Interesting Breakfast Meeting

As I mentioned in my last post, I attended a breakfast meeting (one of a series hosted by the Guelph Partnership for Innovation) and was pleasantly surprised when the speaker turned out to be Dr. Gord Surgeoner. In summary, Guelph is very well poised to be "the place to go" when it comes to agricultural and environmental innovation - that is, Guelph has a lot to offer biotechnology and agricultural/environmental companies and governmental agencies. In fact, the entire region from the GTA to Windsor is experiencing first-hand, the benefits of having these service- and product- based industries close at hand. The immediate benefits are closely associated with the development of synergy rather than competition - each of these organizations and comapnies are complimentary to one another rather than at each others' throats.

However, there is evidently a "centralization effect" in which the people in the immediate region are those that immediately benefit from having this 'synergistic cluster' (as I have heard it be called), and the benefits clearly are linked to proximity. At one point, after the presentation, I raised the very real possibility that many small business owners and farms might feel alienated or otherwise isolated, particularly where the rest of Ontario (North of the GTA) is concerned. I discussed ways we could alleviate and lessen this potential impact. Of course, it helped that I was speaking from the perspective of someone living just outside of Ottawa!

Your thoughts and comments on this would be greatly appreciated within this post, and especially in the discussion groups you can sign up for (links and sign-ups are located in the bottom right-hand panel of this blog).