Make Windsor a City of Innovation
Windsor, which is known for manufacturing excellence, can attract new manufacturing industries with high-paying jobs. Windsor is well-placed to move forward towards becoming a city of innovation provided it has local leadership with vision, drive, management skills and passion for new technologies:
First Tasks:
The first task is of providing necessary support to the existing businesses and in creating an environment of progress -
-
by helping existing businesses, which may be experiencing problems. It requires agile decision-making and provision of targeted support, where necessary and
-
by creating an environment, which enables small businesses to be set up easily, by reducing licence fees and taxes.
Making Windsor - a Start-Up-friendly Center of the region -
-
by encouraging new ideas and by providing targeted support for those working on new products, projects, businesses and industries,
-
by developing policies and bye-laws, wherever required to help Start-Ups and small businesses: Thus the City may help purchase of new products for its own use, wherever appropriate and
-
through providing office and working space at reasonable rates near the city center.
Windsor's Assets: Invaluable for Innovators:
Windsor can succeed in attracting innovators since it has assets, which not many places have.
-
Windsorites are known as Makers and Builders and they can help innovators prepare proto-types easily
-
Windsor has well-known Odette School of Business and Professors of Business at St Claires. The City's agencies, in coordination with the University and the College, can help the innovators study business models and then help the Start-Ups prepare documentation, as required for Financial Institutions, Crowd Funding, Angel Investors or Venture Capital Funds.
Windsor Inc:
Heather Rivers has quoted, in Windsor Star dated 7th July 2018, from a Report by Brookfield Institute for Innovation & Entrepreneurship, that businesses and manufacturers at Leamington, Ingersoll, Tillsonburg, Woodstock are expected to lose jobs to automation.
Windsor can provide more jobs in automation technologies & robotics than the jobs lost due to automation, if we work together as Windsor Inc and if Windsor, pro-actively, takes up the task of developing innovative products for automation, jointly with the businesses in the four cities.
Windsor's Resources - The Right Mix: Windsor has all the resources, required to develop the automation products for the world of tomorrow, to be ushered in by the 4th Industrial Revolution:
-
manufacturers, who have been developing industrial products,
-
researchers and engineers, working in new technologies, and
-
users, who need the new products and who are located nearby.
But we require leadership, which has the vision, the agility and the passion to start attacking problems, which are apparent today and which are going to become bigger by the day.
Who, except the city of Windsor, can create the spirit of Windsor Inc among industries, researchers and governments and take the bull of automation by its horns, and, not wait for it to come and attack us?
A Call to Windsor Inc: Let us develop initially new technologies required by our businesses and manufacturing units and those at Leamington, Ingersoll, Tillsonburg, Woodstock and let us develop new AI-based products required by our seniors. We can do it and we should start doing it at the earliest.
By using new technologies, the new products are going to become better, easier to use and less costly.
Shall we wait for large corporations of the world to make these products and bring them to us or shall we marshal together our competence to build such products for ourselves, and, then supply them to the world?
Virtuous Cycle: As Windsor Inc starts developing automation technologies and as these start getting used in and around Windsor, the businesses in Windsor will start growing & generating high-paying jobs and our researchers will be able to bid for & get more grants.
Windsor as a hub of innovation: Windsor is known as a city of Makers and Builders. If the City works to build a reputation as a City of Innovation, as a Start-Up-friendly city and as a city, where new technologies are used and developed in businesses, small and big, it will start attracting entrepreneurs and inventors.
Since Windsor is the transit-hub between Canada and USA, its location will be of interest to new entrepreneurs. Our university is able to attract a large number of students from China due to its high reputation. Detroit is known as the hub of Americans of Middle East. So as Windsor develops as a City of Innovation, it can develop linkages with innovation hubs in Asia and Africa. This can further strengthen it as the Mecca of inventors.
Alex is an innovator, who has a patent to his credit. He can contribute to developing Windsor as a city, which is innovator friendly, where new enterprises can be set up easily and are supported in every way and where the City Hall is agile in creating bye-laws and new policies for new technologies.
-----End-------