 Monday for In Listen Only Mode. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for the webinar on innovation spaces. My name is Susan Lowe. I'm with the Design, Coordination, and Outreach Branch of the Ministry of Jobs, Trade, and Technology. And I'll be moderating and providing technical support for today's webinar and some content as well today. I'm located in Victoria, BC, in the traditional territories of the Likwungen-speaking people, namely the Songhees and the Esquimalt First Nations. Before we go too far, I'm going to show you a few tricks and tips about our platform today. There are two ways to connect to the webinar for audio. So if you have a headset or speakers on your computer, choose the computer audio. And if you're concerned about your bandwidth or if you don't have computer audio, you can select phone call instead. And dial-in information will get displayed. So you get a phone number and an access code that gets you into this webinar. And then a pin, which is unique to you, and it lets me mute or unmute your line if you ask to speak or you're doing question and answers, things like that. So the control panel for go-to webinar, you can use the orange arrow to hide or unhide all those functions. It hides itself automatically when you're not using it after a little while, so don't panic if it goes away. You can also go full screen by tapping on the little blue button if you wanna see it super big and you can raise your hand. And that lets me know that you have a question that you wanna ask during the Q&A portion of the webinar. However, since there are probably gonna be about 35 to 40 of you and one of me, the better option is to actually write your answer in that, or type your answer question in that enter a question for staff. It comes up here on my screen and when I have a moment I can answer it if it's a technical question or I can ask it of our presenters. There's going to be some interactive components of this webinar and I'll let you know in advance that this go-to webinar platform actually lets me see if you are attentive and your monitor is focused on the webinar screen. So I'm not gonna call anyone out by name, but we'll have some pop quizzes through the session and some polls. So I'm just gonna run a poll right now so you see what it looks like and you have practice answering it. We're gonna ask what kind of organization do you work for? We wanna know a little bit more about you. I'll usually leave these up for about 30 to 45 seconds. So we get a chance to get some good voter turnout. It's important to set the engagement. So thank you everybody for contributing your responses. We're at 93% voter turnout. Excellent, excellent. I'm going to close the poll and then you'll see I can share the results with you. So we've got 44% of you are from local governments, municipal or regional. 8% are from Economic Development Commissions or agencies. 0% today from First Nations governments or indigenous organizations. 24% from the provincial government and 24% from other. If you want to type in the questions menu and tell me what kind of organization you're from, I love holding on to that and so I can see who's checking into our webinars and how many better you meet your needs. So moving on, I did not ask you how many pets you have today. So today's objectives, by the end of today's webinars, if you're all paying attention, you will be able to describe how shared spaces contribute to innovation and entrepreneurship, discuss reasons to support an innovation space as part of an economic development strategy and identify some steps and stages in developing a shared innovation space based on examples from two BC communities. So our presenters today, after I've given you a bit of a foundational background, we have Kimberly Steadman from Camelope's Innovation Society. Hi Kimberly. And Jeff from Kelowna Innovation Society. Hi Jeff. Hello. And if we have some more time at the end, based on time allowing, I'll show you some examples of two innovation spaces across Canada that I visited that provide a lot of inspiration around what can be achieved in these kinds of spaces. I'll, oh, I forgot to give some background information about our guests today. So Kimberly is from Camelope's Innovation. Camelope's Innovation operates HubSpace, which combines co-working space with incubator programs. And a small fun fact, Kimberly teaches oil painting and runs a fine arts society. Jeff is a director with Kelowna Innovation Society, which brought the Kelowna Innovation Center into existence. And he'll tell more about that. And he's also the managing director of Atrium Ventures, which is an entrepreneur-led venture capital corporation that makes early stage investments into promising new technology companies. So, innovation spaces. What are we talking about? Here's a working definition. And I found this definition from Christine Prefontaine. And if you want to look at her blog, it's kristineprefontaine.ca. So she defines them as physical environments that promote community learning and making. Critical factor for an innovation space that we're talking about today is that they're actually physical spaces. So in a world where virtual connections are more possible than ever, it might seem a little old fashioned to be focusing on building these brick and mortar facilities as a way of promoting innovation. But as we see, it's the physical proximity of users of these spaces that