Last week I tried to explain the landscape of entrepreneurship in Atlantic Canada to someone from Toronto. Before I continue, I should explain what I mean by “landscape.”

The person was in Halifax because he needs to learn more about entrepreneurship in the region; he plans to come here regularly to build contacts. I told him that he can’t develop deep relationships in Atlantic Canada by only visiting Halifax. For better or worse, there are at least four communities of entrepreneurs in the region, and the links among them are tenuous at best.

One of our challenges in Atlantic Canada is the fragmentation of the economy. Everything is divided into four provinces, then into countless, regions, counties, municipalities, wards, and neighbourhoods.

Each of those units believes—wrongly, in my opinion—that the best way to fight a rear-guard action against the encroaching economic decline is to have local institutions oversee health, education, economic development, and so on. It’s an expensive solution, often badly co-ordinated. In the case of entrepreneurship, it interferes with the job at hand.

The problem is that entrepreneurial networks develop along the lines of the institutions that support them. So the tech community in New Brunswick has the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation as its hub, assisted by Propel ICT, Tech Southeast, and others. Nova Scotia has Innovacorp, Enterprise Cape Breton, NSBI, and so on. You get the picture.

There’s a massive upside to having these different groups, and it’s that entrepreneurs can get in front of decision-makers, even at an early stage in their development. That means they can get the financial and advisory help they need more readily than if they were in a bigger centre. I’m not about to understate the importance of that.

But there’s also a prevailing downside. For one thing, Atlantic Canadian entrepreneurs spend too much time working with too many groups. Someone starting a company is overwhelmed with multiple tasks, and it takes time to register with and lobby for the vast number of programs offered by an equally vast number of departments and agencies. It’s a detriment to business in Canada, nowhere more so than in Atlantic Canada.

But there’s an even greater concern caused by fragmentation, and it’s that the regional tech, biotech, and cleantech industries are each cloistered in their own neck of the woods. For example, I’m amazed by how often I’ve met someone in Saint John who is undertaking a complementary enterprise to someone in St. John’s, but they’ve never heard of each other. That’s a problem, because networking is to the entrepreneur what the church was to the medieval peasant; one sustains the other.

This also affects international marketing, because this mosaic of tech communities is too small to attract international attention. Gerry Pond, the most prominent investor in the region, has taken up this cause in several speeches. He says the tech community must do what the cruise ship industry has done: work together to bring business to the region. He also says the private sector must take the lead, because government is essentially focused provincially and locally rather than regionally.

I don’t know if it’s necessary to create new organizations to do this, but it’s time to recognize that the next stage of evolution for the various industry groups is to expand networking opportunities among the provinces. We should follow the lead of such groups as the First Angel Network and Springboard Atlantic, which have done a superb job of crossing borders.

Maybe the tech socials in Moncton and Halifax should plan more joint events. Maybe the PEI BioAlliance and BioNova need to increase their collaboration. I’m not saying that nothing along these lines is being done already; I’m saying we need more of it.

It would be great if the next time I have to describe what’s happening in the region to an outsider, I can talk about the “community” rather than the “communities.”