Highly Creative, Tech-Savvy Workforce Drives New Media Growth
Metro Vancouver established itself early on as a key player in the explosive digital media industry, and its importance is growing as rapidly as consumers’ seemingly insatiable appetite for the most cutting-edge video games, cell phone applications and entertainment experiences.
“Vancouver is one of the leading hubs of digital media and high-tech innovation in the world,” says Gerri Sinclair of the Centre for Digital Media at Great Northern Way Campus. “We very often are referred to as Digital Hollywood North or Silicon Valley North.”
Close to 2,000 digital media companies call Vancouver home. The high-tech creative industry’s growth over the last 15 years or so has bubbled out of both homegrown talent and a superior quality of life that attracts media professionals from around the world. Sinclair credits the latter with Vancouver’s unparallelled natural surroundings.
“We win hands down when it comes to livability, when it comes to the beauty of the environment, when it comes to the whole cliché of being able to ski and scuba dive and golf all on the same day,” Sinclair says. “People who are in the high-tech industry tend to also be very active people.”
These days, many of the transplants come to Vancouver for the brand new Masters of Media Arts Program at Great Northern Way Campus’ Centre for Digital Media.
Several years ago, the B.C. government agreed to put its dollars behind a technology field that could propel the province to the leading edge of Canada’s tech sector, and a task force determined that field was digital media.
“The digital media industry, in its lobby to the government to make an economic investment in digital media, didn’t ask for the traditional kinds of things that industrial lobbyist groups usually ask for,” Sinclair says. “Instead, what they asked for was a world-class graduate school program in order to train the talent that they knew was going to be required to create tomorrow’s leaders.”
The program that was born from that $40 million investment graduates its inaugural class in May 2009, and because the one-of-a-kind program at Great Northern Way is a collaboration among the four largest area universities, graduates become alumni of not one school, but all four.
“A key ingredient that fosters and encourages the growth of the high tech creative/digital media industry is the collaboration between industry, government and academia,” says Kenton Low, President of New Media B.C. “The provincial and municipal governments are collaborating with industry to create the appropriate economic climate that encourages entrepreneurship, company growth and attracts investors to the digital media industry.”
The wireless technology industry, like the digital media industry, has grown rapidly here over the last several years.
“The moment I go and meet with international players and tell them that there are 250 wireless companies in B.C., nine out of 10 times, the response is, ‘Wow, I didn’t know that,’” says Michael Bidu, executive director of the Wireless Innovation Network of B.C.
Approximately 6,000 people earn their living in the area’s technology industry, which has, much like the digital media industry, been fuelled heavily by spin-offs of successful companies.
The greatest need for Vancouver’s wireless industry, Bidu says, is increased international awareness.
“The wireless industry is absolutely massive in the world,” he says. “We’re out there to tell the world that there’s great talent here.”