generates many of the benefits. Bringing together a blend of tenant types is also really important. So, I mean, universities for many years have supported centers of excellence or research centers. So you've had industry partners brought together. What's new about the innovation spaces we're talking about these days is you're getting a really broad mix of tenant types and fields of interest. Different types of innovation spaces. There's a whole bunch on the screen and I'm just gonna talk about shared work spaces are themselves a social innovation. So it's a new way of working. So the dominant workplace model has been separate organizations working separately. And that may have made perfect sense at one time and it might still make perfect sense in many cases, but it's no means of universal approach. Thus, the nature of work is changing and with it the workplace, we see incredible potential for economic, social, cultural and environmental progress in the coming years. So shared spaces. Now, of course they are a major trend in the technology sector as we see small and nimble companies being able to experiment with new product concepts and get things to market in the agile development model. And for them not having the overhead of having to maintain their own standalone office space is a great advantage. But we also see shared space becoming a trend in the nonprofit or the community sector where social innovation and social enterprises are changing the way that we think about how to build organizations. So many nonprofit organizations create networks and set up co-location centers so they can collaborate with one another and also so their clients can access multiple services under one roof. So what makes them work? Well, bringing people together in a physical work environment from different organizations and backgrounds it creates innovation that leads to economic growth. So there's a variety of theories of why this works. First, there's a purposeful culture of community that's created by the people who start up and are drawn to shared spaces. For example, the co-working manifesto which you can look up at co-workingmanifesto.com shows some of the values that support the co-working movement. When you share common facilities there's an inherent cooperation called for and that leads into the way you approach your work. So a kitchen isn't just a kitchen. It's a place to eat, to have shared meals but also impromptu gatherings and build building relationships. It is essentially one great Canadian kitchen party that gets things started. Within those relationships that you've built it's easier to exchange ideas, to access knowledge that might otherwise be hard to come by. You sit together with someone and share a problem that you're working on and these conversations sort of blow away the cobwebs. Someone brings beginner's mind to your problem and someone else brings decades of experience in a similar or parallel field. Having conversations with new people all the time gives you a lot of opportunities as well to explain what it is I do. And the more often you have to explain what it is I do the more clarity and certainty you can get on the value that you're delivering or even being able to explain your problem clearly so that other people can help you. It essentially forces you to work on the elevator pitch for your work every week or even every day. So this graphic comes to us from iHub which is an innovation space located in Nairobi. And I found this online actually from quite a few years ago and it takes a lot to unpack. So I've also provided a PDF copy of it in the handout section of your webinar control panel. So this just addresses some of the different things that innovation spaces bring. Obviously internet connectivity in Africa, it's a huge deal but it's also an issue for smaller communities in BC. We're getting access to a high speed, fat pipe internet connection can be a barrier for people who want to start businesses from their homes or from in their own communities. Coming together to share a big fat pipe of internet connectivity can be really helpful. Open interactions, critical to the success of innovation spaces is this thoughtful approach to bringing people together. So running education programs, monthly munches where people have lunch together, et cetera. This is one of the big benefits of having an innovation space. It actually gives you a venue to hold these things and for a lot of communities, finding venue space is one of the first barriers that you have to deal with. So the welcoming environment, joining people in a workspace can actually, for many people, reduce those feelings of isolation that can play solo workers and entrepreneurs and your personal growth experience, not only from the people that you brush shoulders with but also having access to other resources and workshops and activities and these all help people to grow. So I'm gonna do a little challenge for myself here. I'm going to ask you, are you aware of an innovation space in your community? And if your community has something like this, submit the community name to me through that ask a question box and as the webinar goes on, I'm going to try to build a slide which shows all of the different places in BC that innovation spaces are starting to pop up. It's a technical challenge for me to do while our speakers are talking, everybody cross your fingers. Another thing I'm gonna mention