By Peter Kallai

As many of you already know, on November 22 we will host a Sector Leadership Council in Toronto. During this closed-door session, participants will discuss and debate an industry growth strategy for our sector in Canada. This starts with the growth of our Members as our sector growth is the sum of our companies.

This event, an initiative of our board of directors, will bring together our board and advisory board with the senior executives of the CPEIA’s industrial Members.

Why are we doing this? Because we must.

We have before us a wide range of opportunities to develop this sector. But positive progress requires a clear vision of where we want to go with a roadmap of how to get there.

Consider the statistics – according to the Business Development Bank of Canada’s The Scale Up Challenge study, only two per cent of mid-sized companies succeed in becoming large businesses. They need more support to invest in capital spending and productivity improvement.

As your association, it is our responsibility to drive this agenda. But we need input from CPEIA Members on where we can create jobs, generate wealth and make strategic investments to grow our sector. We need to sit down as a group to determine where the CPEIA should focus its resources to develop the right end user markets.

And we need to secure the resources to get there. The Federal Government has budgeted $900 million to ignite and support innovation. Other industry groups are lining up. We must decide as a group if it makes sense for our sector to also pursue a piece of this pie.

If it does, we must work together to develop a strong and competitive proposal to educate government on the needs and importance of our sector to the Canadian economy. This includes determining what commitments our industrial Members will make to grow our sector—we must demonstrate how prepared we are to contribute to job creation and economic growth for Canada.
 

Many government programs in Canada focus on the supply side, favouring R&D in the university setting.  We need to focus on the demand side – what markets want and where there is opportunity to generate wealth and create jobs. This by definition must be driven by industry with the support of universities, not the other way around. It’s the most effective way to generate more strategically-focused R&D with much stronger commercial potential.

As you know, this is what the CPEIA does – build critical linkages across the entire supply chain, starting with what we already have in Canada, to create global opportunities.

And this approach works – many of you can attest to this personally as CPEIA Members. We have helped you establish contacts and secure new business opportunities collectively worth millions of dollars.

Our peers south of the border have received hundreds of millions of dollars recently from the U.S. government for printable and flexible electronics and smart textiles. U.S. policy makers, including President Obama, recognize the importance of our sector to the long-term strength of American manufacturing.

These initiatives lever public and private funds, with partnerships between key government agencies like the U.S. Department of Defense, academia and industry. They include the Flexible Hybrid Electronics Manufacturing Institute, The Revolutionary Fibers and Textiles Manufacturing Innovation Institute and the Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute.
 

Driving this agenda forward is beyond the reach of any one organization. It is the role of an association, the CPEIA. This meeting will serve as a forum where all participants can feel confident about putting their cards on the table.

Our sector as a whole must speak with one voice to chart a roadmap for the future. If we agree that government support is necessary, our industrial Members must decide what contribution they are willing to make, to demonstrate that we are ready to partner with government and invest in creating jobs and opportunity.

With the right kind of support, our sector can accelerate commercialization, market growth abroad and job creation here at home.

And it all begins when we sit down to talk on November 22.

This event is exclusively for industrial Members of the CPEIA. We have sent personal invitations for one senior executive from each industrial firm to attend.

If you received an invite but have not yet registered, please do so as soon as possible so we can confirm numbers.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me directly if you have any questions or concerns, at pkallai@cpeia-acei.ca or 613-795-8181.