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With the economy on everyone's mind these days, talking about the positive impact of new technology may seem out of place. But there's no time like a crisis to make investment choices that will provide jobs and wealth creation into the future.

Even as the economy struggles, a revolution in digital technology is continuing at an incredible pace. In the consumer world, this digital revolution has delivered 100 million users to Facebook and YouTube. There are now more than 100 million users of new handheld devices. Websites and handhelds are moving from newspaper-style publishing to microtelevision broadcast stations and receivers. In the Waterloo, Ont., region alone, there are more than 2,000 jobs available in the high-tech sector as layoffs across the country make front-page news. This digital revolution will drive new productivity enhancements and lead to global competitiveness. But will Canada as a whole keep pace in this digital race?

It has been estimated that less than 1 per cent of Canada's information is available on the Internet. As Canadians embrace these new technologies to help them with their tasks in education, research and commerce, they find themselves being connected to websites outside Canada. Our researchers, educators and business people are forced to take information from other places in the United States or Europe and adapt it to Canada's situation.

Meanwhile, extensive research reports, and the books and articles that both reflect and illuminate the experience of generations of Canadians, lie dormant on shelves. The knowledge of Canada they contain needs to be unlocked and easily available to inform the present and future. We will gradually lose our Canadian identity if we rely too much on information from outside the country to educate our children and provide solutions for Canadians. This has already happened to a whole generation of young Canadians over the past decade.

Today's teenagers – tomorrow's work force – are immersed in the digital world, constantly connected to friends via text messages and social websites. They will lead a cultural shift in the way people collaborate and share knowledge in the workplace, with a premium placed on openness and the free flow of information.

Canada's businesses need to create environments that are friendly to the new high-collaborative approach to work. That means opening the door to these new technologies and finding productive ways to incorporate them into business processes. Corporations and governments will find the same enormous productivity gains that consumers experienced with the arrival of Facebook, YouTube and MySpace. Unlike traditional two-way information-sharing tools such as e-mail, social computing and community applications make collaboration easier, faster and more productive. These new tools can establish deeper, more dynamic connections between employees, and with customers, partners and vendors.

Driving the Revolution

As the revolution in national content grows, who will lead the way? The question is an important one for Canada. This country can take the lead as digital media and mobile computing converge into exciting new consumer and business applications. There are potentially major opportunities in health care, energy, finance, education and manufacturing. The digital media sector globally is one of the fastest-growing industries in the knowledge economy, with a double-digit growth rate up to $2.2-trillion (U.S.) in the next five years, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The Obama administration has made IT infrastructure and digital content a top and multibillion-dollar priority. The European Union has just launched a massive expansion in European digital content as part of its digital commercialization strategy. With only 1 per cent of Canada's content on the Web, we are falling behind the rest of the world as other countries pull ahead in the race to put their information online. Canada must keep pace in the fast-moving digital revolution.

Canadian research, innovation and products are known around the world: in mobile access, in digital preservation and in enterprise content-management solutions.

Library and Archives Canada, with strong support from the private and university sectors, has a plan to digitize Canadian content and is ready with the digital equivalent of a shovel-ready knowledge infrastructure project. It is time to implement. To succeed, we have to move quickly to take advantage of our strengths and opportunities.

Canadians are good at collaborating. The University of Waterloo, Open Text, the City of Stratford and the province of Ontario created a $50-million Stratford campus of the University of Waterloo that will be dedicated to education and research in digital-media technologies.

The federal government recently contributed $10.7-million to the Corridor for Advancing Canadian Digital Media (CACDM). The total initial investment of $100-million to establish CACDM is drawn from dozens of private and public organizations.

These complementary initiatives are designed to create momentum in Canada's digital economy. Drawing on the creative talents of Stratford and combining the region's art, music and theatre programs with abundant technical and business expertise allows researchers and students to mix technology, the arts and business at a critical time in their career development. These highly skilled graduates will be well equipped to lead a new wave in Canadian innovation and tech startups on the global stage.

These hard numbers show the digital revolution is more than hype for Canada. In fact, numbers such as these can help us take our minds off dire economic predictions and focus them squarely on the future, where they belong. Let's skate to where the puck is going and not to where it has been.

Tom Jenkins is executive chairman and chief strategy officer of Waterloo's Open Text Corp. He is also chairman of the Centre of Excellence Corridor for Advancing Canadian Digital Media, and a member of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Competition Policy Review Panel and the Ontario Commercialization Network Review Committee.