Kensington Market - Little Italy - Little Portugal : Innovation + Job News

For the third year, technology publication Techvibes is giving out awards to acknowledge the country's top new ventures and enterprises. The finalists for the 2013 Canadian Startup Awards were recently announced, and now it's up to you: the winners will be selected by the public, via an online vote. You can cast your ballot until midnight on January 19; the winners will be announced on January 20.

As usual, Toronto is well-represented among the finalists. Among the local ventures vying for awards are:

• InteraXon: a technology company that creates products based on tools that read a person's brainwaves.
• Music-messaging platform Rithm
• Business-to-business marketing company Influitive, which closed a major round of funding this time last year

All of those were nominated for the most prominent award: overall startup of the year. Toronto's well-represented in other categories. Two local startups are also nominated for accelerator graduate of the year. Bionym, which came through Creative Destruction Lab and The Next 36, provides unique user identification tools based on a person's signature heartbeat. And ShopLocket, which graduated from Extreme Startups, provides easy-to-use tools to help retailers set up online stores.

Techvibes received over 2,500 nominations; editors whittled down to the list of finalists with public input as well. Launched in conjunction with KPMG, the Canadian Startup Awards are given out in six categories. Last year nearly 18,000 votes were cast. Wattpad won for best overall startup in 2011, and Indochino in 2012.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan

This summer, MaRS Discovery District announced a new program: an accelerator for socially-oriented businesses, called Impact 8. It's a bootcamp of sorts: eight participants were chosen for an eight-week crash course in everything from marketing to investor relations. That first cohort, chosen from more than 150 applicants, recently completed the program.

They celebrated in style, opening the TSX on December 5, and spending the day explaining their enterprises and pitching venture capitalists.

"One of the biggest roadblocks to getting my venture off the ground," says Gavin Armstrong, president of The Lucky Iron Fish Project, "was trying to really narrow down the business plan—hone in on the value proposition, who your customers are, and how you're going to deliver." As an Impact 8 participant, Armstrong got one-on-one time with experts who were able to walk him through the practical elements of pulling his project together more adeptly.

"The most critical thing is mentorship," Armstrong says about why he wanted to join Impact 8. He'd been working on Lucky Iron Fish on his own for a year prior to participating, but as a newbie entrepreneur the program "helped lay some of the first-time learning tools: financial fitness, marketing communications, intellectual property, trademarking…"

The Lucky Iron Fish, if you're wondering, is actually an iron fish—one that people can toss into a pot of whatever they are cooking, which will then absorb some of the iron, and help alleviate anemia. Armstrong is right now focused on Cambodia, a nation with significant rates of iron deficiency.

The entrepreneurs who joined Impact 8 all knew going in that they wanted to make a difference through their work—their projects must have social or environmental benefits in order to be eligible. It's the business side of thing that wasn't always as clear. "I didn't know how to make a sustainable business plan," Armstrong says frankly. "I was hemorrhaging money."

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Gavin Armstrong, CEO of The Lucky Iron Fish Project and Impact 8 participant

Immigration isn't just a matter of navigating clearly defined legal and employment constraints: getting your paperwork in order, re-credentialling, and so on. There is also a host of soft skills—cultural conventions and communication best practices, social insight and networking capacity—that anyone needs to successfully make a transition to a new country.

Helping skilled immigrants do just that: the mentors of the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC), who assisted 1,000 immigrants this past year via a program called The Mentoring Partnership. Mentors offer sector-specific advice (mentees and mentors are matched by occupation), but also help with the ephemeral, essential task of getting settled in a new work environment.

Those mentors and their successes were celebrated recently, at an annual reception.

Indra Maharjan was a mentee with the program in 2010; he returned in 2013 to act as a mentor to two new skilled immigrants; he was one of the program participants honoured at TRIEC's reception. Like many new immigrants Maharjan had done a lot of research and planning when it came to logistical issues, but it was the Mentoring Partnership, he says, that "helped me to get lots of other information which is not publicly available: how to deal with people, how to make sure your boss is happy," and other similar matters.

The Partnership helped him learn about Canadian work culture and communication styles, which allowed him to find and flourish in new work more quickly. "The crux of success lies in how you communicate with people," Maharjan says, and there's is no better guide to that than another person who can answer real-life questions about it, and help you work through situations as they arise. Years later he and his mentor are still in touch.

