In partnership with the Government of British Columbia, tech industry association BC Tech has unveiled eight inductees for the first year of its BC Innovators Hall of Fame.
According to BC Tech, the BC Innovators Hall of Fame recognizes the leaders that have left a legacy on the province and who have helped enrich its technology and innovation ecosystem.
Here are the first eight inductees for BC Innovators Hall of Fame:
Judy Bishop
Judy Bishop is the co-founder of BC Tech, where she had a hand in creating several local startups, such as Galeforce Solutions, where she served as president and chief marketing officer. Bishop currently applies her expertise as a corporate director to a number of businesses, including the Opa Souvlaki! Franchise Group and BC Wine Authority.
Kathy Butler
Kathy Butler is the managing director and head of BC Capital Markets at CIBC, where she has worked for nearly three decades. Butler has been a partner with Social Venture Partners since 2003, where she works on socially driven venture philanthropy.
Andrew Harries
Andrew Harries co-founded Sierra Wireless in 1993, growing the company from inception through public listings on the Nasdaq and Toronto stock exchanges, to more than $200 million USD in annual revenue. Currently, he is the Tom Foord Professor of Practice in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business.
Don Mattrick
Don Mattrick co-founded video game developer Distinctive Software with Jeff Sember in 1982, out of their parents’ basements.
Electronic Arts bought Distinctive in 1991, and Mattrick went on to become president of EA Worldwide Studios. He has also worked on the Xbox Kinect wireless controller at Microsoft and served as CEO of mobile gaming giant Zynga, creator of the Farmville game series.
Firoz Rasul
After a 15-year tenure as president of Aga Khan University, a private research university based in Pakistan, Firoz Rasul announced his retirement in 2021. Prior to Aga Khan, he was CEO and chairman of Burnaby, BC-based Ballard Power Systems, which offers clean energy hydrogen fuel cell solutions.
Rasul was also appointed president of sales and marketing for mobile data products manufacturer MDI in 1981, until its takeover by Motorola in 1988.
Shannon Rogers Roy
Until her passing earlier this year, Shannon Rogers Roy was the president and general counsel of Global Relay, which offers cloud-communications solutions to regulated sectors like financial services.
A lawyer by trade, she partnered with her husband Warren Roy to build out Global Relay, scaling it to 1,300 employees and $200 million in annual revenue.
Geordie Rose
Geordie Rose has founded several deeptech companies throughout his two-decade career as a technologist.
He founded one of Canada’s leading quantum computing companies, D-Wave, in 1999 and led the company’s technical development as CTO until 2014.
Rose subsequently founded robotics and AI companies Kindred and Sanctuary AI in 2014 and 2018, respectively.
William (Bill) H. Thompson
William (Bill) Thompson owned the largest electronics parts distribution company in western Canada in the 1960s and 1970s.
In the early 70s, Thompson founded a personal holding company, Eldevco, to invest in early-stage BC tech companies.
Image courtesy Alejandro Luengo via Unsplash