Nortel chief technology officer John Roese on Thursday said Ottawa scored a B- on its quality as a research and development centre, and hinted that local workers might be "repositioned" to fit the company's new skills-based – rather than project-based – approach.

At the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation's Technology Executive Breakfast Thursday morning, Mr. Roese said Ottawa was doing well in terms of the quality of life of its people and the innovation occuring in the city, but that it fared poorly in other areas.

"I'll be very honest – Ottawa is doing OK, but not great," he said, adding that more must be done to build up business in the city.

Mr. Roese said Ottawa scored a B+ on quality of life and that it was improving, especially with the building of the new Congress Centre and the upgrades to the airport. Nortel gave the city a B on innovation, with Mr. Roese noting that while there are many startups in the area and an abundance of talent, there is no sense of urgency when it comes to economic development and adopting new technology.

"We're not operating as fast as we should," he said.

Ottawa scored poorly on the operations front, getting a B-, because the local ecosystem of companies was weakening, and the problem was getting worse.

"We're going back to the same (technology partners and suppliers) here because there's less of them," Mr. Roese said.

The city also scored a B- when it came to hiring, which Mr. Roese said was because Ottawa hasn't promoting information and communications technology (ICT) as a priority ever since the tech bubble burst. As well, he attributed the score to a local tendency to regard IT and telecom as two separate fields, where Nortel saw the two converging, and as a result there few players are working together to create new and connected technology.

However, Mr. Roese reserved his harshest judgments for the selling and investment opportunities in Ottawa, giving a score of C and D, respectively.

"There is good business here but it is ad hoc," he said, adding that Nortel has a good relationship with the government but that the company believes the consideration for local companies are not reflected in requests for proposals or procurement activities.

The lowest score was given to Ottawa's investment climate, and Mr. Roese said that much of the nervousness in the region could be attributed to the conservative attitudes of the local industry, which is often reluctant to invest in risky new technology.

As well, he noted that recent tax measures were great for attracting new businesses to set up in Canada, but not for cultivating existing companies. And with the cost advantage disappearing for Canada due to the high-flying loonie, Mr. Roese raised the question of whether companies such as Nortel are getting enough value for their spending here.

Mr. Roese was reluctant to elaborate on what these low scores meant specifically for Nortel's Ottawa operations, although he hinted there would soon be announcements about the retraining or possible relocation of local jobs.

While he stressed that Ottawa remained at the centre of the telecom giant's R&D operations, and that many of the job cuts were completed, he said some of Ottawa's 5,000 or so employees could be "retrained, reskilled or moved" to fit Nortel's new "skills-based" strategy, which would see its various facilities around the world centred around specific skills areas such as optical or wireless, rather than on a location or single project.

Mr. Roese also declined to comment specifically on rumours of Nortel's WiMAX operations in Ottawa being shut down, saying instead that there had been some "shifting of work" between WiMAX and the company's new "long-term evolution" broadband technology.