This year Maharjan's two mentees each found jobs within two months, he says with pride. "Most people are hardworking, but if they can't express themselves that creates a bottleneck."

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Indra Maharjan, The Mentoring Partnership
Photo: Camilla Pucholt

Ontario is a growing force in medical technology research, and now the provincial government wants to bolster the sector further. Last month Queen's Park launched the new Ontario Health Innovation Council to help support the commercialization of medical innovations and new technologies. The council's task: identify growth opportunities and strategies for market-oriented development.

The council is specifically focused on small- and medium-sized businesses, and has a mandate to create the conditions for job growth in this sector.

The provincial government estimates that Ontario's health technology sector generates $9.1 billion a year. In job terms, the medical devices sector employs more than 17,000—49 per cent of the total nationwide.

The 15 council members represent academic institutions, hospitals, private companies, and non-profits. (Toronto-based members include the heads of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, MaRS Innovation, UofT's Institute for Health Policy, and the University Health Network.)

Deb Matthews, Minister of Health and Long-Term Care, said via a written statement that, "Ontario’s capacity to provide the best care and get value for our precious health dollars depends on harnessing our strengths in health research and innovation. The Ontario Health Innovation Council will help us improve the quality of care while creating valuable new jobs."

Catherine Zahn, president of CAMH, echoed those sentiments in her own comments, writing that "OHIC is an opportunity to ‘think big’ and broadly about health innovation in Ontario and make it real for patients, people and communities.”

The council's members will be looking at a range of issues beyond commercialization, too. They'll be examining ways to lower health care costs in the province, and try to focus on new ways to improve patient care.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care
Photo: Courtesy of the University Health Network.

Here's something we could all use less of: gridlock. A political lightening rod and increasing limit on daily routines in Toronto, traffic congestion eats up our time, not to mention reserves of patience and good humour. Now one UofT student thinks she's found a way to help tame congestion, by getting the lights at individual intersections to communicate directly with one another.

Samah El-Tantawy was inspired by the awful state of the roads both here in Toronto and in Cairo, where she grew up. Her traffic-management system formed the core of her graduate work (El-Tantawy earned her PhD in civil engineering in 2012), and is based on innovations in artificial intelligence research.

Right now, El-Tantawy explains, there are three types of traffic-management systems operating in Toronto:

• Set times for light changes, based on prior calculations using historical records; these are optimized, but don't adapt to the circumstances of any given moment.
• Actuated controls: detectors under the pavement which send calls to traffic lights, so those lights can change based on immediate conditions. The shortcoming with these is that they are operating "as if blind," El-Tantaway says. Since they only have inputs from vehicles in one direction, they don't work based on the state of the intersection or road network as a whole.
• Adaptive controls that are optimized in real time, based on traffic approaching an intersection; this system exists at about 300 intersections in Toronto. The main limitation with this system is that it works via a centralized command system, and thus requires a substantial communications network. (Any failure in that centralized system has, correspondingly, a huge impact on the whole network.)

The system El-Tantawy has developed is based on individualized intersection control, and comes with lower capital costs and risks of interruption compared to the adaptive control system. As she explains it, "each intersection sends and receives information from its neighbours, and each of the neighbours do this in a cascading fashion." Essentially, the lights at each intersection communicate with the ones at the connecting intersections, and this allows the lights at each intersection to change based on what those neighbouring lights are doing.

Unlike scheduled cascading traffic lights (where you hit a series of greens in a row if traffic conditions allow you to pace yourself just right), this system includes real-time responses to changing traffic conditions. "Each one decides for itself," El-Tantawy says, "but it considers what decisions what might be taken by the neighbours by having a model for each neighbour, and that model is built based on receiving information every second. They are actually deciding simultaneously."

According to El-Tantawy's simulation models, her traffic management system—called Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning for Integrated Network of Adaptive Traffic Signal Controllers (or MARLIN-ATSC)—can reduce delays by up to 40 per cent, and yield a 15-25 per cent savings in travel time. It can also have environmental knock-off effects—up to a 30 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions, since vehicles are spending less time on the road and travelling more efficiently when they do.

