Innovation centre a winner
From the living plant wall in the lobby to the rooftop deck and all six floors in between, the Okanagan Centre for Innovation in downtown Kelowna is a winner.
The office building, which opened in April, was honoured with the Stan Rogers Memorial Award at the recent B.C. Economic Development Association Summit in Victoria. The award recognizes a private-public project that has the most significant impact on a local economy each year.
Past winners include Surrey’s Innovation Boulevard and Chilliwack’s Canada Education Park. The seven-storey Innovation centre at the corner of Ellis Street and Doyle Avenue has 105,000 square feet of office space for technology companies of all sizes.
Some tenants include FreshGrade, BananaTag, Intraline Medical, WTFast, Wheelhouse Ventures, Martketer, The Profile Co-Working Space, Accelerate Okanagan, Interior Savings Credit Union’s IT department, Business Development Bank and Okanagan College’s animation program.
The award is named after Stan Rogers, the late Chilliwack businessman and community booster who helped turn a massive abandoned vegetable processing plant into the Legacy Pacific Industrial Park.
Flightcraft
KF Aerospace delivered so well on the first five years of a contact with WestJet that the airline has hired the Kelownabased aircraft maintenance company for another half-decade.
For the past five years, KF, formerly Kelowna Flightcraft, has done engineering, design and maintenance work for WestJet as well as installed winglets, installed onplane Wifi and live TV systems and retrofitted interiors with new seats.
It will continue to do similar work on WestJet’s fleet of Boeing 737 aircraft.
The work is done at the main facility in Kelowna as well as KF’s hangar in Hamilton.
Both locations will install more maintenance lines to handle the work.
KF is Kelowna’s largest private-sector employer with 650 workers at its hangars at Kelowna airport.
Besides the WestJet contract, KF does maintenance and retrofit work for other airlines, governments and military, flies cargo and leases planes.
Just Ducky
Despite flooding dominating the news, there’s still thrills to be had in the hills above Peachland.
Zipline adventure attraction ZipZone is having some fun with the water theme by introducing, tongue firmly in cheek, a radical new safety device for ziplining.
It’s a big inflatable duck, usually for floating in the lake or pool.
However, for ZipZone purposes, you can ride it eight kilometres away from over-full Okanagan Lake and high above ground along a zipline.
“No level of safety is too much for our guest,” said ZipZone president Kevin Bennett with a laugh.
“The Canadian spirit of entrepreneurship, invention and can-do attitude is alive and well at ZipZone and we welcome our guests to try out this exciting new innovation.”
ZipZone actually has six of Canada’s highest and longest freestyle ziplines as well as the country’s highest freefall pole at 80-feet at the edge of a 300-foot cliff. trays, pizza that looks like the Canadian flag and cheese in special sesquicentennial Summerland.
The bakery is celebrating its fifth anniversary today and letting people know it also sells crackers, croutons, pasta, pancake mix and a wide assortment of organic B.C. flours you can use in your own baking.
True Grain won new business of the year from the Summerland Chamber of Commerce when the bakery first opened in 2012 and has since also won three consecutive business of the year accolades.
Appreciation barbecue