Ottawa-based CANARIE is supporting more than 15 Startup Canada Community leaders to come together in Ottawa next week to meet with their MPs, Ministers and government leaders as part of Startup Canada Day on the Hill taking place on November 26th.
During their time in the Ottawa, these entrepreneurial catalysts will share the impact of entrepreneur-led, grassroots entrepreneurship in addressing some of the most salient challenges of today including small business succession, community economic revitalization and job creation.
According to Kelsey Wolff, the Leader of Startup Nanaimo, “We hope to reduce the brain drain to larger urban centers by strengthening the tools of our startup resources and increasing the job opportunities in Nanaimo.” Wolff has says that she has benefits a great deal from bringing Nanaimo into the Startup Canada network. “Startup Canada raises the collaboration efforts to a larger scale. The program makes you feel united and supported from East to West across Canada, because you’re all working towards the same goal.”
Startup Canada Day on the Hill is a collaboration of Canada’s entrepreneurship community and political and government leaders. This event is set to draw hundreds of attendees throughout the day, including some of Canada’s top entrepreneurs, investors, industry leaders, media personalities and government decision makers. This is a not to be missed event featuring headline speakers from Second Cup, Wind Mobile, and Beyond the Rack, to name a few.
Through its Digital Accelerator for Innovation and Research (DAIR) program, CANARIE supports Canada’s tech entrepreneurs and small businesses by providing free cloud-based compute and storage resources that help speed time to market by enabling rapid and scalable product design, prototyping, validation and demonstration. To date, CANARIE has helped more than 300 Canadian businesses take their ideas to the cloud and beyond, to commercial market offerings.
“It’s been wonderful to see that today’s technology entrepreneurs have the ingenuity and passion that we come to expect of innovators. But we are also seeing that they are developing strong business skills to prepare them for the operational and strategic challenges of creating high performing growth companies,” said Peter Wilenius, Vice President, Business Development at CANARIE. He adds that, “CANARIE will continue to deliver services to support the ICT sector in Canada based on feedback we get through dialogue with the entrepreneur community – both through our current users and through new connections made at such fantastic initiatives as Startup Canada on the Hill.”
For more information on CANARIE please visit them here.
(This article was written by Stephanie Alexiou)