City of Toronto staff are aware of El-Tantawy's work, and she's hoping it will eventually be implemented in some intersections here. She needs to conduct field tests first, however, and is currently looking for quieter areas suitable for pilot projects next summer.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Samah El-Tantawy

A trip to Ghana in 2009 by a few self-funded Scadding Court-area teens is paying off, and in the process offering an excellent example of how rich countries can learn from poor ones.

"What we saw there were all kinds of rusted out containers where people were selling chicken, cutting hair," says Scadding Court Community Centre head Kevin Lee. "We came back to Toronto, there's so much under-utilized public space, like sidewalks that are three times the size they need to be, and on Dundas Street, economically depressed, with no eyes on the street…."

So now, there are 19 containers on Dundas just west of Bathurst, and a charette at the Scadding Court Community Centre on Tuesday brought together architects, designers, city planners, public health workers and community members to show and tell how that might be expanded into the city's first container mall.

The first container went up three years ago, very shortly after the group, of which Lee was a part, got back from Ghana. At first, it was just food, but it soon morphed into retail, including Stin Can, a bike repair shop run by two 19-year-olds, graduates of the Biz Start program who, according to Lee, were able to start up with just $2,000. (You may want to think about stopping by their container instead of your usual local.)

"What we're trying to do," Lee says, "is establish a template for the city of Toronto in terms of economic development at the grassroots level. Economic development doesn’t just mean trying to attract Google to move their head office to Toronto."

The city just found $80,000 to buy two or three new containers, according to Councillor Adam Vaughan, in whose ward the containers sit. Now they’re just waiting for a council vote on approvals, which could come as early as this week.

"You put 10 bureaucrats around a table, all it takes is one to say no to scrap things," Vaughan says from the floor of the charette. He says the original idea came from a private company who wanted to set up some containers on Queen West. Heritage Toronto nixed it, according to Vaughan, saying the only spot they could use was the parking lot at Queen and Phoebe, so the company dropped the idea.

The charette, and the community centre's central involvement, is a way, Vaughan hopes, to circumvent the usual impediments to Toronto ever having nice things. "What we're looking for here is a way to say yes."

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Kevin Lee, Adam Vaughan

When the provincial government released its budget this past spring, one key focus was on employment—and specifically youth employment. At that time Premier Kathleen Wynne announced her intention to roll out several new programs to help Ontario youth find work. Last month, the complete details about the largest of those news programs were released.

The Ontario Youth Employment Fund is a system of incentives to encourage employers to hire young people. The province plans to spend $195 million on the fund over the next two years, and up to $7,800 on each eligible participant. That money is split: up to $6,800 could go to a participant's employer to cover training and defray wages, and up to another $1,000 to the participant directly, to help cover employment costs such as equipment purchases or transportation.

To be eligible, a worker must be between the ages of 15 and 29, unemployed, and not registered as a full-time student. The province has said it will "make special effort to help youth facing barriers to work, including youth on social assistance, aboriginal youth, and youth in communities with high unemployment." Employers, for their part, must provide four to six month job placements which don't take the place of current or recently laid-off employees. Employers can apply to use the fund for multiple employees, and companies in all sectors are eligible.

It's also important to note that the fund supports "non-occupation specific" training: that is, the goal is to help participants develop general workplace competencies—basic computer literacy, communications skills, and so on—rather than provide training for particular industries. The province's employment services department will assist prospective participants in trying to find employment, but workers who find their own jobs can then apply to the fund as well.

Launched at the end of September, the Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities reports that in its first month more than 1,200 young people received assistance from the fund; applications are accepted on an ongoing basis.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities

In order to help combat the increasing wage gap in Ontario, the Wellesley Institute is joining in calls for a $4 increase in the minimum wage.

We've heard it for years, both anecdotally and through a growing body of research: the middle class is shrinking and the gap between rich and poor widening.

A new study just released by the Wellesley Institute explores one particular element of this development: the status of minimum wage workers in Ontario.

The study is animated by two key ideas, says its author, Sheila Block. "One is that the minimum wage is just for kids…however, 40 per cent [of minimum wage workers are over the age of 25."