and how the BC government is supporting these innovation spaces or at least getting involved in them, the BC Venture Acceleration Program. It provides entrepreneurship support through partner agencies throughout the province. Some of them located in innovation spaces like we're gonna talk about today. Another interesting example is the FAB Lab in Trail where almost a half a million dollars of the best fabrication equipment is set up for public, academic and commercial use. And alongside that program, there's an entrepreneur in residence, there's funding programs and guidance on commercializing the new discoveries that get made in the FAB Lab. So yeah, there's a map here that shows the different regions that the BC Acceleration Network operates in. And if you Google BC Venture Acceleration Program, you can find out more about those partners, some of whom are featured today. So I'm very excited to be able to introduce the first of our two speakers today, Kimberly, is the Operations Manager for Chemlips Innovation Society. Kimberly, please share with us how the innovation space came to life in Chemlips and what you do with it. I'm gonna turn the presentation screen over to you. Oh, and I'm gonna unmute you too, it's an extra bonus. There we go, now you're unmuted. Sorry about that. Oh, so let's start my presentation. How's that? Great. Okay, great. Thank you so much for having me here today. As I mentioned, I'm Kimberly Steadman. I'm the Operations Manager at Chemlips Innovation in a beautiful Chemlips BC speaking to you from the traditional territory of the Sokutnik First Nations people. Just to give you a little bit of a context, Chemlips Innovation is a technology business accelerator. So what we do is we help tech companies start up and grow or go from one stage to another. We offer programs on that guide and coach, early stage and grow stage companies. We have office space that's here that we sublease out. We host a wide range of events and we also have co-working in our space here. So this presentation is focused on the co-working aspect of all of the things we do, but really everything is connected. So we were asked to talk about a couple of things here today and then we're going to go over these five points and then I think there's some time for questions and answers at the end. The presentation is just really a collection of images to show you or give you a little bit of an idea about what the community is like here. So first of all, who uses our space? Our primary users are really the tech startup companies here in Chemlips and in the surrounding areas. Right now we have about 12 tech companies that are working onsite here in dedicated offices. The offices are around the outside of the building and the co-working space is in the center. So it's really the heartbeat of the whole building that we have here. What we have is a large hand-built table which is in that space and a couple of smaller tables, but the co-working table itself is large and it's actually hand-built from some reclaimed wood from a local nightclub here. So it's kind of fun, the table itself has some stories. We're also a temporary home to a number of traveling workers. People coming from Vancouver often to go somewhere into the interior or vice versa and these people tend to find us online through various co-working sites. We've established some listings and connections and relationships with a number of these and we found them useful certainly more and more as co-working becomes more and more popular. People are looking for us or finding us online. One thing that we're seeing more of lately and we're really encouraged by is people visiting who are coming to see their friends or families, often friends and families in town and they'll be here for a period of time. They wanna keep up with their work. They're looking for that large pipe that was mentioned earlier, Wi-Fi or even just a little space to be able to get a little work done while they're visiting. We're encouraged by this because some of these people are actually looking to come back home in some way and Kamloops Innovation is a first step and often helping them find those connections, those networks and those local jobs that they're looking for in order to come back. We also have a number of Thompson Rivers University students, Thompson Rivers University is our local university and they use the space as well. We have a bit of a co-working space on campus as well called the generator. So there's some opportunities to go back and forth between those two spaces. And then we also have industry and some other new partnerships that are developing. For example, we have a pilot project running right now with the city of Kamloops. They have some of their tech staff working here right now looking to engage with the startup community and collaborate and share. Probably on the who aspect of things the most important thing that we've recognized is that we really needed to look at who was in our community right now and target those people, build on what we had and definitely engage the willing, the people who were willing to come in and interact with us. Because every community is different and I think moving across the province certainly will be a different configuration for everyone. So what works here in Kamloops may not work in other areas. When we started out had looked at Vancouver and other areas as a model of what to do here and I'll talk