At Entrevestor, we’re dedicated to the growth of innovation-driven companies as vehicles for economic development in Atlantic Canada. But it would be great if economic policy in the region focused more on entrepreneurs than innovators.

We’re all too anxious to toss around the term “innovation” and its derivatives these days. Same goes for “disruptive”, “smart”, “clean” and so on. I plead guilty.

The Memorial Centre for Entrepreneurship has opened applications for the 2020 Mel Woodward Cup, which will hand out $35,000 in prize money to companies founded by Memorial University students.

MCE Director Florian Villaumé sent out an email Monday to say the organizers are changing the rules of the competition to channel more development capital into the two strongest participants.

The

Halifax in 2018 maintained its position as the cornerstone of the Atlantic Canadian startup community, and in the last two years the city’s ecosystem has deepened.

As we present segments from our 2018 Atlantic Canada Startup Data report, we’re breaking out Halifax as its own jurisdiction because it was home to 199 startups at the end of last year – almost two-fifths of the 550 companies we

Dalhousie University and Memorial University of Newfoundland are at the forefront of a new national program to help researchers turn their discoveries into businesses.

They will be two of the three Canadian universities that will be piloting Lab2Market, a new pan-Canadian program based on successful programs in the U.S. and U.K. The program will work with PhD candidates and post-doctoral

Atlantic Canadian cities have generally lost ground in the past year in the rankings of Canadian tech talent centres, even though other small cities have advanced.

The real estate consultancy CBRE last week released its report titled 2019 Scoring Canadian Tech Talent, which ranks major Canadian cities based on their ability to support information technology companies. The survey’s main focus is

The Prince Edward Island BioAlliance has appointed Mark Redmond as Director of Incubation Services for the Emergence incubator, which supports life sciences startups in Atlantic Canada and elsewhere.

The BioAlliance – a partnership of government, industry and academia dedicated to fostering the life sciences sector on the Island – issued a statement Friday announcing the appointment. It said

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Mae Seto compares the way her laboratory programs robots to work to the way we all try to raise our children.

An associate professor in Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Engineering, Seto’s official titles include the Director of the Intelligent Systems Laboratory, or ISL, and the Irving Shipbuilding Research Chair in Marine Engineering and Autonomous Systems at Dalhousie

The Montreal-based health technology organization Medteq is seeking health startups to apply to pitch at its next funding event, which offers startups a chance to win $200,000 in funding.

Five founders from across the country will pitch at a cocktail reception in Montreal on Jan. 13. A panel of judges will then choose which pitcher receives $200,000 in funding. You can apply here. 

The next

As it plots the expansion of its Cannaplex innovation hub, Dartmouth-based Dispension Industries has also just installed its first Verified Identity Dispenser, or VID, in a pilot project in Vancouver.

Dispension created the VID to allow authorities to distribute regulated substances like cannabis or opioids to registered users, and only those users. The machines use scanning sensors to take

The presentations of our 2018 Atlantic Canada Startup Data research will continue with a luncheon event in Sydney on Dec. 10.

Cape Breton Partnership and OnSide are hosting my presentation of our latest startup data at noon at the Verschuren Centre for Sustainability at Cape Breton University.

Each year, Entrevestor charts the growth of the startup community, collecting data on such metrics as