Abbotsford Investment Readiness Accelerator Project 2.0

On November 30, 2018, in a unique conference space within the airfield side of the Abbotsford Airport, the City of Abbotsford Economic Development (CAED) held its second Master Class Workshop focused on investor readiness development. ICF Canada and CAED are working together on raising the level of community engagement with the goal of helping the community to become investment ready. Abbotsford has many of the essential elements to become a truly great intelligent community of 150,000 people as it leverages its growth potential to become a community of 200,000. However, it also realistically recognizes that it has many areas to improve upon as it grows to that size and is working with a community of very engaged and enlightened stakeholders from municipal government, the private sector and the University of Frazer Valley and other local institutions to work on them. But they also recognize the incredible assets and competitive advantages that they already have in their community to be able to help to attract jobs, investment and talent to take advantage of the many opportunities that they have. Investors take note!

Abbotsford is a community in lower mainland British Columbia, just east of the Greater Vancouver Area that has built a prosperous community on its legacy and foundation built on its agricultural roots. For a profile of Abbotsford, see the #51 Edition of the ICF Canada newsletter. Abbotsford recognizes that economic prosperity for its citizens is primarily in this sector, along with some other diverse sectors such as manufacturing, transportation, education and healthcare, but its greatest opportunities are in planting digital roots across an extensive agricultural sector and building on entrepreneurial opportunities that integrates all of its sectors to fully leverage their competitive advantages.

Following the initial ICF Accelerator workshop in August, CAED decided that Abbotsford would strategically benchmark itself against hundreds of global submissions for the SMART21 Intelligent Community awards in order to be able to independently determine its competitive advantages and compare itself among its global competition. This was a critical step in Abbotsford’s Accelerator process. Accordingly, Abbotsford submitted data in ICF’s 6 key indicators (Broadband, Knowledge Workforce, Innovation, Digital Equality, Sustainability and Advocacy) in September. On October 25, 2018 in Hamilton, Abbotsford was announced as one of the world’s SMART21 communities and one of four in Canada, along with Winnipeg, Sarnia-Lambton and the Greater Victoria area. It now joins the ranks of over 180 global cities, towns and regions, globally recognized as SMART21 communities by ICF since 1999, and joins a unique family of currently 40 SMART21 communities in Canada. The global adjudicators, arms length from ICF’s think tank and association of members, select these 21 communities as smart communities in October of every year using ICF’s indicators in judging the communities for this recognition. Over the next several months, these adjudicators will dive deeper into every community’s data, and on February 11, 2019 in Quebec City, ICF will announce from among these twenty-one communities, the 2019 TOP7 Intelligent Communities, representing the top seven communities that have best met ICF’s criteria for 2019. With this data, Abbotsford was now able to be benchmarked against the most current competitive data available – from among the 2019 SMART21 list, a key component of ICF’s Accelerator program.

During the November 30 workshop, ICF’s Abbotsford Metrics Report was unveiled. The results of the metrics report indicated that the city’s greatest strengths are in its community advocacy, broadband infrastructure and knowledge workforce – all essential ingredients in a growing and emerging SMART21 Intelligent Community. While areas of improvement were cited in innovation and sustainability, these are also areas in which the community has tremendous opportunities to attract investors and talent to assist the community as it grows. In 2017, Abbotsford received a huge investment of broadband deployment throughout the community by Telus, connecting 90% of its residents and organizations with a significant enabling foundation of smart infrastructure ready for any investor and entrepreneur to come to this community to flourish. Since the promotion of the Accelerator, Economic Development Abbotsford has also received interest by Shaw and Rogers to participate. The community is keen to attract investors and entrepreneurs and accordingly, also has the local university and secondary schools with which to work with to evolve the necessary skillsets needed for the new digital economy. Its healthcare facilities are exceptional and its growth in aerospace and aviation, film, television, tourism and special events, as well as niche marketing, significantly augment Abbotsford’s agricultural excellence as “Canada’s Agricultural Capital”. See more at https://caed.abbotsford.ca/grow-here/key-sectors/.

Through leveraging its available knowledge workforce from 5 institutions within Abbotsford’s municipal boundaries and another 55 in the Greater Vancouver Area, investors will be able to locate their businesses with suitable talent available for all the key sectors that Abbotsford has the greatest strengths in. Abbotsford is building on this through its CityStudio project, an imaginative effort to engage university and secondary school students with city staff in innovation that improves city services, sustainability and governmental culture. With this in mind, a new city-centre innovation-focused hub will be launched later this spring in a downtown park. The community is also developing a café culture to attract and retain its talent in the community.

A key area of investor opportunity will be to create higher value products and services from Abbotsford’s key and emerging sectors for export. For instance, Abbotsford is working on developing innovative agribusiness opportunities such as the Valley Field and Farm Collective, which seeks to leverage the agricultural foundation of the economy in new and creative ways with particular appeal to a new generation of consumers who place high value on local foods. Look for entrepreneurial activities in agribusiness start-ups through locally engaged entrepreneurs and through attracting FDI (Foreign Direct Investors) to the community to leverage its smart infrastructure, especially broadband and its local knowledge workers. But also watch investor interest in these other sectors as the community works on building up its other assets and enhancing areas where it recognizes improvements may be necessary.

Abbotsford’s project, Plan 200K, was cited in the Metrics Report as an excellent project to identify, plan for and advocate the growth of the community by engaging citizens and organizations in the community and making them the greatest advocates of positive change leading to a more dynamic future.  While more can be done to promote Abbotsford as open for business, it gets top marks for its administration and council leadership, community engagement and citizen-wide participation. For instance, Plan 200K met the spirit of advocacy with its 8,000 interactions with residents during the 2014-2017 period. Another example is its annual “Business Walks” campaign where businesses are met to understand their needs as growing businesses in their community. The city’s Economic Development team is a smart, keen and highly engagement group, led by a vibrant leader, Wendy Dupley. This new department is only 4 years old and exemplifies the community’s commitment and desire to evolve its traditional local activities to become a global player in economic development. As such it recognizes the value of home-grown economic development but also the value of attracting and retaining external investments, bringing with it new capital, new innovation and a diverse population. Abbotsford is already one of the most diverse communities in Canada and is seeking to leverage these connections, especially with South Asia. In addition, with its new ICF SMART21 brand, it will be able to proudly and confidently promote itself as an attractive smart community to its global FDI leads.

It is anticipated that the ICF Metrics Report will inform much of the community’s further investigation in becoming investment ready. A forthcoming guidebook on Abbotsford’s progress will help not only Abbotsford and the communities in the Greater Vancouver Region and British Columbia to benefit from their experiences, but it will also help other Canadian and global communities to learn from their experience to become investment ready. ICF Canada will also monitor and report on their journey to becoming a successful investment-ready community, leveraging their competitive advantages, their diversity and their emerging brand as a SMART21 community on the global stage. This unique project will no doubt attract many investors to look into this community and consider them for future opportunities.