cover image: SUPER CONNECTORS, SPECIALISTS, AND SCRAPPERS: HOW CITIES USE CIVIC CAPITAL TO COMPETE IN HIGH-TECHNOLOGY MARKETS

SUPER CONNECTORS, SPECIALISTS, AND SCRAPPERS: HOW CITIES USE CIVIC CAPITAL TO COMPETE IN HIGH-TECHNOLOGY MARKETS

6 Jul 2023

The authors wish to acknowledge the generous financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through the Partnership Grant Program #895-2013- 1008 and the Insight Grant #435-2020-0581, the research assistance of Alessandra Cicci, Brendan Haley, Todd Julie, Lisa Huh, and Rebecca Byrne, and helpful feedback from Neil Bradford, Allison Bramwell, Dan Breznitz, Shiri. [...] Specifically, we employed a qualitative analysis of the 211 interviews above to identify the history and activities of the key collaborative organizations in each city, as well as a thematic 2 Definition from the Brookfield Institute (Vu, Lamb, and Zafar, 2019, 63). [...] The leading sectors in Toronto’s economy are concentrated in the knowledge and design-intensive sectors around business and financial services, some core manufacturing sectors, including automotive and computers, the biopharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors, as well as the cultural, creative, and design- intensive sectors. [...] The deep reservoir of civic capital in the region was institutionalized in the Ottawa-Carleton Research Institute (OCRI) in 1983.10 Unlike the Atlas Group and Communitech in Waterloo, mentoring was not an area of focus (Spigel, 2017), perhaps in part due to the frictionless flow of information within the tight-knit telecommunications industry. [...] By the turn of the millennium, high-technology employment had surpassed federal employment for the first time in the city’s history (Harrison et al., 2004: 1048), the region ranked first in Canada in measures of technology employment, and it led the country in venture capital investment (Florida and King, 2015).

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Pages
33
Published in
Canada

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