Photo credit: Calgary Chamber of Commerce Facebook

You might not expect to hear aspirational speeches about the “economy of the future” and “moonshot” ideas about renewable energy from the Chamber of Commerce in one of the world’s most important oil towns.

Yet that was exactly what we heard at Onward YYC, a conference hosted June 23 by the Calgary Chamber of Commerce.

“Calgary has reached a pivotal moment in its history,” read the mission statement, “[and] we need to build the economy of the future.”

The conference was organized in response to the economic trough Calgary finds itself in following the collapse of world oil prices. The Chamber wanted to present a vision for Calgary’s business community to strive towards, and it did so through presentations from prominent local and international innovators, entrepreneurs, and change-makers.

A sense of urgency beat through many of the presentations, as speakers sketched out a new world in which Calgary could either lead or be left behind. Speakers included Owen Rogers from the design consulting firm IDEO, on how to develop transformation shifts within organizations; Ray Depaul, Director of Mount Royal University’s Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship; Alice Reimer, CEO of Calgary-based Chaordix, in the crowdsourcing industry; and Peter Diamandis, one of the world’s most well-known entrepreneurs, innovators and authors.

For local entrepreneurs like Reimer, it was a chance to remind the city that the opportunities of the next economy have arrived in Calgary. Her crowd intelligence company has powered solutions for organizations like LEGO, IBM, and the USAID development agency.

The presentations included local success stories and warnings of exponential technological growth on a planetary scale. Two messages were clear:

• Alberta has everything it needs to be a worldwide leader in successful entrepreneurship and innovation. It has enough talent and capital to support a startup ecosystem and to attract major corporations, combined with an entrepreneurial spirit ingrained in a century of Alberta mythology.

• There has never been a better time to seize Alberta’s potential and move past the outdated image as a one-industry province.

Complacency is a threat to change, Diamandis warned. His forecasts on technological change made it clear the business community should not pin its hopes on rising oil prices. Change is coming; can Alberta get ahead of it?

The conference sparked internal conversations here at the Canada West Foundation as well. The following morning, we discussed how we can bring renewal and disruption even to our own field of public policy research and advocacy. We will be chewing on that one for some time, but it was a useful reminder to question our assumptions and to justify the work we do.

Talk of “moonshots” – radical shifts that make things 10 times better rather than 10 per cent more efficient – also made us take a hard look at what we do. In the last 50 years, the integrated circuit technology that powers computing improved literally a hundred billion-fold, in terms of speed and cost. A company’s average tenure on the S&P 500 shrunk from more than 50 years in the 1960s to less than 20 years today, and that is shrinking farther. How can the Canada West Foundation help governments respond to these kinds of transformations?

It is impossible to predict exactly what is coming next – for example, did you know that Obama signed an act to allow the granting of mineral rights on asteroids? – but we are ready to help governments prepare for what is coming down the road (or the space elevator, or the Hyperloop).

If the world is going to change as fast as it seems, and if western Canadians are going to change with it, policy-makers need to be prepared.

– Liam St. Louis is a research intern