With the dust of the federal election now settled, the time for speculation is over. No matter which federal party rules, one truth remains constant: Alberta’s strength lies in its people and our relentless focus on results. Alberta Enterprise Group (AEG) members do not sit around waiting for permission to succeed, we roll up our sleeves and get to work.
Alberta has always thrived regardless of who is in power federally, because our entrepreneurial spirit runs deeper than politics. If we are to meet the challenges of today and the opportunities of tomorrow, we must go further than we ever have before. It is time to move beyond incremental thinking and lean into exponential thinking, a mindset that has transformed industries and nations.
True innovation comes from the exchange of ideas, collaboration and compounding breakthroughs. It is the power of networked knowledge. Consider how AI is now accelerating drug discovery by cutting development time from a decade to mere months. Or how companies like Hadrian are reimagining manufacturing, using fully automated “dark factories” that produce aerospace components with stunning speed and precision.
Alberta has a long history of exponential thinking, and we need to continue to embrace this mindset.
In the 1920s and ’30s, Karl Clark, a chemist with the Alberta Research Council, refused to accept the conventional wisdom that Alberta’s oil sands were economically worthless. Instead, he developed a hot water separation process to extract usable bitumen from the sands, laying the foundation for what would eventually become one of the largest energy industries on Earth.
While commercial-scale adoption took decades, Clark’s vision did not just tweak the margins, it opened a new frontier. That is exponential thinking: unlocking a resource that others dismissed as waste and turning it into a pillar of our economy.
We continue to see flashes of it here at home today. Alberta’s leadership in direct lithium extraction through firms like E3 Lithium and Summit Nanotech are positioning Alberta as a key player in the global EV battery supply chain. Companies like Attabotics, which reimagined the traditional warehouse into a vertical, robotics-driven system inspired by ant colonies, prove that Alberta has the talent and ambition to build entirely new categories of innovation.
Exponential thinking means asking: what if? What if we redefined innovation not as something that happens in Silicon Valley, but something that’s born from our energy sector, our farms and our manufacturing floors? What if we aimed not to grow 2 per cent next year—but to double output by reinventing the model entirely? To do that, we must create the conditions for ambition to thrive. That means:
- Reducing red tape that stifles experimentation
- Unlocking capital for scale-ready projects
- Removing interprovincial trade barriers that prevent our goods and ideas from reaching new markets
- Investing in the next generation of workforce-ready talent
Let’s not wake up with fear about what’s next in Ottawa. Let’s rise with confidence about what’s possible here in Alberta. The future does not belong to the timid. It belongs to the bold. Let’s build it together, with optimism not just as a mindset, but as a strategy.
