Redefining Canada’s Community of Tech: How Identities and Industries Co-evolve

Darius Ornston, University of Toronto

Recent literature on regional and comparative political economy has argued that collective identities can play a crucial role in the emergence of new industries by inspiring entrepreneurs, fostering collective action, and attracting external resources (Storper et al. 2015; Walshok and Shragge 2014; Ornston 2021). But the collective identities themselves in this work are largely static, a curious omission given the literature’s attention to institutional and economic change. Focusing on the emergence of high-technology entrepreneurship in Canada, this paper illustrates how collective identities need to co-evolve as industries scale in ways that challenge entrepreneurs and their political allies. Analysis is based on a historical study of the tech sector in Kitchener-Waterloo, an entrepreneurial hub roughly 100 kilometers west of Toronto. At very early stages of development, the entrepreneurial community was small enough to rely on personal connections and face-to-face contact. Investment in more sophisticated public goods, however, required a deeper and broader pattern of collective action, which was achieved by crafting and diffusing a narrative about the region’s Mennonite heritage and its tradition of collective problem solving (Spigel and Bathelt 2019). This mythologized “community of tech” enabled the region to creative protective space for local entrepreneurs, but it frustrated the type of cross-sectoral and cross-regional coalition building that was necessary to eliminate provincial- and national barriers to scaling high-technology enterprises. As a result, local leaders with the tech community have attempted to layer a new, contested, pan-Canadian identity on top of the regional one. While the paper derives the greater analytic leverage from historical process tracing of the Waterloo tech sector, the conclusion briefly generalizes the argument by identifying parallel, sectorally defined regional identities in other Canadian communities, and contrasting the Canadian case with other nations such as the United States, Sweden, and Finland, which managed to surmount these regional cleavages.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 47. Technology and Entrepreneurship