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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.

The Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC) is pleased to announce today's appointment of Gordon M. Nixon, president and chief executive officer of RBC, as Chair, and Zabeen Hirji, chief human resources officer of RBC, as Co-Chair of TRIEC.

As top executives at one of the largest financial institutions in North America, Gord Nixon and Zabeen Hirji are key ambassadors to articulate how Canadian companies can benefit from the international experience and networks, language skills and cultural knowledge that skilled immigrants bring with them to Canada."

Nixon has for years been a champion for promoting diversity in Canadian communities and of leveraging skilled immigrant talent as a driver of Canadian innovation and prosperity. Nixon is chairman of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and chairman of MaRS Discovery District. In 2007, Nixon was invested into the Order of Ontario and was named Canada's Outstanding CEO of the Year.

Netchange Week taking place at the innovation hub of Toronto – the MaRS Discovery District.

Net Change is Canada’s first week long, city wide event designed to dissolve the divide between digital professionals and social change-makers. With a full five day schedule of sessions helping learn more about leveraging technology to aid awareness of their causes and as a catalyst for social change.

ssues faced by the charity we noticed they shared similar problems that many for-profits and small businesses faced. They had limited marketing resources, need to reach out the people that need their services and increase awareness of the good work they were doing.

Dubbed Certo-Ex, their simple concept streamlines sampling in these billion-dollar industries, bringing a process that can take 4 to 24 hours for a single sample down to a mere 30 minutes for multiple samples. The brothers have combined Ameer’s scientific expertise and Ahmed’s business savvy and also hope one day to broaden their work to include helping other young and promising inventors.

Part of their TiEQuest winning gave them access to networking with MaRS Discovery District, a Toronto-based, non-profit centre that brings together Canadian science, business and investment capital. Here they met the third member of their team, industrial designer and entrepreneur Lahav Gil, who has been designing and building technology products and medical devices for more than two decades with his company, Kangaroo Design and Product Development. Gil wanted to help the brothers because he liked them.

“They had a very innocent and authentic desire to commercialize their idea,” says Gil. “And that was quite inspiring.”

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.

A Toronto-based startup, called Skymeter, is developing this technology using what it calls 'financial-grade GPS' data.

Skymeter recently received a $500,000 loan from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation and is a tenant in Toronto's MaRS Centre. In 2007, at the Canadian Venture Forum held in Toronto, Skymeter was selected as "the best angel company" and attracted investment interest from a group of US-based investors in the transportation field. According to the company's website, they are currently seeking funding from professional/strategic investors in the >$5million range.

MaRS Entrepreneurship 101 – an approximately 32 week program that runs October to May. Best part all of the previous training videos available on Vimeo.

Simple solutions - include actually using the BDC like it was designed. Simplifying and making program funding more accessible (why should a startup have to hire Tier 1 consultants to apply for SRED) and fund the innovation centres that are already here (eg. MaRS), find foreign cash and make strategic investments in universities to create centres of excellence.

Canadian Regional Boot Camp for Technology Start-Ups featuring Silicon Valley experts and investors March 16-20, 2009

Thursday, March 19, MaRS, Toronto

first round of Canadian Regional Boot Camps will include stops in the following ICT cluster regions:

annual Technology, Media and Telecom predictions event. The attendance at the conference centre known as the MARS Discovery District is amazing.

Canada's economy is outperforming the rest of the developed world

willingness to embrace a strong role for public investment in innovation,

Another example of public, private and university collaboration is the MaRS discovery district, a nonprofit innovation center that brings together biotech researchers, VCs, and social entrepreneurs in the same part of downtown Toronto with several research hospitals. 

The temple has a conference room equipped with state-of-the-art audio-visual aids. Its board of directors includes several leading software billionaires and their wives, providing it with money as well as connections.

The monks are entrepreneurs as well as holy men, one moment talking about reincarnation and the next about sustainable delivery models.

he temple provides 200,000 local schoolchildren with free meals every day.