says. “It’s just the belief that you could start something that could become a global leader.”

#17 YouTube: Use platforms for scale

The American filmmaker Casey Neistat has 7.2 million subscribers on his YouTube channel, and his videos—most of which feature him as the narrator and star—have been viewed more than 1.6 billion times. Neistat is one of a new generation of digital celebrities that have found a home on YouTube, which now has more than 1 billion users. His success, according to YouTube’s managing director of global brand solutions Debbie Weinstein, is a great example of the democratizing power of the platform, which transformed advertising, the entertainment business, and mobile communications—and could transform the way businesses interact with their customers. “It’s a platform for anyone who has a story to tell to come and tell it,” she said. “And you can find huge audiences on YouTube.”

#18 Amazon: Divide and scale

At Amazon, leaders use another means of retaining speed and focus through rapid growth: subdivide a fast-growing business. “The way we’ve managed to grow so fast is to act like a federated group of startups,” says Al Lindsay, former Vice President, Alexa Engine Software at Amazon.com. “So Alexa began as a startup and then as Alexa grew and became really big, we kind of refactored ourselves back into a bunch of small startups again and we repeat this pattern fractally throughout the organization.”

Trust

#19 Helpful.com: Seek out competition

The iPhone, Uber and Airbnb were all born in that hothouse of disruption – Silicon Valley – and gained from its so-called ecosystem. There are big pools of talent and capital, of course, but also plenty of frenemies who help innovators thrive. Good disruptors are always looking for ways to harness their ecosystem – to find others to work with and learn from. And critically, to pay it forward. As the serial entrepreneur Dan Debow put it: “Innovation is not this magical elixir that you drink. It’s a result of a competitive environment.” Debow, tapped into the competitive ecosystem in Toronto when he co-founded Helpful.com, a video messenger for professionals, and then sold it to Shopify, which liked the team he had built.

Innovation is not this magical elixir that you drink. It’s a result of a competitive environment.

#20 Verified.Me: Always Be Building Your Bench

The best organizations have accountable leaders, and the best startups identify and empower those people early on. “There is a very clear level of accountability, a clear level of communication and a very real sense of urgency against the opportunity,” says Darrell MacMullin, a veteran fintech executive and Chief Commercial Officer at Verified.Me, an initiative to transform the way we manage digital IDs. He tries to imitate a shared characteristic of all the best companies in any field: they not only seek out the best recruits, but they develop what they already have. “Part of their culture is investing in their people, investing in their processes,” he says. “They’re always working on how they run meetings, how they get the right questions, how they get the right leaders to mentor the people on their teams.”

#21 C100: Tell Your Story (No One Else Will)

There are lots of great stories of Canadian entrepreneurs changing the world, but the public often doesn’t know them. The C100 – a group of Canadians in the Valley — is now capturing those stories, to inspire and guide future entrepreneurs. “We have a thriving startup community, but we’re not always good at amplifying our stories,” said the C100’s executive director Laura Buhler. “We are hoping to change that so many more Canadian entrepreneurs can benefit from the knowledge and experience of others.”

For more lessons and ideas on the rapidly changing world around us, visit the RBC Disruptors Hub.

  

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The challenge is deepest amongst front-line employees – think of retail servers or call-centre operators – and the majority of those workers are women. According to a global survey by Ipsos, 54% of front-line employees are going to need some form of significant reskilling by 2022.

Despite the challenges, there is also an opportunity. With the right kind of training and reskilling, millions of Canadians could move to new and better jobs as machines take on more mundane and repetitive tasks.

At our most recent RBC Disruptors, we sat down with Carol Leaman, CEO of Waterloo-based Axonify, a micro-learning company on a mission to revolutionize the way companies retrain their front-line workers, to talk about how the disruption of learning can turn the age of automation into a positive force, and how women are set up to thrive in an automated future:

By Drawing on Skills They Already Possess

In conversations about the future of work, two words are heard often: perseverance and resilience. These are qualities that Leaman learned on the job as a 26-year-old accountant, working for a difficult boss, who one day looked at her and said, “We need $40 million, go find it.” She was terrified but stepped up and did it. “He taught me that you can do anything, you just need to decide that you can do anything.”

