New Brunswick: A 'Living Lab'

When New Brunswick needed jobs, a province famous for its brilliant fall foliage and charming covered bridges uncovered a new attraction: call centers. Now, New Brunswick is North America's call center capital in a province where such operations were virtually non-existent before 1990. "We had 45 call centers locate here in the past six years," said Kevin Bulmer, an economic development investment division coordinator for the Government of New Brunswick. "For every job advertised by a call center, we still get an average 22 to 1 response," Bulmer said.

NBTel, the New Brunswick telephone and telecommunications company that laid the innovative communications groundwork for the province's call for a new business direction, again is working with government leaders to further expand on the region's rapid call center success. NBTel boasted the first completely digital switching network in North America and the first province-wide fiber optic network, and now is investing more than $300 million to bring a broadband multimedia network to more than 70 percent of its customers by 1998.

NBTel now has turned the entire province into a trademarked "Living Lab," in which NBTel will work with call centers on innovations and then "try them out" on an audience that is its customer base. "From a technology perspective, we have, if you will, hot-wired the province in terms of being fiber, digital and now broadband. It is a good place for companies to come and try new services," said Sue-Ellen Thibodeau, NBTel's manager of new business ventures. "From a customer perspective, they have a captive audience they can try out new products on before they take them to other markets. We invite customers to come here and partner with us. We say, 'Come here. Play in our lab. Test it in our lab. Build it in our lab,' which is our province," she said.

Twinpak Atlantic manufactures plastic bottles at its plant in Moncton Industrial Park in New Brunswick.

If New Brunswick has been the home of so many firsts, it is because the province recognized early that to keep New Brunswick residents employed, the government must act quickly, and so did NBTel. "It is truly an effort of the entire province to make this a good place to do business," Thibodeau said.

Al MacDonald, founding partner of MCM Technology Inc., a Fredericton-based information technology consulting firm, said that while the province's now considerable technology infrastructure is an important component in attracting companies such as his, "what's more important is the support infrastructure in place at all levels. They actually are opening up opportunities for us." Companies such as his, in turn, are often called upon to aid and abet the province's economic development cause. MacDonald also is chair of the Greater Fredericton Knowledge Industry Task Force, formed to support existing business while attracting new knowledge companies.

With a ready work force quickly trained to fill the incoming jobs, the province began focusing on preparing new generations of even more highly skilled workers. "New Brunswick was a natural resource-based economy that couldn't compete with bigger centers. The advantage for us in taking the information highway route is that distance no longer has any meaning," said Patrick Lacroix, communications and promotions director for the province's Economic Development and Tourism Department.

"One of the first things was to build a technology-friendly society, so we became the first province to have all the high schools and libraries wired to the Internet," Lacroix said. By the end of 1998, 200 community access centers will be open across the province to "make more New Brunswickers information technology-ready," he said. "There's a global shortage of information technology workers."

Today, 90 percent of New Brunswick's Advanced Training Technology (ATT) services are exported around the world, with IBM, Digital, British Aerospace, NASA, Xerox, Lockheed and Microsoft among the better known companies making use of the ATT/Multimedia expertise developed in a province also home to Canada's first official information highway secretariat. That's also why companies such as United Parcel Service, IBM Canada Ltd., Federal Express, COM DEV, Purolator Courier, Lexi-Tech, Air Canada, Dun & Bradstreet Information Services and Delta Hotels & Resorts have set up shop in New Brunswick in recent years.

New Brunswick's capital, Fredericton, is home to most of the province's knowledge technology industries, along with four fully developed industrial parks and four colleges and universities serving as academic magnets to companies seeking close-by expertise and research capacity.

That makes Fredericton an obvious choice when it comes to solving problems such as the global year-2000 dilemma. The problem that has been the stuff of newspaper headlines and business magazine covers for the past year centers on what-if scenarios that could occur if computers using a two-digit system shut down or, unable to compute a change in century, revert to the year 1900, when the calendar reads Jan. 1, 2000.

CGI Group Inc. already has expanded its Greater Fredericton presence to set up a Remote Software Development Center to tackle the year-2000 problem. Greater Fredericton-based Format Systems Inc. is developing an automated conversion tool set to provide year 2000 correction to its system customers. Unisys also is opening a Year 2000 Development Center in the capital city.

The growing Internet security market is the focus of Greater Fredericton-based operations of Ingenia Communications Corp. and Atlantic Systems Group. Greater Fredericton is also home to TeleEducation NB, a distance education network with some 100 sites across the province and a course list ranging from distance AutoCAD training to advanced physics.

New Brunswick's largest city, Saint John, still is home to some of the head offices of the hundreds of business interests of the Irving family, one of the 10 richest families in the world. Family holdings include Irving Oil, which operates the largest, most modern oil refinery in Canada at Saint John, and Saint John Shipbuilding.

IBM last year opened a major call center in the seaside city boasting Canada's third busiest year-round deep-water port. Saint John, Canada's oldest incorporated city with a sparkling new look to its recently renovated downtown business centers, has three industrial parks and a thriving marine biology center through the University of New Brunswick's Saint John Campus.

In Moncton, "we've seen terrific growth in call centers and back office operations," said Peter Belliveau, general manager of Moncton Industrial Development Ltd. Among the call center newcomers is Dun & Bradstreet. At Moncton Industrial Park, which Belliveau said is now at 90 percent capacity, the Royal Bank last year doubled the size of its telebanking center at a site that also includes recent expansions by Acme Sales & Warehousing and DRM Realty.

A three-year, $14 million expansion of Moncton's Caledonia Industrial Parks, was recently completed, Belliveau said, making available 220 additional acres (88 hectares) for new development, including a newly zoned and built Business Technology Park.

Now a Bridge Away More Newcomers				A 'Living Lab' New Directions
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