Dana Hachwa, Shruti Goyal, Svetlin Antonov, Maryam Hussain
St. John's is experiencing a persistent loss of university graduates and early-career professionals, who leave the city in search of broader career opportunities in larger metropolitan areas. This trend reflects a mismatch between the expectations of young talent—such as career growth, industry diversity, and long-term stability—and the opportunities available locally. This outmigration contributes to a growing “brain drain,” weakening the city’s workforce sustainability, reducing innovation, and accelerating demographic imbalance through an ageing population. Key stakeholders affected include graduates, local employers, educational institutions, and government bodies. External factors such as geographic isolation, limited industry diversification, and competition from larger cities further intensify the issue. If this trend continues, it threatens the long-term economic resilience and development of the city.
Problem Statement: St. John’s has trouble retaining university graduates, who tend to leave the city for more popular metropolitan centres. This is contributing to a “brain drain” in the city, which exacerbates an already aging population, and threatens the strength and resilience of the city’s economy.
St. John's faces a talent retention challenge, where many graduates from Memorial University of Newfoundland leave due to limited access to relevant, well-paying jobs and clear career pathways. This reflects a broader lack of economic diversity across sectors. We propose building a digital media and creative technology ecosystem that can scale into a major industry. This includes areas such as game development, digital marketing, content production, and design services. These sectors are employment-intensive and rely on human creativity, making them more resilient to automation. Compared to AI-driven industries that require large data centres and high energy use, digital media operates with lower infrastructure needs and is more environmentally sustainable. This ecosystem can generate roles across disciplines like arts, business, and engineering, while supporting startups and growing firms. By developing this sector, St. John’s can expand job opportunities, diversify its economy, and retain a larger share of its skilled graduates.
Although this group feels confident in their proposed solution, there are several limitations that seed some doubt into our final proposal. First, it’s worthwhile to mention that we have not take into consideration the role of Indigenous populations or incorporated any process for reparation in our project, which is something vital to any Canadian context. The second is time. Our team believes that a project of this magnitude must be tackled with the careful deliberation of several months. Third, we believe that a more grassroots approach to decision making would be more appropriate. A team wanting to tackle skilled labour retention must be on the ground, conducting surveys and interviews, and speaking to NGOs and community leaders. Finally, examining the risks and installing rail guards (I.e. policies) to mitigate issues like gentrification, rising housing costs, rising food prices, wage inequality, and racial discrimination would be crucial.
The province already has programs in place to incentivise activity in the interactive digital media sector. For example, there is the the Newfoundland and Labrador Interactive Digital Media (IDM) Tax Credit. It offers offers 40% of qualifying expenditures (max $40,000/employee). This includes supporting activities such as video game development, the creation of educational software, designing training simulators, and the creation of virtual or augmented reality experiences. It is among the “most generous digital media incentives” in Canada. (GrantCompass)
Currently, there are already some independent video game studios in St. John’s: Other Ocean Interactive, Celsius Game Studios, and Abhiwan Technology. There is also Clockwork Fox Studios (now Carnegie Learning), which began as a video game studio but pivoted into educational technology. Additionally, there are plenty of graduates available from local education institutions to supply this industry. For example, the College of the North Atlantic has a Video Game Art & Design program. Memorial University has a computer science program.
Compared to other technology sectors like ocean tech, software, financial tech, and defence, the digital media sector is not as robust as it could be. We debated targeting the software sector, particularly AI, but we were wary the negative environmental effects and the controversy these investments would create. Additionally, we also didn’t want to target the defence sector as it presents some moral issues.
We believe this makes Interactive Digital Media the perfect candidate for this economic enrichment.
At the outset, our solution would entail creating partnerships between these existing indie game development studios and local educational institutions. That way, there is a low initial cost. Later on, more investment can be invited and startups could be created to further support this sector.