Opinion: Vancouver is hosting the future, but we're not keeping any of it | Daily Hive

Web Summit Vancouver 2026. (Web Summit)

Written for Daily Hive Urbanized by Dan Burgar, who is the CEO of Frontier Collective.

Last week, the second annual Web Summit conference in Vancouver brought over 20,000 people from around the world to the city. They came for our talent, our companies, and our setting. They’ll leave with deals signed, partnerships formed, and ideas that will turn into businesses somewhere else.

That last part is the problem we keep refusing to talk about.

Vancouver is great at hosting innovation. We’re terrible at keeping it.

Slack was built here. It was scaled in San Francisco. Hootsuite, AbCellera, General Fusion, and Clio: every one of them globally significant, and every one of them has had to look outside this city, this province, and often this country for the capital, the customers, and the conditions to grow. The pattern is so consistent it’s stopped being a pattern and started being the model.

And it’s getting worse. Two-thirds of Canadian founders now raise their first institutional round from foreign investors, mostly American. Forty-five times more startups per capita are launched in the San Francisco Bay Area than in Canada. Our productivity has flatlined for a decade while the United States has pulled ahead by every measurable metric. We’re not in the same race anymore. We’re spectators with good seats.

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This isn’t a story about taxes or talent or weather. We have all three. This is a story about infrastructure. The kind of infrastructure that doesn’t show up in a budget line because it isn’t a road or a bridge. It’s the connective tissue that turns a city full of smart people into a city that captures economic value from those smart people. Capital flows. Procurement pathways. Permanent platforms where founders, investors, corporates, and policymakers actually run into each other on purpose.

Every serious innovation city in the world has built this. Paris has Station F. New York City has Newlab and Industry City. London has the Knowledge Quarter. Houston built ION. Tallinn built an entire national digital platform. These aren’t co-working spaces with foosball tables. They’re operator-led, curated, capital-connected ecosystems that make it cheaper and faster for companies to start, scale, and stay.

Vancouver has none of this. We have programs. We have accelerators. We have one-off events. We have a Digital Technology Supercluster that, seven years in, has produced a fraction of what was promised, with most of the money flowing to incumbents and almost none of it producing breakout companies.

Alan Winter, B.C.’s first innovation commissioner, laid out exactly what the province needed to do in 2019. Most of it still hasn’t been done.

The window is closing

Here’s what nobody at Vancouver City Hall or the B.C. legislature seems to want to admit out loud: cities that miss their innovation moment do not get a second one. Detroit had a moment. Buffalo had a moment. Montreal had a moment in the 1990s and is still trying to get it back. The hierarchy of innovation cities is being rewritten right now, in real time, while a generational shift in artificial intelligence (AI) and frontier tech reshapes which regions become economic centres for the next 50 years.

Vancouver is on the bubble. We have everything a top-tier innovation city needs except the one thing that turns potential into permanence: a physical, operating platform that consolidates this ecosystem into a single centre of gravity. Something durable enough to hold capital. Visible enough to attract global partnerships. Curated enough to actually produce outcomes.

Without it, the talent we train here will keep leaving, the companies we build here will keep scaling somewhere else, and the global delegations who come to visit will keep going home impressed with what we have, and unable to find anything to invest in.

We’ve spent six years building the relationships, the corridors, the partnerships, and the proof points. Innovation missions to New York, Tokyo, London, Austin, and Silicon Valley. Memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with Sapporo and New York City. Convenings that have produced nearly a billion dollars in measurable economic activity.

Global partners are ready to engage with Vancouver, but they just don’t have a permanent place to land when they get here.

What governments should actually do

The Mayor of Vancouver’s office, the Government of British Columbia, and the Government of Canada all have a role to play, and none of them should wait for the others.

Vancouver should treat innovation infrastructure the same way it treats public transit infrastructure: as a non-negotiable public good that catalyzes everything around it.

The provincial government should redirect a fraction of what the Supercluster has spent into operator-led, outcomes-accountable platforms. The federal government should treat innovation infrastructure as part of national economic security, the way the U.S. treats defence and the European Union treats industrial strategy.

None of this is hypothetical. It’s been done in every city we benchmark ourselves against. The model works. The question is whether Vancouver builds it on purpose or watches it get built somewhere else and wonders why our companies keep leaving.

The second annual Web Summit in Vancouver has come and gone. Tens of thousands of people have flown home. The cameras have moved on.

And then we get to choose: another year of hosting other people’s futures, or the year we finally start keeping our own.

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