As many global cities continue to face ever increasingly complex challenges when it comes to public transit, decarbonization, education, housing, job creation and economic growth, we caught up with Torontonian and member of our Strategy+ team Brian Moelich to learn more about how one of the world’s most culturally diverse cities is trying to anticipate the future needs of its citizens.
What are some of the challenges you think Toronto is facing as a city?
A big challenge, as any Torontonian will tell you, is transit. The city is complex and difficult to navigate via public transport. We’ve being doing a lot of work with the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) to improve this; from our capacity improvements work at Bloor-Yonge station to our work on the Hillcrest complex. This 32 acre site in the heart of Downtown Toronto is now 100 years old, so there’s a real opportunity to consider how this facility needs to modernize, reconsider operations, and adapt to the shifting needs of transportation.. I’m originally from Toronto and have recently returned following a long period away in Silicon Valley and the West coast of America, so I’ve really seen the city change over time. Toronto has always had really strong focus on the financial services and telecomms sectors but that’s been changing and shifting in more recent years, becoming a hub for artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other nascent technologies. The old core industries will always be there, and challenge is twofold. Pushing older players to become more flexible and explorative, while building the infrastructure of support for newer industries to grow and thrive, so they’ll stay in Toronto or Canada in general. A consistent story we hear is a startup gets its life in Toronto, but leaves because the ecosystem of technology growth, support and capital availability of Silicon Valley or elsewhere is more appealing..
So what do you see as the opportunities for Toronto?
Toronto has a great opportunity to diversify just as I alluded to; building on its financial services heritage to become a hub for fintech, blockchain and crypto for example, capitalizing on its already strong foundations in AI. Become a destination, rather than a starting point for sustainable long-term growth. The city is now the fourth largest and fastest-growing tech hub in North America which is a great foundation to build on.
The MaRS Discovery District is helping to establish an innovation district in the city, similar to those in other leading global cities such as Singapore, New York and Barcelona. There, the incubators and accelerators attract a range of entrepreneurs and innovators. The Creative Destruction Lab at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management offers a seed-stage program for scalable, science and technology-based companies. It brings together engineering and MBA students with impressive results. But the city and actually Canada as a whole lacks start-up capital. Without an abundance of start-up capital, seed-funding and a healthy culture of failing fast, the city will struggle to attract entrepreneurs on a large scale. Without investors, big businesses won’t follow, creating a vacuum of jobs and hindering GDP growth, so this is really an area of untapped opportunity for the City.
Partnership is key. Any city needs to bring together public, private and academic sector organizations and institutions to create a single vision and then work collaboratively to deliver it. This is something we’re already seeing play out in Toronto with a number of the clients we’re working with which is really exciting.
One of Toronto’s strongest assets is its hugely diverse population. There’s a real opportunity to leverage this and harness the diversity of thought and perspective that already exists today in the city. In particular, there’s a need to look at the city as a whole and identify the dependencies and inter-relationships between the different parts of the city, the communities and the connections that need to be made. We’re already sowing the seeds of this interconnectedness through the work we do in the spaces and places around Toronto. Rather than just focusing on the client in front of us, we’re thinking more deeply about the ecosystem that a particular client plays in and how mutual benefit can be obtained.
What is Strategy+ and how do you support companies and organizations?
Quite simply we’re a strategic design-led consulting team. We’ve all worked in some of the biggest, global consulting firms so we know how companies think and what makes them tick. We use a co-creation approach to work collaboratively with our clients. Firstly, we seek to understand the current state – what’s going on in your organization, your industry, and your customers? Gain an understanding of what is the real problem to be solved. Or what’s going well that our clients would like us to try to replicate or accelerate?
Once we have a clear understanding of that, we try to identify where our client such as a corporation, public agency, university or institution wants to go next. We do this through a visioning process to gain a better understanding of their goals and aspirations to arrive at an ideal future state. Then we’ll start digging into where are the opportunities by looking at looking some benchmarking and begin to pose some potential prototype options and scenarios for testing either through debate and discussion, simulation or real-world experiments. This helps us to identify what options are best suited for the organization. Essentially, we’re looking to spark a reaction and get feedback to potential ways forward in real time. This helps us to move quickly and responsively to considering how we might help a client get to where they want to be. Lastly, we get into figuring out how you will get there and what implementation might look like or even help execute the strategy
Whilst they might still be ideas, options, proposals or hypotheses at times, we always make sure we’re always developing solutions that desirable, feasible, viable and suitable for our clients.
So, what’s next for Strategy+ in Toronto?
I’d love to look into the future and consider what Toronto could look like in 2050? What all the levers and variables affecting the city are and how we as Strategy+ can use them to create one of the cleanest, greenest, most accessible and livable cities in the world.