A loose confederacy of organizations is organizing East Coast Startup Week in Fredericton in late March to encourage entrepreneurs, and they hope it will become an annual event in a different city each year.
Startup Week 2013 will feature Demo Day for the Launch36 accelerator, the dinner for the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation’s Breakthru competition, a Startup Weekend event and a host of mentoring and speaking events.
The program has been organized by entrepreneurs and their supporters in the three Maritime provinces. It will feature at least one speaker from Newfoundand and Labrador (Zita Cobb of the Shorefast Foundation of Fogo Island).
“The goal is to have a regional event,” said Jeff Thompson, chief executive officer of Fredericton startup UserEvents and one of the organizers of Startup Week.
“Just like the East Coast Music Awards rotate around Atlantic Canada, we hope to have this rotating through the region, being held in a different city each year.”
Thompson said the purpose of the week is not just to encourage early stage entrepreneurs, but also to try to entice more people who have an idea to take the plunge and start a business.
Karina LeBlanc, executive director of the Pond-Deshpande Centre at University of New Brunswick, said East Coast Startup Week could extend beyond Atlantic Canada into New England in coming years.
Already this year, the Despande Centre in Boston, a sister organization of the Pond-Deshpande Centre, is organizing a busload of its staff, students and associates to attend the Fredericton event.
East Coast Startup Week begins March 20 with a speakers’ series, featuring talks by such entrepreneurs as Zach Holman of GitHub in San Francisco and Dan Martell of Clarity in Moncton.
That evening, the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation will hold its Breakthru award dinner, which recognizes the leading young companies entered in the Breakthru business competition.
Peter Brown, author of Power of The Best, will give the keynote address.
On March 21, the Pond-Deshpande Centre will host two events: the 20 Mentor Minutes Day, which will give novice entrepreneurs an opportunity to pitch their ideas; and a concurrent session on social enterprise development.
After this, the demo day for Launch36 accelerator, a five-month course preparing select companies for investment and the market, will allow the participants a chance to unveil their companies before the public.
The University of New Brunswick Smith Center for Technology Management & Entrepreneurship will host a Lunch & Learn session on March 22.
From the evening of March 22 to March 24, a Startup Weekend event will be held at UNB.
Startup Weekend is an international organization that organizes teams of entrepreneurs to meet and spend a single weekend launching a business. The Fredericton will be organized by Startup Kitchen, a bi-weekly TV show on Atlantic Canadian startups on Bell Aliant Community One.
