About Us >> History
whatIf? Technologies was founded in 1989 (as Robbert Associates) by Robert Hoffman and Bert McInnis to build upon their pioneering work in socio-economic modelling and simulation at Statistics Canada. There, for a decade and a half, they had developed a sequence of economic models, starting with the comparative static input-output models at regional and national scales and culminating with the Socio-Economic Resource Framework (SERF), the first long-term dynamic simulation model of the Canadian physical economy. SERF effectively combined the activity analysis concepts of Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief and the system dynamics concepts of MIT's Jay Forrester - from which the 'design approach' to modeling emerged. SERF was used to explore issues of an industrial strategy for Canada, the demographic transition resulting from the post-war baby boom, and the implications of the OPEC oil cartel.
The new company quickly established the reputation as a leader in creating computer-based simulation models for strategic planning and scenario analysis. Several modelling projects in urban and regional planning, transportation and economic sustainability were successfully completed.
One of the founding visions of the company was to advance the state of model-building and simulation software. Early experience at Statistics Canada showed that large, complex models implemented in one-off code were problematic for a multitude of reasons: poor transparency, tedious validation, and duplicated basic I/O functionality, just to name a few. Several generations of software tools to support large-scale simulation modelling were developed, and the whatIf? suite of software had its origins in these generations.
Development of the whatIf? suite put power into the hands of both model builders and users alike. Unprecedented transparency, efficiency and accuracy became available, and whatIf? technology became an important line of business.
By the early 2000s, the substantial model library built over a decade of custom modelling, coupled with the powerful whatIf? modelling suite paved the way for a new offering - application products. These models were assembled from pre-built components, developed though repeatedly building models in the same application area and identifying common structures. Application products provide significant planning and analytical capacity without the level of investment required by custom modelling, and with faster implementation times. To date, application products have been released for Urban and Regional Planning, and Energy Analysis.
In 2005 the company was renamed whatIf? Technologies, from Robbert Associates. This change leveraged the strong brand established by the whatIf? software, and aligned the company's three major business lines: Technology, Custom Modelling and Application Products.