The Alpha Group, the organization responsible for the Alpha Alternative Trading System, launched Alpha Exchange on Monday, April 2, 2012. The Exchange is the product of close to two years of development. The company says the Exchange will provide an alternate forum for listing Canadian businesses in tech and certain financial areas, and builds on the success of Alpha’s Alternative Trading System (ATS), over which about 20 per cent of TSX-listed stocks are currently traded.
Michelle Scarborough has seen and done it all. Over the past 20 years she’s been an entrepreneur and built companies from the ground up; a prolific angel investor in Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa and Calgary; worked for investment groups and merchant banks; and developed an acceleration model used in Canada and the U.S. In 2007, she founded Canada’s Top 10 Competition (
www.topcanadiancompanies.com) in order to identify some of the best investments in Canada and raise the bar on early-stage investing.
Wildeboer Dellelce, a boutique corporate finance firm, is a sponsor of
Backbone’s Start Me Up contest. We sat down with the company’s Paul Flint to get his take on the importance of supporting the innovative and technology space in Canada.
The National Research Council Canada has helped more than 50 companies through its incubator program over the last 13 years. The program, in part, includes finding a mentor within the research community to support each startup. “We focus on technology, rather than offering business support,” said Marie Lussier, Manager of Industry Partnership Facility with National Research Council Canada.
Startup business NuEnergy has been leasing space at the St. Albert facility of novaNAIT for nearly two years. novaNAIT, in Alberta, supports and facilitates applied research and development of commercially relevant products and services for industry.
entrepreneurship@UBC is a campus-wide initiative led by the Sauder School of Business, the Faculty of Applied Science, the Faculty of Science and the University-Industry Liaison Office. I sat down with Carl Leacy, Program Director, to discuss this program and the importance of supporting innovation at the university level.
The Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University is home to one of the largest entrepreneurship departments in Canada, which includes major and minor degree programs plus two MBAs. Students are taught by experienced entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who have started dozens of companies and helped hundreds of entrepreneurs raise more than $2 billion in financing.
If Canadian entrepreneurs have a mindset challenge, it’s probably dreaming big enough. We don’t do that as often as we should, and this conservative, pragmatic approach can put off investors looking for bigger gains—even if the idea really has legs. That doesn’t seem to be the problem for Joseph Fung, serial entrepreneur and co-founder and CEO of TribeHR.
HP might be one of the farthest things from a start-up, but the company knows more than a few things about innovation. And those insights could be very useful to small businesses.
The three pain points of early-stage companies are human capital, markets and capital. The first two are served by various accelerators and incubators, but access to capital continues to be a tough nut for many start-ups to crack, especially in today’s economy.
Healthy competition is good for Canadian innovation, whether it’s with the U.S. or inter-provincial, especially when supported by education, mentorship and a sense of community.
“If you look at the technology and ICT structures in Canada and you take out RIM, you’ll notice a huge drop-off in terms of size,” said Eugene Bomba, Senior Manager, Emerging Company Services with PwC. “There are a ton of smaller tech companies just starting out, yet the revenue in that sector is still really good.” PwC wants to guide and nurture these start-ups and it is willing to put resources behind that effort. Many entrepreneurs don’t have business and finance experience—which is where PwC’s expertise comes in.
Niagara-based
FourGrouns Media is a video production company which creates video content for the Web and television. It was founded four years ago by Adrian Thiessen and his partner Kristen Nater and, like many start-ups, they realized they didn’t have the expertise or connections they would need to be successful, and so they went in search of resources.
In the past decade, technology has been the fastest-growing industry sector in B.C., but it remains predominantly populated by small companies. Ninety-six per cent of all tech companies in B.C. employ less than 50 people, said Bill Tam, president and CEO of the BC Technology Industry Association (BCTIA).
Valerie Fox is the Director of Ryerson University’s Digital Media Zone. She has more than 25 years of experience in creative industries and has worked with technology in universities and in the private sector. The Ryerson Digital Media Zone is a sponsor of Backbone’s
Start Me Up contest, and we sat down with Fox to get her take on the importance of supporting the innovative and technology space in Canada.
CANARIE is offering a DAIR to small- and medium-sized Canadian tech companies: the Digital Accelerator for Innovation and Research (DAIR) program aims to speed time to market by offering an advanced R&D environment for product design, prototyping, validation and demonstration.
Canada’s technology market is underachieving due to a lack of support by the private sector and a securities exchange structure that sets tech entrepreneurs up for failure, according to
Jos Schmitt.
