The Frenchness

Plenty of cities boast their tech bonafides. Amazon’s HQ2 list for example, mapped the top 20 tech hotspots across North America — from California to Tennessee to Massachusetts. The process attracted 238 proposals in total. Tech is a broad umbrella, and unsurprisingly each city tends to specialise in an aspect of tech or two. This is usually a product of history, university expertise, defence links, market opportunities.

 Montreal’s story is that it happened to be the home of Yoshua Bengio, one of the three godfathers of AI. The city has been able to leverage the strengths of its university sector to create one of the most cutting edge AI ecosystems in the world. From the ground up: the city is littered with AI specific incubators and accelerators; the Mila — Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute houses 450 researchers across a network of four universities; its home to companies like Element AI and Stradigi AI; and has attracted R&D centres for Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. And Montreal.AI has a mission to train 100 million people in the basics of AI.

But there’s something about Montreal that makes it different from the rest. It’s a unique city* — a European oasis in the middle of North America. Montreal is, of course, French speaking, but its more than that. The architecture is different, the fashion is different, there are galleries and public art everywhere you look.

 

There’s a Frenchness to Canada’s “cultural capital” that is hard to ignore.

For every student studying computer science and engineering, there is a student studying fine art, sculpture, theatre and. It’s the home of Cirque du Solei after all.

 

Montreal is where science and technology meets art and culture — and the result is burgeoning video games industry. 

 

Montreal houses over 140 studios— including Ubisoft, EA and Warner Brothers — and a video games workforce of 15,000. Nearly 4,000 students are enrolled in local tertiary programs related to the industry. The city’s big breakthrough was Splinter Cell (retro flashbacks!) in 2002. Since then the studios have birthed the major franchises like Modern Warfare, Assassins’ Creed, Tomb Raider and Batman Origins.

The gaming industry is full of starving artists. Passion and skill do not necessarily correlate with player numbers and profits. Game economics require the player to either fork out a significant outlay upfront (like buying an Xbox game), or extract revenues from the player on an ongoing basis (like Candy Crush). The former has high barriers to entry and is akin to making a motion picture. The latter has lower barriers to entry, and the game risks becoming lost on the app store. The strategies required to become successful in this industry don’t always align with the purity of the game, but outfits likeExecution Labs operate to help starving artists eat their “business broccoli”.

A video games industry in Montreal makes perfect sense: the creativity and culture from the city’s art scene mashed together with its coders and techies. But it would be remiss not to note that the Frenchness has been supported by a very generous Multimedia Titles Tax Credit provided by the provincial government, tax credits worth up to $25,000 per E-Business employee, and R&D Tax Credits that are paid in addition to those provided by the Federal Government. Nonetheless, the strategy seems to be working — the number of jobs in the sector has increased 10 fold since 2002. 

* I never made it to Quebec City, and I have a feeling Montreal might only be unique-ish.