Last June, after the Launch36 DemoDay in Dieppe, N.B., I met Scott MacIntosh, the CEO of SwiftRadius, and one of his employees, Chad Griffin, who was about to spin off a company called Adeptio from the software consultancy.

I didn't quite catch the significance of what they were telling me, but in subsequent interviews I learned that there is in essence an incubator for scalable businesses operating within Fredericton-based SwiftRadius.This month, in Progress Magazine, I take a look at SwiftRadius and other tech consultancies that are forming units to turn out scalable products. The consultancies are a real force in the ecosystem that often go unnoticed.

It's a great issue of Progress, featuring a few old friends. Quentin Casey, who's recently been doing some great work in Maclean's, has four stories in the magazine, including a profile of Gregg Curwin's Truleaf Sustainable Agriculture.