While Leaman recognizes that women tend to be in positions that are more susceptible to automation, women have these and other attributes that position them well to move into jobs that are growing in demand. RBC research found that 54% of the jobs at greatest risk of automation are held by women, but that women are better equipped with the generalist, digital and social skills that will be in high demand for the jobs of tomorrow.

“Women tend to have the foundational skills that we need to move into new jobs and new sectors. We are under greater threat, but in a better position for future mobility,” says Leaman.

Case in point, women are creating businesses at an unprecedented pace. “Women are extremely resourceful. I think as the workplace shifts, you’re going to see organizations take more action to support women in different career streams.”

By Learning New Skills – and Learning Them in New Ways

The impact of automation will be greatest among front-line workers – such as servers, retailers and customer service representatives – the majority of whom are women. To survive the displacement that will come about as automation gains a foothold in the services sector, significant reskilling will be required.

Leaman thinks micro-learning is the future of workplace reskilling. Platforms like Axonify’s offer bite-sized learning moments to individuals in those front-line jobs that enables them to learn and acquire new skills, while still performing at their jobs.

Axonify has taken that to the next level by working with a neuroscientist to develop an adaptive algorithm based on brain science. “Because of the amount of data we now collect, which is about 50 million data points a month across the globe, we can apply machine learning to that data, and extract provable correlations,” she says, such as how certain training leads to growth and revenue outcomes.

By Changing up the Look of Leadership

So how do you ensure your workforce is equipped for change? Encouraging female leadership is a good place to start. Female leaders, who are living, breathing and understanding the skills needed to succeed in the workplace of the future, are well equipped to navigate the evolution.

Yet, in new research from Plan International, only 10% of Canadian youth aged 14 to 24 picture a woman when they think of a CEO.

“I think the reason is that there are not enough successful role models, who reach the upper echelons of the corporate world, who have profile,” says Leaman.

More women in leadership roles will attract other women, acting as role models for the younger generation entering the workforce.

As a veteran leader, disruptor and innovator in the tech world, Carol Leaman gets it. Selected as one of the Best Workplaces for Women in Canada, Axonify has a strongly female leadership and women make up 45% of its employees, including product leaders, sales professionals and software developers – male-dominated cohorts in most tech firms.

“I think women are attracted to working with large numbers of other women because they see the possibilities.”

For more research on how women are ready for work in an automated future, download our report.

To learn more about the future of work, and the ways micro learning and inclusion play a role, listen to our latest podcast episode, recorded live at RBC Disruptors.

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One of the biggest opportunities out there for digital disruption is much closer to home: your local hospital.

Canada’s health care system has everything that would inspire a Silicon Valley entrepreneur: scale, data, money—and a big problem to solve. It’s breaking under its own weight.

This year, the number of people turning 83 starts to tick up—that specific age is critical because it’s the average age at which people start to enter long-term care homes. In about four years, this wave of 83-year-olds hits Canada like a tsunami.

By the end of the 2020s, we’ll be spending about $200 billion on health care—and half of that will go to senior care. Even then, we’ll be short nearly 200,000 long-term care beds, and won’t have the support workers we’ll need. The numbers aren’t working.

At our most recent RBC Disruptors, we sat down with two health care leaders to talk about whether digital technology is our cure.

  • Mike Wessinger is the founder and CEO of PointClickCare, one of Canada’s top software companies that is transforming elder care in North America.
  • Michelle DiEmanuele is President and CEO of Trillium Health Partners, a leading hospital with three sites in Ontario that treated 1.7 million patients last year.

New technologies, like artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, will benefit health care in two ways. Importantly, these innovations will solve some of the issues around patient care in terms of safety and quality.

Just as urgently, tech could relieve worker shortages, while also creating demand for more skilled positions. Ideally, the transition will help free health care workers spend more time on the “human” side of their jobs, and also attract and retain a new generation who expect to see and work with new technologies and innovative approaches.

“It’s a very positive thing, but it’s going to happen slower than we would like,” DiEmanuele said.

That’s because game-changing health care will require significant investment up front—and in long-term care, where most senior care takes place, the margins are so razor-thin the sector struggles to attract new capital. Most hospitals in Canada also don’t have shareholder capital to use for new tech, forcing them to squeeze other budget priorities.

Even where the money is available, technology is not a cure-all. Consider, for example, that seniors have been slow to embrace new devices that could help with their care. DiEmanuele said the “non-adoption” rate among seniors, when presented with new technologies for self-care or managed care, is upwards of 50%.

