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RBC Thought Leadership Disruptors Page 18

Augmented Reality in a Post-COVID World

Platform: Disruptors

The crisis is changing how we interact with and experience the world. With physical distancing and lockdown measures still in place across much of the globe, it will be a while before we see a return to travel and exploration as we were used to.

But even a global pandemic can’t quite stamp out the natural human instinct to seek and discover. Rather than venturing out into the world, we’re logging onto the World Wide Web to visit places like the British Museum or Paris’s Louvre, where virtual gallery tours have increased tenfold.

Even before the crisis hit, iconic Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky and gaming executive Vikas Gupta were pushing the boundaries of art through the use of augmented reality, virtual reality and photogrammetry. Together they founded AVARA Media to create immersive, three-dimensional visual experiences that transport people to far-flung and remote places. They joined the RBC Disruptors podcast to talk about how we can use augmented reality to see and experience the world like never before, and to better understand our impact on the planet.

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“The work that we’re doing at AVARA is meant to connect people to nature and to unique and extraordinary parts of the world,” said Gupta.

“You may never have the opportunity to travel to Indonesia to see a critically endangered tiger. But if you go outside, we can make it feel like there is a tiger right out there in your backyard,” he said.

Burtynsky has spent his 40-year career focused on the idea that humans’ relationship with nature has been “wildly out of balance” – first through film photography, then digital photography and other mediums. AR and VR has opened up a new and compelling way to raise awareness about humans’ relationship with nature that can’t be accomplished in a single print or movie.

“Here you are the protagonist,” he said.

And yet, while AR and VR can led us to new places and expose us to new experiences, they can equally distort our appreciation of the world.

“We are overly reliant on technology,” said Gupta. “We’re using it far too much, historically, as escapism. And what this pandemic has really taught us is that we’ve taken nature for granted.”

So, how do we strike a healthy balance? Here are five key considerations for how our interactions with technology and with each other will shape the post-COVID world.

1. Photography 3.0.

It’s about to change everything we see. Many of us grew up with Photography 1.0. That’s the chemical-based art that was the foundation of all media. Think National Geographic. It opened our eyes to the planet. Photography 2.0 was digital, connecting every person with every image (hello, Instagram). What Burtynsky calls Photography 3.0 is 3D, immersive, interactive, and can be more powerful than both.

2. Empathy.

We need to be really careful that our augmented and virtual experiences are connected with the reality of others on this planet. By empathizing with what they see and want to be seen, we can open our mind to the world as others would like it to be.

3. Game theory.

Technology can be far more powerful when game theory is applied – by giving users an array of choices that determine the outcomes of a technology and, when done well, add to our understanding of the world.

4. Canada.

We have a special place to play in this revolution. We’re a nation that’s known for creativity and storytelling. It’s why so many Canadians are in Hollywood. With these new platforms, maybe our artists won’t need to go abroad to influence the world.

5. Climate.

The COVID crisis has reminded us of our relationship with nature. We are still creatures of biology more than we are masters of technology. Moving forward, how can we use the power of visual technologies to better appreciate our ancient relationship with nature – and come to grips with the looming challenges of our own making?

There’s no turning back a technology. We can only advance it, and make sure it advances us.

Fallout from the measures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic have had a disproportionate impact on small businesses. As a country where 98% of businesses are small- and medium-sized enterprises, we’ll need to harness the savviness of our shrewdest start-ups to compete and innovate in a post-COVID economy.

David Skok is on the frontlines of that effort. He’s the founder and editor-in-chief of The Logic, a two-year-old digital publication focused on the innovation economy. His small team of journalists reports on companies and creators, as well as the policies driving transformational change in our country. He joined the RBC Disruptors podcast to talk about how Canada, a small country of relatively small businesses, can excel in a big world dominated by big platforms.

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“We are not a nation that has not created great innovations on the world stage,” he said. Shopify, which recently became Canada’s most valuable company, is a prime example.

“Our challenge has been keeping them there.”

Skok founded his media startup to facilitate conversations on how to clear barriers to innovation in Canada – something he’s noticed as both an immigrant from South Africa and a former expat in the U.S.

“I watched my dad struggle through a lot of those challenges of regulatory red tape and the status quo,” he said.

Cultural inertia might be why some organizations find it hard to change. It’s built into the process and over time, solidifies the status quo. That, said Skok, makes it hard for new ideas to grow and be heard.

“As an entrepreneur, it would be really nice if you felt like the ball was rolling downhill with you and that you were supported and that you didn’t have to fight at every turn to get things done,” he said.

Supporters of Sidewalk Labs’ now-abandoned Quayside Project, a plan to develop a “smart city” on the Toronto waterfront, might agree. The project was mired in years-long controversy over issues of privacy, government selection processes, and foreign ownership of Canadian property. Last year, it agreed to limit the scope of its expansive project proposal after negotiations with Waterfront Toronto, a government agency overseeing the city’s lakeshore development. Last week, it pulled the plug on the project.