more about that on the challenges slide. So what did all those people need? Well, there's the obvious things like high speed, wifi, a quieter space, meeting rooms, something that wasn't a coffee shop. And we've provided all of that but probably the larger, more important thing is the community that we've nurtured here. It's the thing that sets us apart from I think other shared office spaces and it makes Kamloops innovation quite a different space. People really like the way it feels here and then they come back. So what did we need to make that happen? I mentioned that the community is what makes us different and I believe that that's truly the case and that's the thing that each community can make unique and authentic to what it is that's happening there. A really great resource that we found early on was a book by Bradfield called Startup Communities and I would recommend that to any organization that's looking to start out. I won't go into the details of it except to say that we borrowed heavily from it especially in our early days. So for us, Kamloops innovation is a government funded nonprofit organization and the book in some ways allowed us to recognize that our role is to facilitate and nurture the community and to support others doing their thing. Our role is to help them do whatever it is that they're doing just maybe help them do it well or a little bit better. And part of that is we've adopted a gift before you get philosophy. So realizing that really this is kind of a long-term strategy and a long-term plan there aren't any real immediate returns and we don't expect that. It's kind of how we operate and it's an attitude that's grown throughout our organization and in our Tech Startup Community as well. It's definitely become who we are and one of those things that make people want to connect and be with us, hang out with us, be part of the community. We try to be as inclusive as possible. Again, we share our successes with other organizations. We really don't compete. We don't think about it as competing. We definitely include others in the events that we're hosting with programs that we're offering and the things that we're doing. And we've come a long way and it's just been five years and we're pretty proud of our success. But none of that happens without some financial support, of course. Our building ownership has been very supportive of us and building this tech hub here in Kamloops. And it is very much kind of what the Startup Community's book talks about as well. So the entrepreneurs leading the way and engaging the willing. We've had some really good fortune in this regard and it's made a significant difference for us. We have also received funding from British Columbia Innovation Council. We're part of that innovation hub that is across BC. And BCIC is now called Innovate BC. We have received City of Kamloops municipal project funding for some things that we have had going on last year and hopefully this year as well. And also various project fundings from other sources. For example, federal NRC IRAP funding. So all of these things have allowed us to do what we do. The co-working itself isn't a revenue generator for us but it's super valuable in other ways I'll talk about. There's the slide that I should have had up. So I'll just go past that one. Okay, so the configuration. Our co-working space is at the center of the community and it really works for us in that way. As I mentioned, we have dedicated offices that are around the outside of the co-working space. So the inside is where people can connect. It's sometimes noisy, sometimes it's quiet, it changes constantly. We use it as an event space as well. So we hold workshops and different training things that are available there. There's an adjacent lounge where people have casual meetings or little short naps sometimes. Our offices around the building don't have doors and that's something that really does work for us. You mentioned earlier about being able to connect and bounce ideas off of others and we definitely see that happening there and the fact that things are very open here encourages that kind of dialogue on an ongoing basis. And there's also those we do here and is important part about the community. So people bring their dogs to work. My door opening actually has a white picket fence in front of it so that my dog can stay inside my office but other people can lean over the white picket fence and pet her and she likes that very much. People bring their babies with their children in sometimes. We have companies that are quite diverse but they all meet for a coffee or they have lunch together. And yeah, we definitely celebrate each other's successes that way. So challenges, there were a lot of challenges. We've been at this for about five years now. Finding a model that worked was a very big challenge. I mentioned earlier that we looked to Vancouver to build a perspective and plan out how we were going to develop the co-working space. We thought maybe we would do it separately in a different area. We thought we'd charge so much based on a sliding scale of fees and how many hours or which part of the day that people were gonna be there and it got extremely complicated and it just really didn't work for count loops. For us, we recognized that it's really not revenue generating opportunity for us at all but what it is, and it's an extremely valuable way to bring people into our