Capacity Canada report sees opportunity in county’s rural character

Renfrew County just west of Ottawa is a vast chunk of land, with a lot of rocks and trees, farms and small towns.

And, somewhere in all that space – untapped economic energy. Sound familiar?

“It’s a microcosm of Canada,” says Glenn Smith, who helped Capacity Canada with a study in Renfrew in 2014. “There is a variety of industry and some interesting — very promising — activity across multiple sectors.”

“So can they come together for the benefit of the entire community?”

Capacity Canada came up with some ideas to try to answer that question; ideas that might help invigorate the local economy and perhaps stem the outward migration of the county’s young workforce. New approaches for leveraging entrepreneurial potential emerged as the project worked with a local steering committee, tapped into expertise at Algonquin College and collaborated with community partners.

Smith led the ASCEnt (Accelerating Social Cause Entrepreneurs) program at the Communitech Hub in Kitchener, Ont. Cathy Brothers, Capacity’s chief executive officer, is a mentor with ASCEnt. She invited Smith to act as an adviser on the project.

At 7,645 square kilometres, Renfrew County is the largest county in Ontario. It contains 17 municipalities, with a combined population of about 106,000. That works out to about 14 people per square kilometre.

Forestry, farming and tourism rank among key employers, and Chalk River houses a cluster nuclear-science laboratories employing high-tech workers.

But the report encourages Renfrew County to capitalize on its rural character: By encouraging entrepreneurialism around rural strengths, could Renfrew boost the local economy and serve as an example for other sparsely populated areas of Canada?

Immediate-to-the-eye possibilities in Renfrew County include more craft brewing and market farming, which appeals to a consumer interest in cutting food miles. To generate new ideas, the county might consider hosting a rural innovation competition, the report suggests.

The report recommends adopting some of the elements that have made the startup culture in Waterloo Region so successful: mentoring networks, “fierce” collaboration, and the startup attitude of try, fail, pivot and try again.

It should take place in an environment that celebrates entrepreneurial accomplishment. The report refers to it as “lots of love.”

“Most people here (in Renfrew County) enter into a job because it’s kind of what’s available to them,’’ said Megan Conway, academic chair of Health and Community Studies at Algonquin College in the Ottawa Valley. “It’s not necessarily a choice.

“(We) want to cultivate a bit more imagination and curiosity around what else is possible.”

Jamie Bramburger, manager of community and student affairs at Algonquin’s Pembroke campus, expects some of the recommendations will be fulfilled as soon as this summer.

“We are anxious to get started,” Bramburger said. “By the summer, we envision a co-ordinated effort will be well underway to connect entrepreneurs with visionaries that need support to put their ideas into action.”

With support from the Community Futures Development Corporation in Renfrew County, Algonquin College will host an entrepreneur-in-residence program. It will build entrepreneurial networks across the county and serve as a resource for startups. The report regards Algonquin as a catalyst for economic change in the county.

The idea is not to fully duplicate the Waterloo Region model, where a mature ecosystem, including startups, has developed around organizations such as Communitech and the Accelerator Centre.

Instead, the report calls on community leaders — non-profit and for-profit alike — to foster enterprise incubation rather than build enterprise incubators.

“Entrepreneurial thinking has to be in place before enterprises can grow and thrive,” Smith said. “Our recommendations aim to encourage entrepreneurial thinking. There’s a lot of it in Renfrew County, but it has often been born out of necessity as opposed to desire.”