Skok said the Sidewalk Labs exit raises questions around whether Canadians are able to innovate and better the country by building for ourselves or need support from elsewhere.

“Ultimately, Canadians building Canadian companies for the world should take more inspiration – or will take more inspiration – from the Shopifys, who can do it on their terms.”

So, what will does Canada need to compete against the big players in a post-COVID world?

1. Scale.

Canada is a great base and an excellent home market for entrepreneurs, but we’re too small for growth. Every Canadian growth company needs to see itself as a global company.

2. Talent and capital.

Innovators need to think globally about talent and capital. If you want to take on the world, you need to be part of the world. And that means ensuring the world feels welcome here through immigration and foreign investment for small firms as well as big.

3. Procurement.

Governments, especially, need to get more strategic with their buying power to support Canadian innovators. And do more to protect Canadian intellectual property.

4. Focus.

We need to make tougher choices on where we can excel. It may be foolish to try to pick winners, but we need to spot the rising stars and get behind them.

“My hope is that in the midst of the crisis, there were ideas and companies that were given the supports they needed to become the next Amazon or the next Shopify,” Skok said.

5. Criticism.

We have to challenge ourselves. If we’re uncritical of each other, we’ll miss opportunities to improve and we won’t see our blind spots. It’s why we need strong independent national media to hold us all to account, including innovators and entrepreneurs.

The crisis is scarring parts of our society, and Canada’s place in the world might be smaller. We’re going to have to rely a lot more on innovation to gain the scale that we don’t naturally have on our own.

A global pandemic that has decimated demand for its biggest export. A price war launched by foreign countries. A growing movement to transform its production to help address climate change.

But where there are threats, there are also opportunities – for our best oil and gas producers to transform what they do and emerge as global leaders, while helping to build a new economy.

Alice Reimer and Marty Reed are two leading innovators in Western Canada. Reimer is the site lead for the Creative Destruction Lab in Calgary and co-founder of investment platform the51. Reed is the CEO of V.C. firm Evok Innovations backed by two of Canada’s biggest oil companies, Cenovus and Suncor, as well as the B.C. Tech Alliance. They joined the RBC Disruptors podcast to share why this could be Alberta’s and Canada’s moment to “recreate imaginatively” for a post-COVID economy – to transform Bow Valley into Alberta’s own Silicon Valley.

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“We are not in a local race. We are in a global innovation race,” said Reimer. “This is not about us being the best in Canada. This is about us competing on a global scale.”

Reed imagines a bold future in which Alberta is truly a global energy sector titan – expanding beyond oil and gas – that could cultivate a trillion dollar energy-as-a-service company within a decade. To get there requires “a different lens and a different culture,” one that embraces new ideas and invention models.

“That’s the fundamental transition that needs to happen before we can see Calgary really embrace and start to accelerate into this new economy,” he said.

Part of that is creating “smart policy” that will help create an environment in which successful companies, solutions and technologies can emerge and thrive. Take California, home of Silicon Valley and an ambition to be carbon neutral by 2045. Reed describes the state as being at the forefront of policy that has delivered outsized benefits for the innovation sector, such as the Buy Clean California Act or the California waiver that enables it to promote zero emission vehicles. This creates a favourable environment to attract leading edge technologies, like B.C.-based Svante’s carbon-capture system, which is being explored for use in California industrial facilities.

“Right now, all of that work is being done in the U.S. and it would sure be nice to see some of that work being done here in Canada,” Reed said.

Calgary is considered one of the top 15 cleantech hubs globally, and has not suffered from a shortage of ideas. But it hasn’t yet scaled globally. Calgary had roughly the same number of tech deals last year as Kitchener-Waterloo — for less than a third of the money.

So what does Alberta, and Canada, need to do to move the dial?

1. Invest heavily in world-class higher education

“Great cities are built around great research universities,” said Reimer. “It is not good enough for us to be a top university in Canada, we need to have top universities in the world and compete on a global stage.”

Reed agreed. “I don’t know that as a society, anyone has ever said, ‘Boy, in hindsight, I wish we’d spent less on education.'”

2. Choose a few competitive advantages and double-down on them

We have a head start in carbon capture (see Svante) and abundant natural gas that we can decarbonize to produce hydrogen energy. Not to mention our leadership in artificial intelligence and machine learning. How do we own the global podium in these areas?

3. Attract the best and brightest from around the world through an ambitious immigration approach.

It’s not just about scientists and researchers either. Alberta will need more entrepreneurs and investors from around the world and yes, from across the country.

4. Attract risk capital to fund emerging innovations and companies, and corporate capital to scale them globally.

“There’s been a tremendous amount of wealth that’s been created in the oil and gas business over the decades,” said Reimer. “Many of the folks who have created that wealth are interested in helping to start and create and invest in these early stage companies that will help towards diversification.”

Alberta will need a lot more capital to finance this ambition. Venture capital to take on the big risks that entrepreneurs love, government capital for the infrastructure to build on, and institutional and corporate capital to take ideas to a global scale.

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.

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Simplecast

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

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.

 

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.”

 

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.