This year the Northwestern Ontario Innovation Centre is doing something a little different. We are rolling our results into a three year infograph to demonstrate the impact entrepreneurship and small businesses are having on our community. We release these results for a number of reasons which are described below.
1) Entrepreneurship and small business is often seen as an afterthought in our community. With the exception of the monthly Walleye Magazine and quarterly Bayview Magazine, there is limited media coverage of local innovative businesses. We often hear about forestry and mining in our region how it is going to provide 50,000 jobs and the big swings our community is taking but we often forget about the small victories that occur everyday with companies that are actually creating one and two jobs (not just promising). These companies are diversifying our economy and making Thunder Bay a more attractive place to live with employment options that stretch beyond the cyclical natural resources sector.
2) To demonstrate to our funders that collectively all the businesses in our region are worthy of their attention to continue to fund and identify funding program gaps to contribute to these firms continued growth.
3) We at the Innovation Centre take pride in demonstrating a return on investment of how much of our tax money went in and what we are achieving with our capital. Although we cannot pinpoint an exact figure, diversifying the economy and the culture of our City among other items are difficult to place a true value on. With an annual operating budget of roughly $500,000 ($1.5M over the last 3 years), we firmly believe that we are providing a valuable service to our community. If we were strictly to divide our budget by a single number, it appears as follows:
- $10,204 per job created ($1,500,000 / 147 jobs)
- $100,000 per company created ($1,500,000 / 15 companies)
When looking at the numbers in this fashion, investing in entrepreneurs and small businesses that are actually creating real full-time jobs appears to be a way forward for our community and one of the best investments we can make. Entrepreneurship provides opportunities to people who already reside within our community, requires small pots of money to get an idea up off the ground which diversifies our risk, and has tremendous upside potential to reduce youth outmigration, creates meaningful employment opportunities, and wealth for our region. When comparing most investments Governments make such as assets, roads, etc. that depreciate, funds contributed to the Innovation Centre are invested in people, your friends, colleagues, and neighbours to elevate all of our standard of living.
