A new study written by Richard Florida and Roger Martin, released by the Martin Prosperity Institute today, makes recommendations for how Ontario can become a world leader in the creative age.
Roger Martin and Richard Florida call on Ontarians to embrace the promise of the global economic transformation underway and to harness its potential for building shared prosperity for Ontarians. Despite the current economic environment, Ontario is well positioned to compete and prosper in the ongoing global economic transformation. While the economic environment has worsened in the past year, the current upheaval only accelerates the longer-term trends – especially the shift from more routine-oriented to creativity-oriented jobs. Yet Ontario can do more to ensure it is a globally competitive jurisdiction. That is the key conclusion from the report released today, Ontario in the Creative Age.
The full report and press release can be found here and, to read more, see the related articles in The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star.
Your thoughts?
February 5th, 2009 at 11:15 am
Excellent report. I read a bit and skimmed some. I also read the TorStar article.
The McGuinty government absolutely should be investing in high speed trains and early childhood education – without a doubt. A social safety net, infrastructure, and education would reap vast returns in a creative focused economy.
Brilliant.
February 6th, 2009 at 9:03 am
The long-awaited Martin Florida report makes as its top
recommendation: Harness the full creative potential of Ontarians beyond the creative elite professionals, entrepreneurs and artists. This is an admission of the strategic failure of our education policy. We are still stuck an elitist 19th and 20th century education mindset. We teach and test only for rote memorization of information-which is soon obsolete and not for our ability to create anything new. The only significant way to harness this full creative potential of all Ontarians is for the Minister of Education to take a bold step and decide that all public school children get at least one hour a week of direct teaching of both critical and creative, lateral thinking skills. We already know how to do this-we’ve been teaching cognitive thinking skills to our gifted children for over 40 years but have chosen to ignore all the rest of society, to our economic peril. In fact, parents who have been sending their kids to school over the past four decades, have full justification to ask for a refund of the education component of their property tax, if not a class action suite against the education system. The Ministry of Education has broken its social contract to society, by failing to ensure that our youth get the kind of education (both parts, the knowledge and cognitive skills to use and apply that knowledge) to permit them, not just survive but thrive in the 21 century.
Walter Derzko
Smart Economy
Toronto
February 9th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
I think Walter raises an interesting question, which is how are we going to implement the recommendations put forward by the Florida/Martin report? Perhaps a next step would be to identify best practices in the context of each of the four recommendations; to harness Ontarians’ creativity, broaden the talent pool, create industry clusters and build a social safety infrastructure. In this regard it would be valuable to look at the “peer” regions which have passed Toronto in terms of productivity in recent years. This will give some further view on the types of educational programs, infrastructure development and government interaction required to move forward with the economic transition from a manufacturing to a knowledge based economy.
February 11th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
A visual representation (Wordle) of the text contained within the Report
http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/531976/Ontario_in_the_Creative_Age
Peter West
Continuous Innovation
London, Ontario
@WestPeter
February 11th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
In reading many of the articles and blog posts about this report the question on many peoples minds is around implementation or the “how-to” of the report strategies.
I think that the point of the report was to change the way people are thinking about this subject. Not to provide a prescriptive step-by-step recipe for successful implementation. It wouldn’t be very creative to give Ontario a routine-oriented response on how to be creative. Many stakeholders can help out with the ground work.
The National Quality Institute has posted their response on how they can help: http://www.nqi.ca/articles/article.aspx?ID=682
Adam Stoehr
Vice President Education
National Quality Institute
February 13th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
I agree that this report intends to change the way people think about the creative economy, however, I also think it is very important that people are considering the implementation of the recommendations. In fact, the more that people do this, the more the report is accomplishing its main objective. That is, it is getting many people to think about how to improve the province’s economy and make Ontario a leader in the creative age. In my opinion, it is vital that we continue this exercise so that we can get several different opinions and viewpoints.
Thinking further about how to implement the recommendations put forth by the report, I agree that we should benchmark ourselves against peer regions that are ahead in the movement to a creative economy. However, we must be sure to not fully imitate the actions of these regions, since we have set the ambitious goal of achieving over 50% employment in creativity-oriented jobs (which no region has yet to achieve). Therefore, I believe it is vital that we begin the process of creating a made-in and made-for Ontario solution. This solution will fully utilize our unique strengths and look to improve on our weaknesses. The only way for us to do this is to have the governments, businesses and people of Ontario engaged and contributing to the process of building a complete go-forward strategy.