Another part of the puzzle is making the job more attractive, in a country where unemployment is low and personal support workers start out making near-minimum wage.

Wessinger tries to put himself in the shoes of a typical support worker arriving at work after a long commute – “and the first thing you do when you get there is change adult incontinence products. If somebody offered you 25 cents more an hour to go work at Walmart—what are you going to do?”

To learn more about the promise of new technologies, and the many challenges of implementing them—think regulatory, security and privacy issues—listen to our latest podcast episode, recorded live at RBC Disruptors.

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Even as we live more and more of our lives online, we still crave in-person experiences. Think back to last spring, when Toronto Raptors viewing parties were everywhere, capped off by a parade that brought together more than one million fans. Then just last month, half a million movie buffs descended on the Toronto International Film Festival.

As technology evolves, one thing that disruption hasn’t upended is the genuine human need for connection. The experience economy is thriving, and every disruptor needs to think about the signal that sends: today’s consumers want to feel like they are part of something. In a global survey by Live Nation, 66% of people said they are “starving for experiences that put them back in touch with real people and raw emotions.”

To learn more about drawing crowds in the digital age, and the disruptive force they represent, we hosted an RBC Disruptors conversation with the co-heads of the Toronto International Film Festival:

  • Cameron Bailey, Artistic Director & Co-Head, TIFF
  • Joana Vicente, Executive Director & Co-Head, TIFF

 

The number of households with multiple streaming services is growing at a rapid pace, but Vicente thinks back to the advent of television and the introduction of the home video, and comes out bullish on the future of theatres.

“There’s always been these kinds of disruptions, and there’s always been an answer,” Vicente said.

In an era of constant distraction, the theatre is the only place where you’re told to turn off your phone. You are required to get sucked into the story, to laugh or cry alongside your fellow audience members. And let’s be honest, you can’t beat the projection.

“I think that no matter how good your home theatre is, it’s not as good as what we have,” Bailey said. “Sorry!”

But what stands out about the streaming era is that it’s not just about shifting viewing habits; it’s about the potential impact of data on the art form itself. Directors may find themselves struggling between their artistic vision, and what the data says will get them on Netflix’s list of recommendations.

In our latest RBC Disruptors podcast episode, Cameron Bailey and Joana Vicente explain how they’re tackling the industry’s challenges, and the power of live audience in an age of digital experience.

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The hottest app in China right now, Zao, swaps your face with Leonardo DiCaprio’s to amusing effect. Suddenly, you’re Jack on the bow of the Titanic. It’s fun, silly—and a peak at a looming challenge to our democracy.

Right now, it’s still relatively easy to spot a deepfake with the naked eye. The voice isn’t quite right, or the blinking pattern is unnatural. But as the machine learning that powers these impersonations gets better and better, the joke will be on us. In just a few short years, we won’t be able to believe our eyes and ears anymore.

Deepfakes pose a big threat to public trust, misleading people and spreading false information. When you consider 34% of Americans say the Internet is their preferred format for news consumption, the potential impact of deepfakes on election campaigns is staggering.

Already, ahead of the 2020 U.S. election, a video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi slurring her way through a speech was viewed millions of times online, tricking people into thinking she was drunk. It took several days to clarify what had happened: the viral video wasn’t real; it had been doctored.

The truth is in danger. That’s why, with the Canadian federal election underway, we hosted an RBC Disruptors conversation about how technology is transforming the vote. You can watch the full session, which featured panelists:

  • Zeynep Tufekci, Techno-Sociologist & Associate Professor, University of North Carolina
  • Kevin Chan, Global Director and Head of Public Policy, Canada, Facebook
  • Shuman Ghosemajumder, Chief Technology Officer, Shape Security

 

Now that we are waking up to the real threat posed by deepfakes, who is responsible for fighting back? And how? We don’t know how many fake videos are already in circulation, but we do know it doesn’t take long to create one: Shape Security wrote a blog detailing how they turned me into Simon Cowell as a fun side project in just a few days.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=5HUs-t5MUoQ%3Frel%3D0

In our latest RBC Disruptors podcast episode, Shape Security’s Shuman Ghosemajumder explains the making and propagating of deepfakes, and what legislators, Big Tech and ordinary citizens can do to protect our democratic institutions.

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