On Tuesday April 19, 2016, Canada’s Digital Policy Forum (CPDF) will host stakeholders and policy makers to discuss improving Canada’s performance in the development of its digital economy. The Forum proposes that “inevitably, any sound strategy for economic diversification must be a digital strategy.”
At Digital Strategy Conference, we defined digital strategy as “the process of identifying, articulating and executing on digital opportunities that will increase your organization’s competitive advantage.” If you expand ‘your organization’ to incorporate Canada, we can extrapolate that organizational-level thinking to economy-level thinking.
If digital enterprises empower and drive growth, the CPDF Diversifying Canada’s Economy Through Strong Digital Policy Forum asks what kinds of policies and institutions are needed to encourage and scale that growth. How can we best enable digital innovations? The day is set up to:
- Establish the current cyber-security threats and attack environment (behold the recent hospital system held hostage);
- Discuss the potential for user-generated data to impact us socially, politically, and economically;
- Ask if data from our devices be brought out of the private domain and used to serve the public good, without compromising privacy or safety?
- Learn from Sweden’s model for exploiting the opportunities of digitalisation
- Debate if government and the private sector are capable of collaboration and cooperation at speed, or if our competitive skills will merely erode further?
As co-author of the dStrategy Digital Maturity model, I’m looking forward to hearing from industry such as Google and Intuit – and from academics and policy makers such as the Information & Communications Technology Council (who recently released Digital Talent: Road to 2020 and Beyond), the Social Media Lab, a multi- and interdisciplinary research laboratory at Ryerson University and at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University and Sweden’s Digitalisation Commission.
If digital readiness interests you, consider participating in the dStrategy Digital Maturity Benchmark Survey. Intended to help organizations understand the dimensions needed for digital readiness, as with the Forum, understanding how we can build digital capacity at an organizational level can also serve to help us identify capabilities and gaps in advancing our national competitiveness.
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