June 9-11 2009
Martin Prosperity Institute

The conference is an extension of the Placing Creativity partnership which investigates the interconnection between ‘Place’ and ‘Creativity’ through a number of different dimensions.

3rd CIBC Scholar-in-Residence Lecture — 21st Century Cities: The Geography of Innovation

The Ontario Centre for Engineering and Public Policy and the Martin Prosperity Institute present “Smart Ways to Spend Infrastructure Dollars”, part of the Policy Engagement Series.

Speakers:
Dr. Chris Kennedy, Dr. Bryan Karney, Dr. Eric Miller and Dr. Marianne Hatzopoulou
Department of Civil Engineering, University of Toronto

Thursday, May 14, 2009
12 – 2pm
Sutton Place Hotel, Stop 33 (33rd floor)
955 Bay Street, Toronto
Lunch will be served.

Pre-registration is required; please reply to info@ocepp.ca or call 416-224-1100, ext. 1204 by May 11

Roger Martin, Dean of the University of Toronto’s Joseph L. Rotman School of Management and Chairman of the Institute for Competitiveness & Prosperity, will be releasing the 2009 Report on Canada’s Competitiveness and Prosperity.

The report is a collaboration of the Martin Prosperity Institute and the Institute for Competitiveness & Prosperity. It will draw on research recently released in Ontario in the Creative Age.

Richard Florida, Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute and co-author of Ontario in the Creative Age, will address the conference.

Event Details:
Date: Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Time: 8:30 to 11:30 am
Location: Sutton Place, Toronto
Click to register

Relevant Links:
How the Crash will Reshape America by Richard Florida, The Atlantic, March 2009
The Great Reset: An interview with Richard Florida by The Atlantic’s Conor Clarke, February 2009
Evan Solomon interviews Richard Florida, CBC News Sunday, March 1, 2009
How the Crisis will Reshape Toronto by Richard Florida, Creative Class Blog, February 18 2009

Research Director Kevin Stolarick and Research Associates Patrick Adler, Scott Pennington and Ronnie Sanders are participating in the Waterloo edition of TVOntario’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin‘s AgendaCamp series. Expert guests and concerned citizens will debate the issues facing Ontario’s innovation economy on Sunday, March 29 from 9:30am to 4:30pm at the Davis Centre, 200 University Avenue West, University of Waterloo.

Director Richard Florida will be a guest on the televised component of AgendaCamp along with Research in Motion co-CEO Jim Balsillie, broadcasting live on Monday, March 30 at 8 pm on TVO.

Learn more about how to attend in person or join in online via the AgendaCamp website and contribute to the TV program’s schedule on the AgendaCamp wiki’s open source TV production page.

Every month our workshop plays host to an evening of lively conversation and debate known as the Salon Camden series. Founded by a group of passionate Torontonians as a way to celebrate the city’s thought leaders and emerging talents across all fields, the salon welcomes the open-minded for a night of discussion, debate, and flavourful food and drink.

Salon Camden and the MPI are proud to celebrate the ideas, experiences, and opinions of Torontonians.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009
7:30 to 10:00pm
Fleck Atrium (ground floor), Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto
105 St. George Street, Toronto

The Martin Prosperity Institute presents the inaugural event of its Program on Innovation and Creative Industries:

“Markets Making Music” – A Lecture and Concert

You and your guests are invited to register for this unique evening of lecture, discussion, and music.

At 7:30pm sharp we will begin the session and introduce lecturer Prof. Ajay Agrawal, Director of the Program on Innovation and Creative Industries at the Martin Prosperity Institute and Peter Munk Professor of Entrepreneurship at Rotman.

Immediately following his presentation, the evening will feature a Q&A session with Sellaband CEO and Co-Founder Johan Vosmeijer as well as an album debut concert performance by Sellaband recording artist Angie Arsenault. The evening will adjourn by 10:00. There will be a cash bar and snacks.

Synopsis: In 1999, an unknown Northeastern University student named Shawn Fanning released – with little fanfare – a program for sharing music over the Internet. Despite its modest dorm room origins, that innovation and subsequent permutations had a devastating effect on the recorded music industry worldwide. In Canada, for example, revenues declined by a stunning 50% between 1999 and 2007, after adjusting for inflation. In fact some industry observers, reflecting on the rise of Internet traffic and the concurrent decline in music sales, referred to the launch of Napster as “The Day the Music Died.”

Almost a decade later, however, in 2008, something surprising happened. In order to finance the recording and production of her debut album, an unknown artist in Montreal named Angie Arsenault turned to another Internet innovation and raised $50,000 from 531 “believers” spread across 34 countries using an online market-making platform that virtually no one had heard of – Sellaband. She was the first Canadian to successfully do so. Sellaband had been launched in the Netherlands – with little fanfare – two years earlier, in 2006.

