We are only scratching the surface of high-tech industry growth across the Okanagan, says the president and CEO of the B.C. Innovation Council.

Carl Anderson said that opportunity has been created by the combination of how upgrading technology expands access to information-related services at lower costs and the Internet information highway continuing to build on the concept of accessing information from anywhere you want and anytime you want.

鈥淭ech availability has and will continue to be incredibly accessible to each of us. It鈥檚 what we call exponential scaling, where the cost to execute a particular function drops so significantly that you end up with massive additional capability opportunities,鈥� Anderson said.

He points to cell phones today as an example of how technology enhancements have become more accessible, and expanded the multiple platform uses that device can serve.

鈥淭hink about the example of film, taking pictures, and how the machinations of that process have changed to an incredible extent,鈥� Anderson said.

鈥淣ow you can do 10 different things with a photo that you couldn鈥檛 do before, and that is all because the cost behind that has gone down with technology envelopment and advancement.鈥�

Anderson was in 琉璃神社 last Friday to stage the Regional Innovation Opportunities Tour, offering a platform for industry, government and regional stakeholders to discuss their technology innovation challenges with tech researchers, companies and entrepreneurs.

Andrew Greer, a program strategist for Accelerate Okanagan, said high-tech is a $1.3 billion industry across the Okanagan, with high expectations forecast for that economic impact to widen.

鈥淚t is trending in the right direction. There are 633 tech companies in the region employing 7,600 people, and we鈥檝e seen an 1,100 job growth over the last two years,鈥� Greer told the conference.

鈥淭his growth is happening in communities like Okanagan Falls and Enderby. It鈥檚 just not about Vancouver or 琉璃神社.鈥�

Green noted that Accelerate Okanagan is a high-tech incubator, one of 14 established across the province, that matches experienced entrepreneurs with tech entrepreneurs trying to grow their companies.

鈥淲hat we are starting to see now is a growing community of people all swimming in the same direction across our region,鈥� Greer said.

The province indicates that 95 per cent of B.C. tech firms are small businesses with most employing fewer than four employees.

The 琉璃神社 conference saw participants such as the B.C. Ministry of Transportation, BC Safety Authority, IBM, BC Lottery Corporation, FortisBC and Microsoft share their demands for service technology improvements with local potential technology software developers.

Anderson said in the technology field, typically an entrepreneur will develop a software product, and then face the marketing challenge to to sell the technology.

鈥淏ut the other side of it is technology demand, where you illustrate where a technology development is needed. Produce a solution of a potential client and you have an automatic market,鈥� Anderson said.

鈥淭hat鈥檚 what is so exciting today. You need both the push and (demand), but the pull has the tremendous capacity for a higher startup survival rate because you are trying to fill a specific need.鈥�

Anderson said the advancement of the cloud technology is also advancing the scale of processing storage.

鈥淲hat has happened is we started out with a computer, then we bought a spare hard drive, then we got a server, all in one room. Then we advance to a larger storage facility full of servers with greater storage capacity.

鈥淏ut with the cloud, now we are talking about millions of boxes of servers up there somewhere. We don鈥檛 even know or have to know how they work.

鈥淣ow we can solve computing problems it would have taken you three years to work out on our laptop in 10 seconds by hitting a button to access the information you need in the cloud.

鈥淪uddenly you are able to solve problems that seemed impossible and doing things you thought would be impossible, and you are doing it for pennies in cost.鈥�

Anderson says bullish outlooks for the growth of the Okanagan high tech industry are grounded in genuine optimism.

鈥淲hat is unique here and is really neat is you have seen successful companies develop here and cash out, and the founders stay here,鈥� Anderson said, referring specifically to the success of Club Penguin which was sold to Disney.

鈥淐ompanies like that started as an idea years ago, and the people behind them are people you know, you might of had a beer with at some point, and they still live in the community today.

鈥淵ou see how they were able to cash out and make millions of dollars, and you start to think maybe I can do that too.

鈥淚 think that has more impact that if a high-tech multimillionaire comes to town and talks about how he made his money, because of that lack of a personal connection.鈥