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Congrats on surviving 54 hours of Startup Weekend! For those wondering what exactly does 54 hours of Startup Weekend entail, let me fill you in (with a Coles notes version of course!)

 Closed captioning: a requirement in Ontario for online video content

During my 16 years with the Centre I have worked through – 2 managers, 1 name change, 2 moves, several staff turnovers, completed more projects and claims than I can count, and found time to learn to play the bagpipes.  I have worked with people who can remember where they were when Elvis died and those who think John Wayne was a country singer.  A famous saying at the Innovation Centre has always been that “we will get to that when things slow down around here.”  Well it has finally come to that for me.

Hi everyone, it's James! At the Innovation Centre I get asked to assist with logos from time to time. It's often an interesting process filled with confusion, vagueness, many changes, frustration, and at the end of it all... a nice pretty logo. This is a fun depiction of that entire process through a story called 'Sally Needs a Logo'. Enjoy!

Young people today are 3 times more likely to be unemployed than adults.  You don't want them to get out there and create their own job not when they can live in your basement unemployed until they are 40.

Great advice that we often give our clients.  Sometimes we get so busy we neglect our own advice.  At the end of November, four Innovation Centre staff took the time to go on a road trip to the west.  Actually, a couple of flights and a road trip.  Nick Kolobutin, Terry Smith, Jaquelyn Holm and myself got up at 4:00 am to catch a flight to Winnipeg.  That was the worst part of the trip.  Our first stop, after pancakes, was to visit Chris Johnson at Ascent Works to learn about their Maker Space that is truly a grassroots effort.  It was inspiring to see the facility and the variety of design and manufacturing equipment that was developed and funded by volunteers and private sector supporters.  The equipment included CNC machines, 3D printers, plasma cutters, etchers, and software that are accessible to their 150 members. This space provides both the tools and the environment to support innovation, product development and creativity.  We hope to leverage these ideas as we develop our Advanced Manufacturing initiative here in Northwestern Ontario. 

At the Innovation Centre people think we solely deal with techies developing apps, software, and things that go to the moon. In reality as cool as all of that stuff is, we interact with pretty much anyone with an innovation. This includes food processors looking to scale up or helping companies implement new technology to make their existing business more competitive.

Last year was my first opportunity to work with BizKids. Seeing the kids excitement over being able to start their own business and make their own money reminded me of a Ted Talks video I have watched awhile back. It was a talk by Cameron Herold about raising kids to be entrepreneurs.[1] In the video Mr. Herold talks about some of his experiences growing up and having entrepreneurial characteristics that his parents tried to encourage from a young age. In the video he talks about a different way of parenting than what is the norm of society. Society teaches kids to go for great jobs in big corporations, but those corporations were once started by an entrepreneur, so why not teach and encourage that? It’s important to nurture entrepreneurial traits because these kids might one day have the solution to solve some of the problems in the world. The traits he points out that are important to inspire are: attainment, tenacity, leadership, sales, introspection, networking, handling failure, and customer service. We need to be aware of these traits because if we don’t get kids on board at a young age they might miss an opportunity because they are not groomed to think in that way. Entrepreneurs are people who have passion, ideas and see the needs of the world and have the courage to stand up and do it while putting everything on the line for it. He states that we must teach children to fish and not simply go buy the fish, we have to nurture the right skills from a young age.

When I was growing up, the only people that were entrepreneurs were those who had to work for themselves due to poor job prospects.  In post-secondary it was further engrained that you go to school to work for someone else, why go to school to be your own boss?  Furthermore, when I first started at the Innovation Centre 3 years ago I often felt as though we were going against the grain (literally) of the economy when looking at local newspaper headlines that were barraged with Forestry and now Mining headlines among anything the Government does.  It seemed as though people in the broader community didn’t know about the Innovation Centre, what we do, or even the entrepreneurial community we work with.