N.B. Must Do More Than Dip Its Toe In The Ocean Supercluster Initiative
Geoff Flood is a Tech Advisory Leader for MNP in Atlantic Canada and a member of the Board of Directors of Canada’s Ocean Supercluster.
Canada’s Ocean Supercluster (OSC) is on its way to making Canada the best place to start and grow an ocean company. In just three years, the OSC has produced an economic engine; a flywheel spinning out a virtuous cycle of discovery and new investment, energizing a multi-sectoral economy with a large and growing project portfolio from coast to coast to coast, and New Brunswick has the opportunity to step in to be a bigger part of the journey.
While there is growing participation in the Ocean Supercluster from across the country, New Brunswick has a relatively anemic level of engagement that belies the past, present and future importance of the ocean to our economic development.
With a membership of more than 350, of which 70 percent are actively engaged from the private sector, the Ocean Supercluster has approved more than 45 projects with a total value of more than $200-million. The collaboration and scale of projects wouldn’t be possible without the vision to demand demonstrable commercial outcomes and participation by small business before funding projects. It is working as designed.
Typically, projects involve a large ocean-centric enterprise partnering with SMEs that match their innovation with the scale provided by the larger firm. While already successful on the merits of their project outcomes, these partnerships expand our understanding of how large and small firms can collaborate effectively, and how diversity of skill and perspective can drive product development in unexpected ways. The results will transform ocean sectors, and the knowledge gained will readily spread into adjacent areas.
Recently, Donald Savoie has called out the food sector as one path to prosperity for New Brunswick. It’s been suggested the production of sustainably sourced ocean-based protein has as much as a 10:1 benefit while reducing the impact on climate and improving food security. We have advantages many jurisdictions would envy with strong trade links in place, exports to more than 90 countries, and one of the world’s largest farmed seafood companies headquartered in Saint John.
But the ocean economy is much more diverse. Innovative solutions are required to address the intractable problems of our time: sustainability, decarbonization, pollution, and climate change. Game-changing solutions made possible through data-driven insights and artificial intelligence are meeting these challenges with solutions for food traceability, autonomous operations, smart digital ports, sensors, and ocean mapping.
To maximize our success, sharing the huge volumes of data that exist is required, and discipline in the deployment of open and reliable standards is necessary to allow this to happen. We have the expertise to lead these efforts, and one example is the deep cross-disciplinary work at UNB between computer science and geomatics.
We need a bit more vision.
New Brunswick participates in every ocean industry from aquaculture to shipping to oil and gas to fishing with an abundance of talent and expertise in academia, industry, and IT. We have come a long way in the growth of data and computer science resources with a cohort of brilliant minds motivated to make change. Our leaders in ocean also need to think about how they participate and drive positive benefit to their organizations while creating new prosperity for our province.
The OSC has announced its first New Brunswick led project where Teledyne Caris and Ocean Floor Geophysics have partnered to more efficiently deliver better ocean mapping data, using new technologies in robotics and advanced mapping. The technologies employed by this project, and others being proposed, are heavily data-centric and adaptable to other sectors.
The opportunity to take a leadership position in data-driven ocean innovation and build scale in data science and AI are ours to seize. With this comes meaningful projects driving job creation, economic growth, and new ways to attract talent to our region. But we require innovators, creative thinkers, and investment to participate.
In addition to its ongoing core program, the Ocean Supercluster Resilience Call for Proposals has just launched and it’s well-suited to the assets in our province and worthy of serious consideration.
Understanding and believing in these synergies, and the opportunity to be a relevant player in the ocean economy can be a building block toward the development of the “next economy” for our province.
But first, we must step in.
Huddle publishes commentaries from groups and individuals on important business issues facing the Maritimes. These commentaries do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Huddle. To submit a commentary for consideration, contact editor Mark Leger: [email protected].