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What is this creative economy? It is an economic system that relies most on ideas to serve as its major capital, instead of services or physical capital. Take Google for example. In an economy based on ideas, the potentialfor breakaway successes like Google is far greater.

According to Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class: And How it’s Transforming Work, Leisure,Community and Everyday Life, members of the creative class are very different from those who are employed in the manufacturing, service or agriculture industries. They contribute to our economy primarily by producing the new forms and ideas exploited by our various industries and decision-makers.   What Florida terms the “super creative core” of this new class includes “scientists and engineers, university professors, poets and novelists, artists, entertainers, actors, designersand architects, as well as the ‘thought leadership’ of modern society: non-fiction writers, editors, cultural figures, think-tank researchers, analysts and other opinion-makers.”

What sets a creative city apart from a non-creative city? Florida proposes that it is the “three Ts of economic development”: technology, talent and tolerance.

Peter Evans, adviser to the Toronto technology organization MaRs, believes Canada's economy is at a crossroads, as critical to job growth as the Industrial Revolution was at the turn of the last century.

I attended the Wisdom Exchange today at the Mars Discovery District in Toronto, an annual gathering of leading growth firms sponsored by the Ontario government. Ontario’s ministry of small business recognizes that a tiny minority of SMEs, the export-oriented gazelles, account for a disproportionate share of job creation, and it does a great job of encouraging, motivating and supporting the CEOs of such companies through educational opportunities such as the Wisdom Exchange.

Jayson Myers, the respected economist who now heads up Canada's largest industry association, Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters.

Myers offered a fair bit of bad news to the group – he warned that the recession “will be deeper and last longer than consensus forecasts,” and that total Canadian merchandise exports have actually been falling for six years.

The recent Agri-Innovation Forum, hosted in Toronto by a few Guelph-based organizations like MaRS Landing and Ontario Agri-Food Technologies who are dedicated to building linkages between agriculture and other sectors such as health, highlighted some of these developments.

Charles Plant, Managing Director of the Market Readiness Program for entrepreneurs at MaRS

Plant says that acceptance of failure is a cultural problem in Canada in that we tend not to reward the people who have failed. "We tend to punish people who fail whereas in Silicon Valley, they tend to reward people who have failed because they've learned lessons and can gain from that failure.

"I think you have to quickly acknowledge when something is a failure and have a back up plan of what you're going to do," says Plant. "Don't keep flogging a dead horse."