The second, she says, is that "minimum wage work isn't distributed equally." There are some demographic groups with a much higher proportion of minimum wage work than others—specifically women, young workers, racialized workers, and recent immigrants (defined as those here less than 10 years). Crucially, this state of affairs is worsening: the proportion of Ontario employees earning the minimum wage has more than doubled in the eight year span between 2003 and 2011, and the proportion of minimum wage workers is increasing more rapidly among racialized employees than in the population at large. In short, more of us are working for less money, and the distribution of minimum wage work is increasingly unequal.

Some of Block's findings:

• In 2003, 4.3 per cent of Ontario's workforce earned the minimum wage; in 2011 it was 9 per cent.
• Among racialized workers the rate went from 4.5 per cent (2003-2005) to 12.5 per cent (2009-2011).
• A greater proportion of women are minimum wage workers: in 2003 5.1 per cent (vs 3.5 per cent for men), and in 2011 10.5 per cent (vs 7.6 per cent for men). The rate of increase in minimum wage work has been roughly equal between genders.
• The demographic group with the highest proportion of minimum wage workers are recent immigrants who are women: 26.5 per cent of this group are working for minimum wage.

Increasing minimum wage would, Block says, "have a disproportionately positive impact on those groups [that currently have the greatest proportion of minimum wage workers]" in addition to raising the floor for all workers in the province.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Sheila Block, director of economic analysis, Wellesley Institute

Nuit Blanche, the international sunset-to-sunrise arts festival that first came to Toronto a few years ago, celebrates art and the ways it can interact with a city's streets, buildings, and public spaces. At its best moments, it transforms the way we experience the world around us. This year, one installation in particular aimed to do something a bit different: change the way we experience the world within.

That exhibit was called My Virtual Dream, and its primary creators weren't traditional artists but rather scientists from Baycrest Health Science and the University of Toronto's faculty of medicine. Their aim: gather data for an ongoing research project, while simultaneously giving participants the chance to engage in a dialogue with their own brains, by monitoring and displaying own brain wave activity, and then helping them play around with the visualizations that resulted.

If you walked by Queen's Park Crescent and College during Nuit Blanche on October 5, you might have seen a large geodesic dome that had been put up on the street, emitting a changing array of pastel lights. Inside: a semicircle of 20 participants, each with a wireless brain-computer interface on their heads. That interface allowed participants to watch their own brain wave activity on monitors in front of them, and see how it changed over time.

Participants were asked to alternately relax or concentrate, and as they did they could see how that affected the visualizations on the screen. It also affected what was happening in the entire dome: an animated projection light up the interior of the dome, and changed based on whether the group of participants tended to relax more or concentrate more. At the same time, a band played improvised music based on how those visuals changed.

The entire thing was beautiful, but it also served a purpose: the team of researchers gathered 550 data sets that night to help them refine the computer software that drove this whole process, called The Virtual Brain. Still in development, the Virtual Brain is a system for modelling the human brain. It can be used to simulate either an individual person's brain, if a researcher has readings from a specific subject, or create a generalized model based on a population.

Dr. Randy McIntosh is VP of research at Baycrest Health Sciences and the project lead for the Virtual Brain. He explains one way the simulator will be able to help in clinical settings, by providing individualized health care: "If you have someone who, for instance, has a stroke and you're considering various therapies, you can test the therapies in the virtual brain first to see which is likely to be most effective."

The data his team gathered at Nuit Blanche was especially significant, McIntosh says, in part because it was collected in such an unusual setting: "The idea is to make [the Virtual Brain] adaptable to any environment. it was really trying to push the technology in directions it can't currently go…If it works in that environment, it can work anywhere."

But it wasn't all about the data, McIntosh added. "This intersection of art and science is really cool because it really does capture the heart of what it is to be a scientist and what it is to be an artist," he went on. "The artists really needed to understand the science and the scientists really needed to understand the art" in order to make the project work. It was a deep collaboration that those who passed through the dome this past weekend certainly appreciated.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Dr. Randy McIntosh, VP of research, Baycrest Health Sciences

With the emergence of social enterprise, and the increasing visibility of many social, and especially environmental, issues, many more investors are becoming interested in using private capital to not only generate revenue, but also tackle some of our greatest problems. Helping to match investors with the enterprises that might achieve these goals: Social Venture Connection (SVX), an online platform that's just been launched by MaRS with the help of the Province and several private partners.

