Downtown business hub opens
Innovation Cluster launches The Big Idea program to develop accessibility technology during official opening of The Cube facility
As officials celebrated the grand opening of the city’s newly renovated downtown business hub on one side of the third floor of the VentureNorth building, David Winter’s attention was trained on a monitor displaying a video game in another.
The president and co-founder of Canuck Play – one of several startups that call The Innovation Cluster, or The Cube, home – is busy getting ready for the June launch of its first title, Canadian Football 2017, a partnership with Microsoft.
Much has been accomplished since the startup moved in last October, Winter said. “We’ve been getting access to services we wouldn’t have before.”
The willingness for clients to help each other means help goes both ways. He’s drawn from experts in other fields that may be sitting a few metres away, while the professional code writer has been able to offer his own knowledge in return.
Such are the benefits of being in a business incubator.
“It’s been going both ways and I think that’s been very helpful,” said Winter, who went on to explain how the space has allowed the company to make the game on a budget more akin to one might expect for a smartphone application.
He’s drawn on local resources outside the building, too. The voice of the in-game stadium announcer was provided by none other than Jordan Mercier of Extra 90.5 FM, for example.
As clients like Winter worked in one area of the re-envisioned collaborative space dubbed The Cube in the former Promenade building at 270 George St. N., media and community representatives invited to the launch were given tours.
Marketing manager and innovation specialist Rosalea Terry highlighted its large glass-encased community rooms and boardrooms, library and games room set to include a virtual reality development studio and large accelerator space, complete with a beer keg.
The open-concept space includes different zones distinguished by colour – orange in the motivation zone and green for innovation. There’s even a Find Your Path game of Frogger, for those familiar with the 1981 Atari classic, illustrated in chalk on a blackboard wall.
Some 80 per cent of start-ups fail – but that figure is reduced to less than 25 per cent when those businesses are involved with an incubator, The Innovation Cluster – Peterborough and the Kawarthas president and CEO Michael Skinner told dozens gathered.
In the past 12 months, the notfor-profit has supported 28 innovation companies that have created 62 full time and 40 part-time jobs, $976,000 in sales, $190,000 in personal investment and $11.7 million in equity investment, he said.
The cluster partners with academia and industry to provide support to start-up technology companies and entrepreneurs to help take innovative ideas and processes to market.
It’s core funders include the city, Ontario Centres of Excellence, Trent, Fleming and the Peterborough Region Angel Network.
The cluster recently unveiled a new logo to accentuate the focus on technology and recently adjusted its boundaries to include Lindsay and Apsley, giving it more of a regional focus, Skinner noted.
Peterborough-Kawartha MP Maryam Monsef said that innovation is part of Peterborough’s heritage, noting how it was the first city to have electric street lights, the creation of Trent University, the construction of the highest lift lock or how the first wave of Europeans farmed the land.
“This space will allow us to build on that proud legacy of innovation,” she said.
Adding to the innovation theme, Peterborough MPP Jeff Leal noted how two local toolmakers began a business in a chicken coop that evolved into manufacturing powerhouse Fisher Gauge Ltd.
Peterborough Mayor Daryl Bennett recalled speaking with older relatives about the changes they’ve seen in their lifetimes – such as advances in clotheswashing and refridgeration. “The simple little things in life that we often take for granted were all done by what is going on here.”
Fleming College president Tony Tilley cited the famous quote by Winston Churchill, that “we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.”
The Innovation Cluster dates back to 2004, when a partnership was forged between Trent University, Fleming and the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, said Neil Emery, Trent’s vice-president of innovation and research.
Successes of company’s such as NobleGen, which plans to be the anchor tenant of the university’s research park, speak to the growing “innovation ecosystem” in the city, he said.
Cluster board chairman John Desbiens called the hub a “truly collaborative effort” offering an array of services that he, as an entrepreneur, wishes were as readily available when he could have really used them 25 years ago.
He called Wednesday’s launch “just one moment” of many others to come that will be celebrated in the “evolutionary trajectory” of the project.
NOTES: The cluster also launched a new pilot program called The Big Idea, which supports the advanced innovation of accessibility technology .... It is one of two organizers selected for the effort .... The Innovation Cluster’s website is at www.innovationcluster.ca.