Imagine you have an idea for a zillion-dollar business, but you need partners, skilled employees, industry contacts — and patient capital to build it.
In a perfect world, you could source all that with a few local calls. In this world, it happens in just a few places: Silicon Valley, New York City, London, and maybe Beijing and Tel Aviv. When the mix of entrepreneurial activity, knowledge, mentoring and funding reaches critical mass, help finds you.
Can Canadians build their own entrepreneurial clusters? That question is being explored this week in Waterloo, Ont., site of a three-day conference focusing on creating more innovation ecosystems. Waterloo Region, an hour’s drive west of Toronto, comes closest to the ideal in Canada. Sparked by the University of Waterloo’s founding principles of industry placements and giving researchers ownership of their discoveries, the region has become home to 1,000 tech companies, as well as leading-edge science, think-tanks, and renovated co-working spaces where technology veterans and Google employees rub shoulders with ambitious startups and starry-eyed students.
Read more from Financial Post