Billed by the Ontario government as the first such system in North America, SVX is a registered dealer with the Ontario Securities Commission. At launch, 12 ventures (including both non-profit and for-profit enterprises) were registered, ranging from an organic farm supply company to ZooShare, which is piloting a biogas plant at the Toronto Zoo. Their goal is to attract what are dubbed "impact investors," ones who have "a focus on achieving positive social and/or environmental outcomes and modest to market-rate financial returns," according to SVX's website. 

It's the first step towards a larger goal of creating a full-fledged regulated market, one that functions much like any mainstream exchange but with an explicit focus on social impacts.

Because SVX vets the enterprises that apply to be listed, and also provides some support services to the ones that make the cut, the idea—or at least the hope—is that those enterprises that do get selected will have an easier time attracting investors. SVX is also actively working to identity potential investors, ones who are known to have an interest in the social implications of the ventures they support.

To be eligible for consideration, ventures must have been incorporated in Ontario for at least two years, and have revenues between $50,000 and $25 million a year.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Ministry of Economic Development, Trade and Employment

In a city with an ever-increasing number of incubators, accelerators, and other support programs, it can be surprising to realize how many unmet needs our aspiring entrepreneurs actually have. It's still a developing community though, and there are many gaps to be filled in. Addressing one very specific gap is SheEO (pronounced SHE-E-O), a program for women entrepreneurs in the social sector, which has just graduated its first cohort of program participants.

"I've been a mentor to young entrepreneurs for almost 20 years, and one of the things that I'd noticed the women mentees were asking very different questions…around boldness, and confidence, and buildings networks," explains the program's co-founder, Vicki Saunders.

Anyone can pick up the hard skills of running a business, she went on: you can learn basic bookkeeping and how to build a pitch deck online quite easily. It's the soft skills—communication and management and wooing investors—that are trickier to develop, and "which we're now realizing are the most important." In our current business environment, Saunders says, women in particular can face challenges because their sense of what leadership looks like can differ from the prevailing models.

One thing in particular that Saunders points to is the need for any entrepreneur to be self-aware, to understand how she is most naturally comfortable acting as a leader. This isn't just a nice form of self-development, she maintains, but essential to the business itself: "You can't be a leader and not be yourself. You can't fake it and have people follow you. To really be a leader you need to understand who you are and what motivates you." That's why the opening days of SheEO's month-long program are devoted helping participants flesh out an individualized concept of leadership.

After that, the question is: leadership for what? Like a growing number of entrepreneurs, Saunders isn't interested in launching businesses just to capitalize on money-making opportunities. That's why SheEO is aimed not just at women, but at women who want to create ventures with social or environmental benefits.

Plans are already underway for future cohorts, and Saunders says that the program will continue "…as long as there are people out there who think that they need this, but the goal is that we never need to run any kind of program."

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Vicki Saunders, co-founder, SheEO

"In a market economy, if you solve a big problem you get a big reward," says Tom Rand, managing partner of the MaRS Cleantech Fund.

Generating substantial amounts of environmentally sustainable energy is certainly a big problem, and the Cleantech Fund's goal is to try and find the emerging companies who will help solve it. The $30 million private venture capital fund, located at MaRS, has just landed a new $500,000 investment courtesy of RBC Generator, the bank's investment arm that looks specifically for opportunities in companies that address social and environmental issues. It's the first investment deal RBC has announced as part of that initiative.

Green energy is obviously a huge sector; the MaRS Cleantech Fund focuses primarily on "early stage, disruptive, low carbon energy infrastructure," Rand explains. (More concretely, this means innovations like smart grids that better distribute energy.) The Fund has already invested in eight companies, and is aiming for 10 to 12 in total.

Though the fund is entirely privately financed, Rand also emphasizes the importance of being located at MaRS, which he calls "the most serious clean-tech innovation machine in Canada by far."

MaRS assists the fund with deal flow—the most promising new companies can be found there, so for investors it provides fertile ground for sniffing out the best opportunities—and their ongoing support with essential processes like preparation for the market make it, Rand adds, "the most high powered, high octane help you can get."

