The Thin Edge of Innovation: Metro Vancouver’s Evolving Economy

A study of Vancouver’s local businesses and the city’s opportunities for growth.

Aligned with global trends in post-industrialization, the economy of metro Vancouver is changing, but along its own trajectory. The focus is shifting away from resource-based activities to local entrepreneurial initiatives across a remarkable range of industries, from software to craft beer, biopharmaceuticals, and mountain bikes. This evolution is being shaped by local business and the city’s location on the national and global periphery.

The Thin Edge of Innovation focuses on the performance of signature businesses in these entrepreneurial sectors to grow and foster industrial clusters and integrate with the global economy. The contributors give a mixed report card to this economic transition. Within metro Vancouver, innovation has stimulated economic diversification and promises to deliver high-income jobs. But this diversification has also been thinly spread and lacks deep local roots or dominant anchor companies.

This constructive study examines the distinctive opportunities facing metro Vancouver. Despite challenges, it reveals a region with undoubted potential for sustained, broadly beneficial local development.

Roger Hayter is professor emeritus of geography at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Technology and the Canadian Forest-Product Industries: A Policy Perspective, The Dynamics of Industrial Location: The Factory, the Farm, and the Production System, and Flexible Crossroads: The Restructuring of British Columbia’s Forest Economy. Jerry Patchell is associate professor emeritus of social science, environment and sustainability, and public policy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is a coauthor, with Roger Hayter, of Economic Geography: And Institutional Approach and author of China’s Greater Bay Area: Agglomeration, External Economies, Governance, and Urbanization. Kevin Rees is associate professor and head of the Department of Geography at Swansea University.