Are you a follower or a leader? In our experience, one of the key challenges small and medium size innovative firms often struggle to overcome, is their inability to consistently and successfully commercialize enough profitable new products and/or services to ensure there is an adequate and predictable stream of funding to support R & D, and the ongoing development of key managerial and organizational capabilities critical to achieving the full benefits of a “first mover” advantage, and leadership position.
Once entrepreneurs have a great idea they also have a healthy accelerator community to turn to for help, but what about before that big idea hits?
Need a handyman, a personal trainer or a math tutor for your kid? What’s the easiest way to access these service providers in your community? That’s the question Rob Platek is working to answer with his online marketplace
jobdeals.com.
BCIC, the British Columbia Innovation Council, is dedicated to developing globally marketable innovative B.C.-based entrepreneurs in the global scene—with emphasis on marketable.
A year and a half ago, when Senia Rapisarda joined the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) to head up the BDC Venture Capital’s new Strategic Initiatives & Investments (SII), she made an insightful, worldly observation about Canadian entrepreneurship.
OMERS Ventures, the venture capital arm of
OMERS, was started in late 2011 with the mandate of investing in technology, media, and telecom companies and offering financing ranging from $500,000 to $30 million.
Successful innovation in the digital economy is good for Canada, but it’s also good—it turns out—for charities. Formulating Change of Kitchener, Ont., has developed a novel way to help Canadians give more easily to charities.
When Josh Sookman developed a mobile application prototype that would empower people during emergencies by connecting them to personalized safety networks, he turned to the Mobile Experience Innovation Centre (MEIC) incubator at OCAD University for support.
Crossing the delta between a pilot-scale lab and the ramp up to demonstration scale is a significant challenge in innovation.
For me, one of the best Chapters in the book... Adam uses many examples of how SJ (Steve Jobs) drilled culture and acceptable behavior through the ranks at Apple and describes his fight against the bureaucracy that tends to cripple and slow organizations as they grow. SJ was fervent in his fight to maintain a start up type environment upon his return to Apple.
Are you a CEO? Do you tweet? If so, you are among the '8 percent'. Peter Aceto is and he explains why. Peter sees a dramatic shift in the way companies are now being run, as do other experts like Don Tapscott. Social business is here and one of its big requirements is transparency. Find out what social business leaders are doing to connect with customers and employees in new and exciting ways.
In our experience with firms, two major recurrent themes often rise to the surface that are directly associated to the underlying root causes of poor innovation performance. These areas are outlined below.
Who are we and where are we headed?" - in terms of the digital media economy in Canada - was the question that started the 49 Pixels project. The survey has taken a year and seeks to answer the following questions: the size and scope of the industry, the number of digital media service providers operating within Canada (number of employees, location, revenue, etc), and the size of the workforce (habits, salaries, and skills of producers of digital media content). Read the full report...
Smart TV use is growing and in 2012 we can look forward to the release of iTV from Apple as well as other Smart TV developments. Nick Jones explains what Smart TVs are, who makes them and what opportunities they provide.
I have read (and am now re-reading)
Adam Lashinsky’s fantastic book titled
‘Inside Apple’. I highly recommend to anyone who is:
Last night was
MobileMonday Toronto's annual Meet the Analysts event at the MaRS Discovery District facility.
The
Internet Society is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. They are a global organization devoted to maintaining a free, open, accessible, and viable Internet. I've recently blogged about the Internet Society's call for people to submit ideas for a new
Internet Hall of Fame they are establishing.
Just launched free website that helps small business better measure and manage tactical marketing programs. We are looking for beta testers for our new website called MarketingReportCard.com – a marketing measurement dashboard. Designed for small to mid-size businesses, companies can login to the beta version of the MarketingReportCard.com and document and measure tactical marketing results over time.
This morning [December 15, 2011] I attended a breakfast session hosted by
IT World Canada, and it was a good update on the state of the channel, especially for serving the SMB market.
Why do people use mobile devices? Which ones do they use and is their use growing? Yes it is - tablet use, for one, is growing rapidly - and this offers opportunities explains Nick Jones.
I was invited to attend an update here in Toronto yesterday [December 6, 2011] on
Avaya's IP Office, which inluded a preview for Release 8.0, scheduled to launch on December 12. Lots of Avaya folks on hand, along with the sponsors,
Smart IP. They're one of Avaya's top 10 Canadian reseller partners, and having started out as a
Nortel shop, they know the territory pretty well.
I don't often write about tech based on what I come across via mass media, but this one caught my attention and has triggered a whole bunch of thoughts around innovation. I'll just speak to the kernal idea here, but this sure could spawn a blog of its own - hmmm....