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Tom Rand, Managing Partner, MaRS Cleantech Fund

Toronto has theatre festivals, art festivals, music festivals, food festivals, comedy festivals, vegetarian food festivals--festivals for just about every cultural interest, it seems. But we don't have a science festival, or at least we didn't until now. That will change next month, when the University of Toronto launches what it hopes will become an annual event: the Toronto Science Festival.

Just like all the other festivals we're familiar with, the goal in large part is to demystify, to attract curious members of the public who aren't experts or deeply involved in a certain community, but want to learn more.

"The idea," says Michael Reid, public outreach coordinator for UofT's Dunlap Institute, "was to try and engage people in science in a new way. We run a lot of events that attract a sort of standard audiences--public lectures, tours of our observatory--those tend to attract a crowd of people who are already quite scientifically literate."

The intention with the Toronto Science Festival is to help the public engage with science in some nontraditional ways, to offer scientific programming in new formats, and to use those unexpected formats to help people understand some of the latest innovations and research developments coming out of UofT and other key institutions. (Reid describes it as being something like Luminato, but for all kinds of scientific engagement.)

"Very generally, I don't see a lot of science on the broader cultural landscape," Reid goes on. "There isn't to my knowledge any kind of major science knowledge event that's directed at everybody." Which is why, perhaps, TSF's first year will include such unconventional events as a jazz performance by a climate scientist whose lyrics discuss physics, and a biologically-inspired dance performance by a classical Indian company.

The festival is co-sponsored by the Dunlap Institute and by UofT Science Engagement, a new office created in the past year by the university to try to foster public engagement with science and innovation.

The 2013 Toronto Science Festival will run from September 27–29 at locations across the St. George campus.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Michael Reid, Public Outreach Co-ordinator, Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics

The most interesting of the opportunities we've seen this week:

The Ontario Brain Institute, a major hub for research and medical commercialization, has two key positions open. They are looking for a knowledge translation lead and a communications lead; both for their outreach program.

Also looking for communications help is TechSoup Canada, which helps organizations with a social mission--non-profits, charities, social enterprises, and the like--make better use of technology. It's an entry level position, and those with compentence in French are particularly encouraged to apply.

In the environmental sector, the University of Toronto's sustainability office, which is charged with improving that institution's sustainability, is hiring a campaign coordinator to support and supervise a team of 10 students. It's a five month contract, but there may be opportunities to extend.

In senior hires, the Royal Ontario Museum is looking for a new managing director of ROM Contemporary Culture (formerly known as the Institute for Contemporary Culture) to take charge of positioning the centre as it evolves.

And in city-building organizations, non-profit 8-80 Cities, which works to make streets, transportation, and public space vibrant and available to all a city's residents, has two positions open: a director to lead some specific projects, and a more junior project coordinator, to support the organization's work.

Do you know of an innovative job opportunity? Let us know!

Entrepreneurship can come at any age--and often it can come very early in a person's working life. Hoping to give a leg up to some of the country's youngest and most promising entrepreneurs is The Next 36, a nine-month program that provides intensive mentorship and support to 36 undergraduates and recent graduates. They've just opened up applications for their 2014 cohort.

Program participants work in teams of three, each of which will develop a business aimed at the mobile technology market.

That doesn't mean that only developers and the technologically-oriented should apply though: participants come from all disciplines. The key quality applicants should demonstrate is leadership, explains marketing and events director Jon French.

It's not the sector that matters so much as the characteristic, someone with the ability to "look at an opportunity or challenge and turn it into a positive," he says. To that end, "a track record of excelling at at least one thing" is the single most important factor Next 36 looks for when selecting its finalists, which have included top athletes and musicians as well as coders and engineers. (In previous years participants have been split into roughly one-third technology majors, one-third business and commerce majors, and one-third students with a background in the humanities.)

While program participants spend their time with Next 36 developing a new business, immediate impact matters less than establishing the skills for long-term success, French says. Their main goal is that in 10 or 15 years, some of Canada's leading entrepreneurs will have come through the program, having learned the hard and soft skills they need to build viable businesses throughout a long entrepreneurial career.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Jon French, Director of Marketing and Events, The Next 36