A New Begining
Ottawa’s tech community has been at the receiving end of some blunt criticism about the lack of young business leadership in town. Time and again, since I made Ottawa home about five years ago, I have heard folks speaking from a position of authority (and standing on “podiums”) about Ottawa’s inability to produce business talent – often hinging on suggestions that Ottawa just does not have the capacity to produce “marketing/sales” talent. Many of the critics have also lamented the inability of Ottawa to encourage young business leadership, hence making a case for the need to import “business expertise” from other places (read “down south”).
http://www.ottawabusinessjournal.com/288532987861393.php
As I disagreed then, and passionately disagree now, I do not think that it is the case of missing “sales/marketing skillsets”. Maybe this position comes from the fact that the best part of my (day to day) job with OCRI is that it brings me face to face with lots of smart ambitious students on a daily basis. I am quiet simply blown away by the talent of some of the individuals I meet on a daily basis. So – as expected – I have a different take here. I think what Ottawa traditionally lacked was a pan-community initiative to invest in the training/development (on the business strategy end) of our “abundance” of young technical talent – with an eye kept on our needs for the future. As my grandma use to say “the sweetest mangoes are the ones that stay the longest on the tree to ripe with abundance of resources to derive nectar from”. This is not to suggest that there are no supporters of talent in town – because there are quiet a few and quiet dedicated to the cause too – but that this is an opportune time for us to develop a cross institutional grassroot initiative for “talent identification, talent development and talent engagement” – all (as I mentioned) aimed towards the development of the next generation of Ottawa business leadership.
The idea of Talent Bridge was primarily inspired by the above thoughts and solidified by the validations I received in innumerable discussions held with local SME leadership and students from all institutions. Through the support received from Ministry of Research and Innovation (MRI) Talent Bridge was officially launched by OCRI in June of this year. The first cohort of the program has two students, Emily Chan from the photonics program of Algonquin College and Steve Robins from the University of Western Ontario who is in a dual business/computer science program at UWO. Both of them are working closely with the management team in Rove Mobile, where Steve is working closely with the Director of Marketing and Emily is closely aligned with the VP of Sales. Needless to say, we are very excited about the possibilities and very encouraged by the learning opportunities that the two students are being exposed to on a daily basis. The program is not only ambitious in its intent (assisting in the development of the next generation of business leadership is just one of many intents), but it is also quiet unique in its structure (I will talk about it in more detail in the next post). We are getting some great traction with the local SME’s (the principal clientelle for the program) and we are currently recruiting for the Fall 2008 intake.
Please stay plugged in to read the whole series of blogs, which will be coauthored by the two students and myself. Over the next ten weeks, we will be writing a total of eight entries for the first Talent Bridge program which will run till the end of August 2008. For more details about the program, please dont hesitate to contact me at anytime.
My thanks to all those who played a critical role in the genesis of Talent Bridge and stayed strong in their support, especially my team at OCRI which has been phenomenal in their support for the program. Let us keep believing in Ottawa.
Manu Sharma
This post is also published under “Entrepreneurship and Innovation Support” at www.ManuSharma.Info
Tags: Business Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Sales and Marketing, Talent
