Playing to Strengths

The face-to-face networking that comes with a smaller, more closely knit city. Why did Hotrocket rent such an oversized office in the first place? Because Bautista planned to bring other tech companies into the space as a kind of creative co-operative.

In a way, Bautista has recently renewed that plan, committing himself to fostering a larger-scale community amongst tech companies across the province. He served for two years as president of Digital Alberta, an organization dedicated to promoting and strengthening the province’s digital media industry, and was the local mentor in last year’s inaugural Digital Content Creation Entrepreneurs Network (DC2EN) incubation program, which helps early-stage entrepreneurs develop their ideas into viable commercial products.

Bautista takes his inspiration from a city like Seattle, which despite a relatively small population of 600,000, boasts both a vibrant start-up culture and a well-funded technology and creative base. He cites Richard Florida’s 2008 book Who’s Your City?, in which 84% of the world’s innovation is traced to a few clusters of cities called creative mega-regions – and he wryly notes that Alberta didn’t make the cut. “We have all this money here,” he says, “and yet we’re still ranked pretty low when it comes to the creative space.”

Bautista insists that digital industries cannot succeed without equal funding and attention given to the arts. As he puts it, “Creativity is what drives innovation, and you get your creativity from arts and culture.” This belief is at the heart of his involvement as chair of the Alberta chapter of artsScene, a national non-profit group that links young artists and business professionals for mutual benefit. Despite his myriad other commitments, when presented in early 2008 with the opportunity of founding an Alberta chapter – whose organizing committee now includes representation ranging from the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra to Afexa Life Sciences Inc. – Bautista couldn’t resist.

“What we were starting to do with Digital Alberta I could accelerate [with artsScene]… at a broader level,” he says. “I thought, ‘Here’s this chance to hit all these things we’ve been talking about, with a national cover. It’s already got some infrastructure and some branding behind it, and we can do it in Edmonton and Calgary.’”

Perhaps the best example of how Bautista’s passion for both the arts and digital media intersect remains CIE, the online game Hotrocket has been developing since 2005. (Red acquired Hotrocket’s interactive services division late last year, which is why Bautista divides his time between CIE and Red.) CIE combines narrative-based video games, social networking, Flash-based puzzles and embedded videos, and contains echoes of pop culture ephemera ranging from Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? to The X-Files. There’s a subtle but clever educational portion, too: kids have to go to participating museums and art galleries for custom-made “field missions,” which are completed by visiting exhibits and gathering clues.

And just as CIE users have to leave the isolating world of traditional video games in order to be better secret agents, Bautista believes businesses need to adopt a similar attitude – and venture out into the larger community to share and develop ideas.

“When you’re an entrepreneur, you’re probably heads-down a lot of the time,” he says. “You’re not talking to anyone else. We’ve talked a lot about CIE over the past two years, and people have asked if we’re afraid about sharing this information. The way I see it is that it’s a race. At the time we started it, there were probably three to five people coming up with the exact same thing – if we tell them or not. So what it comes down to is execution.”

By that measure, he’s more than holding his own. CIE had already won awards at tech conferences in Vancouver, Toronto and New York, even before the game went live in June. Then there’s that VenturePrize, which earned Bautista and Suriano more than $90,000 in cash and in-kind services, which will only further raise CIE’s profile.

So even in the unlikely event that the Smithsonian turns Bautista down for sponsorship, chances are his phone won’t stop ringing any time soon.

Next Up is a series of profiles of emerging leaders in Alberta’s business community and public life.

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