The importance of labour market information

Polytechnics Canada CEO Nobina Robinson was quoted in a recent Globe and Mail article about the importance of labour market information (LMI) and nascent efforts by federal and provincial governments to produce these data for the Canadian economy. Polytechnics Canada has advocated for more effective LMI for the past year+, and the Institutional Research offices of the 11 members have compiled useful data on connecting supply and demand of education and skilled talent for the labour market. Many have been advocating for an independent, arms-length Labour Market Information Council, which is the name chosen for this group, though it is made up of provincial and federal government officials. It is likely that many will take a wait and see approach to this new LMIC and give it the benefit of the doubt - anything may be better than the current state, which is akin to driving a car without a dashboard. Having a coordinated approach to LMI will help guide investments in education - at the political and the personal level.

Last January George Brown College launched Career Coach, an online service that is designed to illuminate for potential students the gaps in the current labour market and which programs prepare graduates for these fields. It is a powerful application that draws on StatsCan data and links programs, pathways, and job openings with salary information. This follows on an excellent report the Toronto Board of Trade commissioned last last year, which GBC, along with our GTA college partners Centennial, Humber and Seneca, along with Colleges Ontario and the United Way, sponsored. This report - Closing the Property Gap - has the best LMI available to date; you can download the data cube and execute your own analyses on it. And while it is focused on the GTA, it offers a good start to what is needed to ensure that regions and regional economies can enable citizens to best respond to present and future labour market conditions.

From Concept to Commercialization: How SME'S Can Turn Innovations Into Income

Join Infonaut's Niall Wallace and me at the Toronto Board of Trade on 30 May 2012 for a breakfast talk on From Concept to Commercialization: How SME'S Can Turn Innovations Into Income, part of the RBC Business Advice Series: Innovation for SMEs. We will discuss the challenges that Small and Medium Enterprises' often face in bringing ideas to the market and what can be done to overcome them. Participants will:

• Learn how to quickly turn your ideas into marketable innovations
• Discover how to overcome the challenges of access to capital and facilities
• Reduce your R&D costs by partnering with the college sector

Register online at the Toronto Board of Trade.

On clusters and place: the geography of innovation

The Toronto Board of Trade released its Scorecard on Prosperity, emphasizing regional innovation and clusters. The Globe and Mail has a good summary of its findings, including useful infographics that show Toronto's regional innovation strengths. As I've indicated earlier, place matters to productivity, and it is good to see that the TBOT report reinforces food manufacturing as one of Toronto's main economic engines. The GBC Food Innovation Research Studio (FIRSt) is a hub for industry innovation in the food product development space, capitalizing on the vast economic potential of the food industries in the Greater Toronto Area. (As I've indicated before: There are 25000 SMEs within 80KM of GBC FIRSt working in the food product development area. The sector contributes over $84B annually to the Ontario economy (half of this in the Toronto area), employs 30% more people than the auto industry, employs 1 in 13 people in Canada, and is 9% of Canadian GDP (to put that into perspective, oil, gas and mining combined are 4.5% of GDP).)

The report outlines the need for Toronto to focus on industries that will drive further economic growth. Of some of the obstacles noted, the report includes the regional "inability to commercialize cutting-edge research; and issues around access to capital to support the creation and growth of innovative firms" - issues well noted by many others. The report further states that "Toronto needs a strategy to take advantage of the growth opportunities in certain clusters while trying to improve the performance of those clusters that are important to the region’s economic fabric but have been lagging," points that will be taken up at a regional summit being held this Thursday. I am looking forward to the event.