New Brunswick has decided that innovation is going to be its engine of economic growth, and the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation is the engineer making sure the machine runs smoothly.Already this year, New Brunswick Premier David Alward has announced a new program highlighted by a commitment to fund innovation initiatives with $80 million over five years, as well as the creation of the New Brunswick Research and Innovation Council. And he has signaled that NBIF will play a key role in implementing the programs.

NBIF president and CEO Calvin Milbury says the enhanced mandate will mean a

Once again, I've got together with my friends at Startup Kitchen for Startup Monthly, and round-table discussion of what's going on in the region.

In addition to Suhaim Abdussamad and Robert Foley, we're joined this month by Jason Janes, a founding member of Startup St. John’s. Jason brings great insight to the panel and broadens our reach beyond the Maritimes.

Our topics this month are the wave of accelerators hitting the region and a look a few exciting young companies. Enjoy.

As you read this, prison inmates in Minnesota, Kansas, South Dakota and Alabama are ordering basic consumer goods, doing financial transactions or sending messages using technology developed in Nova Scotia.

Genesis Technology of Halifax has developed a system that allows inmates to organize their finances, communicate and order basic products, all from a kiosk in portions of jails that are open to the prison population. The company has installations in numerous facilities in the U.S., and CEO Chris Barker said the company’s target is to be in dozens of new institutions over the coming

The interactive media industry in Nova Scotia is pressing the provincial government to review the terms and duration of its current digital media tax credit, saying it is difficult to develop long-term strategies without knowing if the credit will exist in a few years.

The credit for developers of video games, interactive training videos and the like expired after a five-year stint at the end of 2012, and the government extended it for one year.

The industry expects that at the end of this year it will be extended for another year, forming a pattern of annual renewal. However,

With its customer list growing, Karma Gaming of Halifax has announced the $4 million first closing of its Series A round of venture capital in what is believed to be Atlantic Canada’s biggest VC financing from outside the region in almost two years.

The developer of video games for regulated lotteries has received $2.5 million from Rho Canada Ventures, the Canadian arm of Rho Capital Partners, which has offices in Palo Alto, Calif., New York and Montreal, and $1.5 million from Innovacorp, the Nova Scotia innovation agency. Paul LeBlanc, co-founder and CEO of Karma Gaming, said there is a

Virtual Marine Technology, the St. John’s, N.L., developer of simulated training systems for maritime industries, has quintupled its revenues in the last two years with its drive into export markets.

And president Anthony Patterson says that move into foreign markets will only continue in the future.

Since emerging from Memorial University of Newfoundland nine years ago, the company has become a cornerstone of the St. John’s oceans industry cluster. But like so many startups, the challenge has been to grow revenues in a meaningful way.

It had been targeting two market segments — oil

But there were two interesting standouts that played supporting roles at the conference, which was held in Halifax on May 30: the region’s start-ups and its universities.

The final conference in the 4Front series wrapped up with the 250 delegates taking pledges on what they would do to improve the region’s economic morass. These included such promises as hiring students and immigrants and exporting more.

The discussion was framed against Barton’s keynote address, which delved into revolutionary changes in Asia, where he lived for more than a decade. Led by emerging markets in Asia and

[Editor’s Note: Perry B. Newman is a consultant in Portland, Maine. We were discussing how Entrevestor could write more about startups in Maine when he proposed a guest column on what we in this region could learn from Israel. Here's the result.]

There’s much to be said for collaboration and coordination in both entrepreneurial and economic development efforts. We get ideas from each other. We share resources, and we create critical mass that enhances the potential for our success. We build virtual teams and virtual companies, and we construct paradigms that allow us to punch above our

With a $1.9-million loan from the Atlantic Innovation Fund, Island Abbey Foods of Charlottetown is tripling its research staff and pioneering the delivery of health supplements and pharmaceuticals through its honey-based products.

The company is famous for its honey-based candies and lozenges, and for walking away from a $600,000 funding agreement with four dragons from CBC’s Dragons’ Den. The collapse of that deal was the dragons’ loss because Island Abbey now appears to be in the midst of its second straight year of 100 per cent revenue growth, and is not only cash-flow positive but

Answer this quickly: What’s the one thing that private enterprise in Atlantic Canada wants governments to do to improve our competitiveness?

Did you answer, “Lower taxes”? It would have been my guess.

But we’d both be wrong.

The top business leaders in Atlantic Canada have spent more than two years studying the weak economic performance on Canada’s East Coast as part of the 4Front Atlantic series of conferences. Ahead of the third and final 4Front gathering on Thursday, the heads of the five working groups that wrote the 4Front report assembled Friday to brief the media on their