Newfoundland and Labrador’s Innovation Week will take place May 19 to 22 in St. John’s, featuring 15 events through four days. Each event will incorporate this year’s theme – Propelling Innovation.

This is only the second annual Innovation Week, but more than 1,200 people are expected to come to the various events. Innovation Week aims to encourage Newfoundlanders to get involved with the province’s technology and entrepreneurship sectors. Innovation Week is a community event, partnering such organizations as the Newfoundland and Labrador Association of Technical Industries, the St. John’s Board of Trade, Startup Canada and Startup Newfoundland & Labrador.

“We have to make sure we create—or partner to make—really long-term, sustainable, well-paying jobs for the people who want to be here,” said Ron Taylor, the CEO of NATI and founder of Innovation Week. “A huge part of that is going be youth, a huge part of that is going to be women.”

Newfoundland’s technology industry is currently worth $1.7 billion. But Taylor wants to make the province’s tech sector worth $4 billion by 2025.

Many Newfoundlanders leave the province in search of better opportunities. Typical jobs in the province, such as those in forestry, only offer $50,000 to the economy. Each technology job adds $430,000 to Newfoundland’s economy, said Taylor, making it a sector that can keep youth in the province, as well as give them a well-paying job with opportunities for travel.

One of the events Taylor loves the most at Innovation Week is the Youth Technology Conference, which brings together 400 Grade 9 students to inform them about the career opportunities in technology.

At the Youth Technology Conference, Taylor said he especially wants to inform young women about careers in technology. Taylor sees many women in the Newfoundland tech sector, but most of them don’t own startups—and he wants to see more of that. Natalie Panek, a 30-year-old female NASA rocket scientist training to be an astronaut, is one the speakers at the conference to show the success of women in the tech sector.

“[Girls] see [tech] as this very uncool, geeky thing: doing code in a windowless room at three o’clock in the morning, eating pizza with three guys with propellers on their heads,” Taylor said. “Once you dispel the myths, and they start seeing that wow, this is a really good career opportunity, a really good career move, then you start seeing traction.”

Other events at Innovation Week include the NATI Knowledge Summit to discuss the future of technology and innovation, Tedx St. John’s, and Innovation and Leadership Luncheon with Governor General David Johnston. You can find the full list of events here.

“Innovation Week is not meant to be a classroom in which someone’s up there preaching to you—it’s something that you’re active with, that you’re involved with, that you’re engaged in,” Taylor said. “It’s exciting, it’s entertaining, and it really celebrates the things that are great here in Newfoundland and Labrador.”