“We have billions of dollars across Canada right now earmarked for technology, so doesn’t it make sense that the government becomes the biggest customer as we face this economic slowdown for our tech scale-ups and SMEs?

“I believe tech procurement is the biggest lever that the government has as an economic stimulus. They definitely need to take some mission critical actions to help our technologies sector and our SMEs, using crisis as a catalyst for change. This crisis is a window of opportunity to change the old ways of procurement and create a true marketplace between business and government and that would mean modernizing procurement to align with technology. The procurement process itself needs to be modernized and, more importantly, we need to buy from startups, scale-ups and commercially ready products from SMEs.” 

The government needs to define problems, not prescribe solutions. That means changing that old way of procurement to empower the problem-solving capacity of our tech sector and our innovators.”

Originally Recorded on April 23, 2020. Click here to join future roundtables.