By Sinziana Chira, NS GovLab Fellow
Last week, my Monday was a highlight: I participated in Innovate Atlantic, the one-day conference hosted by the Volta Incubator in Halifax on November 5th, in partnership with the Rideau Hall Foundation and Canadian Innovation Space.
In his pre-conference blog post, Jesse Rodgers, CEO of Volta, shared a vision about Innovate Atlantic. The event, hoped Jesse, would ignite a Barn-Raising moment for Atlantic Canada’s innovators’ community. It would be a catalyst for synchronicity, conducive towards motivating ‘strategic risks and setting ambitious goals’.
Indeed, Innovate Atlantic felt very much like a community coming together. Prominently represented in the room were entrepreneurs, academics and university students, as well as representatives from provincial and federal government departments. Their presence stood testimony that all these sectors are plugged into the idea that innovation is possibly the most important driver of prosperity in Atlantic Canada.
The speakers, a diverse group of trailblazing innovators and thought leaders, including the Honorable Kevin Lynch of BMO, Professor Fiona Murray of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Right Honourable David Johnston, former Governor General of Canada, made a few things clear: innovation already lives here, and has been a major part of Atlantic Canada’s history. However, our next collective steps can truly define the region’s potential for growth.
The sustainability of innovation clusters was a recurring conversation theme, both on stage and off. Speakers and audience members posed stimulating questions, such as: How can we most effectively grow innovation clusters into robust innovation ecosystems in Atlantic Canada? How can our infrastructure and social systems best supply the needed resources for Atlantic Canada’s innovation clusters to become globally competitive?
These questions spoke to the reasons I was attending Innovate Atlantic. I was there as a Fellow of NS GovLab, which is the Nova Scotia Government’s first social innovation lab, intended to respond to Nova Scotia’s shifting demographic realities through innovation-driven projects that engage social systems and infrastructure challenges.
While real solutions to the questions posed will undoubtedly be complex, a few things became apparent to me at Innovate Atlantic:
1. Innovators in Atlantic Canada share in the enthusiasm and responsibility of finding answers to these questions together.
2. Innovators in Atlantic Canada are committed to harnessing the value of diversity as a true catalyst for regional innovation.
3. Innovators in Atlantic Canada tend to see opportunity in every challenge, a winning mindset in the quest for sustainable innovation.
To return to Jesse Rodgers’s Barn Raising metaphor, in my view Innovate Atlantic provided evidence that the Barn Raising is already underway. As Scott Mabury, Vice President of University Operations at the University of Toronto and Innovate Atlantic panellist noted, there are a few dozen cranes in current operation over Halifax, a number that is a few times higher than that for Toronto, when adjusted per-capita. Things are certainly already off the ground and hold the promise of what is to come.
