Increasing technology adoption and transfer among Ontario businesses

It is important to:

  • Help small businesses and Ontario’s foundational economic sectors—such as agriculture, construction, and manufacturing—to understand and adopt new data-driven technologies more easily, including expanding digital infrastructure.  
  • Create a stronger ecosystem of innovation and commercialization by connecting data-driven businesses and their products with key markets.

Discussion questions

  • How do we incentivize businesses in Ontario to increase their adoption of data-driven technologies to drive growth? 
  • The Ontario government has established a number of programs and initiatives to incentivize businesses’ adoption of data-driven technologies. In your view, what has worked? What hasn’t worked? 
  • How can we help businesses in Ontario to compete more actively and successfully with international players in the data economy?

Enhancing data access for businesses

It is important to:

  • Build new collaboration models between government and businesses to determine which government data assets can best help drive business growth. 
  • Ensure that strong governance structures and standards are in place to promote privacy-protective data business growth. 

Discussion questions

  • How does your business currently use open data to support growth and productivity? Are there examples of how and why access to data has helped your business?
  • What steps can government take to make its data more available to business, and what types of data would be most helpful for businesses to access?  
  • How can we ensure that businesses generate, collect and resell data in a way that is consent-based and drives growth, but ensures transparency and prevents discrimination?

Streamlining public procurement

It is important to:

  • Remove barriers so that Ontario’s small businesses can access government procurement data and opportunities more easily and fairly. 
  • Promote government procurement of new, innovative data-driven products and services particularly for sectors with barriers to technology adoption and application.

Discussion questions

  • What steps can we take to make it easier for businesses to participate in the procurement process for data-driven services and products?
  • How can we prioritize innovation procurement and help businesses develop solutions for government that can be commercialized for wider markets?

Building data skills and talent

It is important to:

  • Expand access to re-training and upskilling programs, and enable more on-the-job training, to build a pool of data talent in Ontario. 
  • Build a talent retention and attraction strategy by attracting highly skilled immigrants and creating more opportunities for work-based learning.

Discussion questions

  • How can we better enable on-the-job training in key data skills, particularly for employees at small businesses, without creating undue burdens on these employers?
  • How can we maximize data-focused talent retention in Ontario? 
  • How can we better align K-12 and post-secondary curricula with industry needs to build data and digital competency in Ontario?

Comments on this discussion paper will be collected until October 9, 2019. We will post a summary of what we heard on engage.ontario.ca. Other consultations on subsequent discussion papers will follow in the coming months.  

If you have questions or comments, please email us at digital.government@ontario.ca or send any other correspondence to the Ontario Digital Service, 595 Bay Street - Suite 1002, Toronto, Ontario, M7A 2C7.