Calgary's Scaleup Tower: A MaRS-Inspired Blueprint

Calgary, a city brimming with audacious potential, is a hard-nosed emblem of innovation, resilience, and entrepreneurship. It's high time we raise the stakes, embracing a game-changing concept with the potential to supercharge our city's capacity to support, nurture, and magnetize scaleups from across Canada and maybe, just maybe, globally.

Stoking Calgary's Innovative Flame: A Vision Inspired by MaRS

Here's the playbook: We swipe a page from Toronto's MaRS Discovery District, positioning Calgary to etch a unique mark on the innovation economy. In a recent sit-down, MaRS CEO, Yung Wu, underlined the indispensable role of innovation hubs, dropping the stat, “The innovation economy is 12% of Canada’s GDP, 16% of Ontario’s GDP and is growing 3 to 6x faster than any other sector."

That's not just a stat; that's a wake-up call to the innovation startup community, policymakers, and the country as a whole. But what resonated with me most about MaRS' impact on reshaping Toronto's tech landscape?

Physical space for founders and their teams to collide, collaborate, and catalyze each other is non-negotiable. Because there’s no one who can help a founder scale faster than another founder who’s done it before.?

Uncovering Hidden Potential: Calgary's Downtown Vacancy

Our downtown, once a powerhouse fuelled by the oil and gas industry, now stares down a 32% office vacancy rate (according to CBRE's Q1 2023 report). CBRE also underscores the volatile landscape tech and startup tenants are tiptoeing across due to the global downturn, with companies dragging their feet to return to the office. But here's the plot twist: buried within this challenge is a gold mine — reimagining our city's core as a hub for scaleups — sparking innovation and steering economic diversification.

Platform Calgary: Laying the Groundwork for Greatness

Platform Calgary has played a pivotal role in nurturing early-stage founders and fuelling a burgeoning tech scene. Their startup events and pitch competitions provide a runway for founders to take off, often for the first time, in front of investors. But to ascend as a city, we need to double down on this groundwork and arm scaleups with the resources they need to excel. This is where the concept of the Scaleup Tower, a hub designed to unify founders and stimulate a dynamic innovation ecosystem, comes into play.

The MaRS-Inspired Scaleup Tower: Calgary's Key to Success

The Scaleup Tower can be our city's rocket fuel, energizing Calgary's innovation ecosystem. By corralling scaleups under one roof, we back our most promising contenders and stir up a dynamic petri dish that breeds innovation, peer learning, and economic growth.

As Y Combinator founder Paul Graham once said, "You can't have a startup ecosystem without a sufficient density of startups." The Scaleup Tower provides three clear advantages:

1. Economic Revitalization: Investing in scaleups leads to jobs, stimulates economic activity, and breathes life back into our downtown. We can address the city's vacancy issue and lay the foundation for a vibrant city centre.
2. Talent and Investment Magnet: Our innovation hub pulls in global talent and investment, helping transform our city into a sought-after launchpad to start, scale, and bankroll the future. The Scaleup Tower's magnetism could even rope in successful scaleups from pricier locales like Toronto and Vancouver.
3. Augmenting Existing Initiatives: The Scaleup Tower bolsters the strides made by Platform Calgary and others. Plus, with talent often opting to live close to work, the Scaleup Tower syncs up with the city's office-to-residential conversion projects, and provides an easy on-ramp for students eager to explore their startup aspirations. Simply put, it creates critical density.

A Clarion Call to Calgary's Leadership

Calgary's leaders, it's time to champion our city's scaleups. By backing these businesses, we can continue pumping life into our downtown and fostering homegrown success stories that put Calgary onto the global innovation stage.

Our game plan? Capitalize on existing office space without major renovations, promising a big-league ROI in the form of job creation, amplified economic activity, and a vibrant downtown. The Scaleup Tower isn't just an investment; it's a home run. Let's step into the batter's box and swing for the fences.

Because after all, successful startups are the seedbed for more successful startups. Let's create a fertile ground in Calgary for them to grow and flourish.