Although it is too early to speculate on long-term industry trends, Prof. Agrawal will present insights, based on Sellaband data, into what general lessons might be learned from this unique artist market in terms of peer-to-peer lending and microfinance (believers invest in $10 increments), foreign direct investment (artists raise much of their financing from outside their home country), and crowd-financing (believers have collectively financed only a select few from thousands of artists featured on the site).

TO REGISTER FOR THE SESSION: The fee to attend on February 10 is $30 per person plus GST. The fee includes your seat and a signed copy of Angie Arsenault’s debut CD. Please register here before noon on February 10.

The session is sponsored by the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.

Questions can be directed to events@rotman.utoronto.ca or at (416) 978-4193.

Dress code is business casual. There are three ways to reach the Rotman School:

• by public transit we are a 2.5 minute walk south of the St George TTC station
• by bicycle we have bike racks at our main entrance and to the south
• by car there is underground parking available – the entrance is located just south of the Rotman School

In the 2008 Ontario budget, the Ontario Government asked Roger Martin, Dean of the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and Richard Florida, Director of the Rotman School’s Martin Prosperity Institute to “undertake a study of the changing composition of Ontario’s economy and workforce, examine historical changes and projected future trends affecting Ontario, and provide recommendations to the Province for ensuring that Ontario’s economy and people remain globally competitive and prosperous.”

The report of their findings, to be released on February 5th, is an important element of Ontario’s economic strategy. Following its release, the authors hope to engage Ontarians in an ongoing dialogue about achieving advantage for Ontario in the creative age.

Event details:
Thursday, February 5th
7:30am – 9am
Hilton Toronto
145 Richmond Street West, Toronto

The Economic Club of Toronto event costs $75 per seat, $750 per table of 10. Member rates apply. Please register online at www.ecot.ca or complete and fax the registration form to (416) 306-0898.

Research Associates Ronnie Sanders and Patrick Adler are participating in the Thunder Bay edition of TVOntario’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin‘s AgendaCamp series. Expert guests and concerned citizens will debate the issues facing Ontario’s aboriginal economy on Sunday, February 8 from 9:30am to 4:30pm at the Fort William First Nation Community Centre, 400 Anemki Drive.

Participants use tools like Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube to build an interactive wiki about Ontario’s economy. Learn more about how to attend in person or join in online via the AgendaCamp website, and view their presentation comparing Thunder Bay to its peer cities.

The inaugural event of our Program on Innovation and Creative Industries takes place Tuesday, February 10 from 7:30-10pm in the atrium of the Rotman School of Management. Entitled “Markets Making Music”, the evening consists of a lecture by Prof. Ajay Agrawal, a Q&A with Sellaband GmbH CEO Johan Vosmeijer, and a concert performance by singer-songwriter Angie Arsenault. More details and ticket purchase information are available here.

The MPI and the Centre for the Study of the United States present a free lecture by Andrew Gelman, Professor of Statistics and Political Science, Columbia University. He is the author of several books, including his latest “Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do” (Princeton University Press, August 2008). Bring your copy to the lecture and Prof. Gelman will autograph it.

Date/Time: October 21, 2pm sharp to 4pm
Place: Room 108N, Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, 1 Devonshire Place

Pre-registration online is mandatory: please register here by noon on October 21.

City as System is a mini-conference for academics from across North America to discuss creative new approaches to the empirical analysis of regional economic systems and innovation networks. It takes place in Toronto from October 9-11, 2008. All scheduled sessions will be held at the MPI offices, Suite 420 in the MaRS Centre, Heritage Building, 101 College Street. Friday will be primarily dedicated to presentations of research, while Saturday will be flexibly scheduled to allow for unstructured working sessions and informal discussions between participants. For further information, see the conference schedule or contact Kim Ryan.

Experience the Creative Economy is the first conference to be held at the Martin Prosperity Institute. It brings together twenty-two leading researchers from around the world to better understand the Creative Economy. The conference is designed to promote the exchange of ideas and methods, giving feedback to participants on their current research areas through group discussion. Researchers will explore the creative economy at a multi-dimensional level, focusing on theory, empirical methods, practical applications and an active evaluation of Toronto’s creative economy. The three days wll be engaging, educational, and fun!

Keynote Speaker: Richard Florida, Director, Martin Prosperity Institute

Topic: “The World is Spiky”

Booksale: signed first-edition copies of Who’s Your City? will be sold at the event

Authors: Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander and Haifeng Qian.