“Coming together is the beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” – Henry Ford
The people of Windsor-Essex have always been innovators. We’re not flashy. But we are passionate and quietly persistent. We roll up our sleeves and get to work.
Innovation for its own sake isn’t enough for us. It’s not enough to make things just because we can. For us, there is always a why. We innovate to collaborate, to problem-solve and to create our future.
Our history says we always knew we’d go farther together.
Our forebearers looked across the Detroit River and asked themselves, how can we connect? Travelling through the water was obvious, boats and ferries were already in use. But early innovators thought further. They realized that connection could be achieved both over the water and under it. As a result, the people on both sides of the river collaborated to create the world’s longest international suspension bridge, and the only international vehicular tunnel in the world. Those records still stand as evidence of our innovative nature almost 100 years later.
This region moves a lot of people – more than a quarter of all US/Canada traffic according to the latest statistics. And we also have a history of moving ideas. The first submarine telephone line was laid between Windsor and Detroit… in wait for it… 1881. Just for the record – the first telephone line was constructed in 1877-78. Windsor-Essex was on the cutting edge of technology – ahead of connections between Montreal and Toronto. Work to connect those two cities didn’t start until 1928, almost 50 years later. From the telephone to fibre broadband networks, we are still growing, still developing, still realizing that the power of our networks is the collaboration between the people they connect.
Windsor-Essex has a distinct pattern of problem-solving. In every industry, from agricultural to manufacturing we are always asking ourselves, “How can I make this work a little better?” As a region we are blue-collar builders, vision executers, all-season growers, people-movers and solution-inventors.
We create the tools that we use to build innovation. Many of us are still tool-shed tinkerers, but now we are using advanced robotics, AI, IoT and 5G to tackle challenges like food production, sustainability, and food security. Students are building solutions in their bedrooms and meeting up at hackathons. Our industries imagine the future in virtual reality and their suppliers create systems to meet the needs of the future of work. It’s clear that we’re thinking about backyard and global challenges in all sorts of new ways.
We’re also innovating the business of living. Windsor-Essex is home to digital, immersive art experiences, the Incubator Art Lab (which involves white lab coats and is as cool as it sounds) and companies that research cures for cancer and identify art-forgery under the same banner. (The Institute for Diagnostic Imaging Research). There are over 50 companies working in life-sciences in our region, who still work closely with our northern neighbors. (Yup, in this one spot in Canada we are not “the neighbors to the north”). Opening a small business has never been more accessible – allowing people to make beautiful things, show their products to the neighbourhood and the world and create lives they want to live. Investments in the region make it possible for local growers and makers to sell their works and get paid through payment processing technology. Networks harness the power and energy of main street business and bring it to wherever people are. It’s a beautiful fusion we might call artisan-tech.
There is no part of our lives that technological innovation fails to touch.
And how we perceive the impacts of innovation are similar, whether we are talking about the telephone or networking technology. In the past, people thought that the telephone technology would “help further democracy; be a tool for grassroots organizers; lead to additional advances in networked communications; allow social decentralization, resulting in a movement out of cities and more flexible work arrangements; change marketing and politics; alter the ways in which wars are fought; cause the postal service to lose business; open up new job opportunities; allow more public feedback; make the world smaller, increasing contact between peoples of all nations and thus fostering world peace; increase crime and aid criminals; be an aid for physicians, police, fire, and emergency workers; be a valuable tool for journalists; bring people closer together, decreasing loneliness and building new communities; inspire a decline in the art of writing; have an impact on language patterns and introduce new words; and someday lead to an advanced form of the transmission of intelligence.”
We recognize the incredible power of innovation as a force for societal change. It is an essential part of a future that we are shaping and the world that we are creating every day in Windsor-Essex.
