Kick-starting entrepreneurship
For many, launching a business is a lifelong dream; for the 150-plus participants of Startup Weekend Montreal, that dream could come true this week — at Concordia.
From July 12 to 14, the university will act as host and sponsor to the high-octane pitch-and-business-creation event. Building on the success of similar ventures — in 2012 alone, there were 400 startup events in 100 countries — Startup Weekend Montreal challenges its attendees to create a business in just 54 hours. More than 20 experienced entrepreneurs and business leaders will be on site to provide mentorship and advice.
“Concordia is a meeting place of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. We want to encourage that spirit and help our students take their great ideas to the next level,” says Concordia President Alan Shepard. “Bringing Startup Weekend Montreal to Concordia reinforces that commitment.”
Concordia is already putting some of these values into action with District 3, a multidisciplinary incubator of innovation and entrepreneurship. It fosters diverse projects with a common purpose: to create innovative products or services that consumers are actually prepared to buy.
Xavier-Henri Hervé, co-founder of the Montreal-based flight simulator company Mechtronix, has helped lead District 3’s evolution. The engineering alumnus and 2011 Concordia honorary doctorate recipient defines innovation as “meeting an unmet need”: rather than being “magic,” he says, “innovation results from bringing certain perspectives together and then taking a series of steps to arrive at a marketable product or service.”
District 3 is the result of the combined efforts of students, alumni and academic leaders to create a workspace that will unleash bold new ideas. The project was initially developed in the Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science, but now includes students from the John Molson School of Business and the Faculty of Fine Arts: a reflection of the reality that innovation often thrives when people with diverse backgrounds and varying perspectives come together to explore the different dimensions of a problem.
Examples of projects currently in District 3:
• One group of students is building models of a chair made from polymer materials that would sense and respond to the sitter’s posture.
• Another team is developing “Augmented Reality”: cloud-based web technology that would collect, in real time, sensory information from the mobile devices of consumers and send pertinent details back to the user.
• The “ElecLab” team has a vision for a brand new service — a rapid prototyping centre housed in the heart of Montreal that would accelerate the development of new products at a low cost.
What: Startup Weekend Montreal
When: Friday, July 12, to Sunday, July 14 (more details on the Startup Weekend website)
Where: Abe and Harriet Gold Atrium, Engineering, Computer Science and Visual Arts Integrated Complex (1515 Ste. Catherine St. W.), Sir George Williams Campus.
Related links:
• Startup Weekend Montreal
• District 3 Innovation Center
• "Start-up District" - NOW, June 26, 2013