What are Canada’s Intelligent Communities up to?

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The little city that thought it could, eventually did. There was a time when Stratford, Ontario struggled to keep jobs twelve months of the year. Known as an agricultural-based service center, it bet on its name and eventually attracted world class actors to perform at its Shakespearian Festival. However, a year-round job market eluded it until it developed its smart city strategy that included global recognition from ICF, attraction of the University of Waterloo to open its Digital Media Center and began to attract and retain start-ups.

Today, the city of 32,000 is making a name for itself as a technology hub and feels vibrant year-round. Nearby the Kitchener-Waterloo area with over 2,000 startups has begun to receive global recognition. Up the road in Stratford, its leadership is also making the global stage, although it doesn’t have the critical mass of startups that the Waterloo and Toronto regions have. What Stratford’s secret weapon has been is its mayor, Dan Mathieson, who worked on its community’s highly collaborative ecosystem to pull together a wide variety of leaders, organizations and investors to turn Stratford into a vibrant year around community. One of the key ingredients in its turnaround was the development of a municipally-owned fibre broadband network and its associated free city-wide Wi-Fi. Soon thereafter followed the University of Waterloo digital media centre, RBC data centre, the Stratford Accelerator Centre, a startup incubator and most recently, given the wireless ecosystem prevalent in Stratford, it attracted an autonomous vehicle pilot, the first in Canada.  ICF has recognized Stratford as a SMART21 and TOP7 Intelligent Community in 2011, 2012 and 2013. Read about Stratford, one of the Intelligent Community Forum’s most prolific smart communities: http://www.intelligentcommunity.org/stratford_ontario

Stratford was also featured in the Intelligent Community Forum books Brain Gain and Seizing Our Destiny available at http://www.intelligentcommunity.org/publications

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