Alberta’s Brain Gain |
No sooner had we dispatched our October issue, featuring a special report on innovation, to the printers than some counterintuitive news came to light. In contrast to the history of technology companies, ideas and talent leaving the province – a fact we sought solutions to in our cover story, “Building the Economy of Ideas” – we learned that Radient Technologies Inc. was relocating its operations from Ontario and British Columbia to the Edmonton Research Park.
Radient has a patented way of isolating active ingredients in natural products using microwave assisted processing. This is highly useful to biotechnology, pharmaceutical, food and cosmetic companies.
No doubt the move had something to do with the $5.5-million round of financing coming from AVAC Ltd., Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Foragen Technologies Management Inc., Koniag Development Corporation and a private investor from B.C. It’s no secret that when a group of venture capitalists takes a controlling stake in a startup, they call the shots, including where the company is located. Usually it works the other way around, with American or Central Canadian VCs plucking viable ideas out of Alberta before they take root. It’s good to see it can work both ways.
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From brain gain to commodity loss…. TD Economics on September 28 echoed something that we first raised back in our April issue, namely how the advent of shale gas pulls the plug on what has really constituted the Alberta advantage for the past decade. To quote economist Derek Burleton: “The potential for an accelerated long-term decline of an industry that does so much of the heavy lifting in the Alberta economy is arguably the No. 1 risk facing the province’s standard of living.”
Not just the gas producers, not just the drillers, not just the government so dependent on gas royalties but all businesspeople in Alberta have to think through what this means for them.
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Suddenly “emotional intelligence” is hot again. Popularized and first applied to the workplace by psychologist Daniel Goleman in the 1990s, this concept – representing the soft skills to moderate one’s own behaviour and empathize with that of others – is very much in demand in a recessionary environment where companies are short-staffed, their employees are stressed out and morale is hitting rock bottom (something my colleague Deborah Yedlin and I discussed on the weekly Edmonton AM business panel on CBC Radio on September 30).
At the recent Canadian Business Outlook forum in Calgary, CCS Corporation chairman and CEO and Concord Well Servicing co-founder David Werklund spoke at length about it, attributing a great deal of his success to what he’d learned over the years about dealing with people. As some will know, Werklund, chosen by Ernst & Young as Canada’s Entrepreneur of the Year in 2005, is a self-made Alberta farm boy who never went to university. EI isn’t the sort of thing they teach in commerce programs anyway.
I just finished reading a book on the subject, The Other Kind of Smart, by Edmontonian Harvey Deutschendorf, whose day job is as a coach and event manager with Alberta Employment and Immigration. Deutschendorf does a good job of encapsulating 20 years of research and findings on emotional intelligence into a short yet comprehensive business self-help guide. Look for a review in our November issue.