community to showcase our programs in a subtle and more authentic way and to demonstrate the benefits of working together and growing this community together. So we don't charge, it's free to drop in and if people do wanna come regularly we will ask that they contribute to the community in some way, maybe that's $100 a month or to share their expertise, put on the workshop or create some kind of a community event that would benefit everyone. In smaller centers, sometimes maybe it's not a matter of opening up a co-working space or finding space within another space which is kind of what we did. Getting the word out was another challenge that we had. We looked at all kinds of different ways initially of letting people know what was going on, ads, direct mail, that sort of thing. Nothing really seemed to work for us. The biggest thing for us really was holding events bringing people into the space and continuing that word of mouth. And again, it's one of those things that is extremely valuable in our community. It does, it is the core of Chemlips Innovation. It's one of the spaces where everybody connects and it's a huge benefit that way. So a couple of the successes. We were nominated 2017 Start Up Canada Community of the Year which was pretty exciting. We've received some other words and we're now consulted and asked kind of like, okay, what's your secret sauce? How did you make all that happen? So we've gained some momentum and we're looking to keep that going. We've also had a good number of people who have co-worked here be hired by connections or companies that can buy connections that they've made in the co-working space. So from a economic development perspective, that's been a really good outcome. We've also had some of those visitors that I mentioned earlier actually find ways to come back to Chemlips through the connections or the networking or mentorship that they received in the co-working space or through Chemlips Innovation. Would they have come back without our help? Like I guess it's possible, but we'll take it as a win because they were in our space. We've also got other programs through Chemlips Innovation like a fellowship program that brings people to Chemlips to show off who we are and what we do and the culture of our community. And all of these things again, the things that co-working does is it brings people into the community and shows them what it's all about. Other successes are tech community and our entrepreneurial community overall in Chemlips has grown quite a bit. I could go and quote a bunch of stats, but that's probably a different presentation. Other successes are that we have some really exciting partnerships that are pending and I'll be able to talk about those at another time too. This last slide is just a collection of some of the images, some of our events that we've had. If you look at the bottom left, that's our co-working table that I mentioned made from reclaimed local wood. There's a prototype on top. It's a little bit of an odd shape. That's an old photo. The walls now are plastered with whiteboards and all kinds of other things. You can see people eating around the table right beside it. That's something that happens quite a bit. And then there's other community type engagement things pictured there. But that's my presentation. If there are any questions or comments? Well, I will just bring it on back over to me. And we do have some questions actually. We have some really interesting questions that have come up. Oops, I'm showing the wrong thing. There we go, slideshow. There we go, Q&A time. First thing we're gonna do, however, is we're gonna have our pop quiz. I did promise there would be pop quizzes throughout and we have one on CamOps Innovations presentation. So I'll launch that right now. Come back to your screens if you've been busy eating your lunch and checking your email because I know we do that. So which award did CamOps Innovation Society get? I think you said nominated for, which I think is the same thing as getting the award. Yeah, we actually won the award. You won the award, okay. All right. So in addition to being an absolutely fabulous example of an innovation space, we've got about 76% of our viewers have voted. Let's get it up there. Let's get our voter turnout out. I'll leave it up for another 10 seconds and we'll see if we can get more responses. I'm shocked that none of you have selected the Publishers Clearing House Feat Stakes cover. I guess Kim really would know about that. All right. So hopefully those of you who've seen it, I'm gonna close the poll now and yes, it was the 2017 Startup Community of the Year award that CamOps Innovation Center was nominated for. Congratulations, you guys. Thank you. Well done. Okay, so there's a couple of questions here that I'm going to read out and actually I may end up just unmuting those people who asked. So one question came from Craig. It was how involved was TRU in the development of CamLoops Innovation? The executive director here at CamLoops Innovation has a dual role at Thompson Rivers University. So he is Dr. Lincoln Smith and he works with the University Liaison Office Research and Partnerships and he also is our halftime executive director here. So Thompson Rivers University was very involved with creating CamLoops Innovation through his role and also we have a really terrific ongoing partnership with TRU. We have a TRU generator, which is the entrepreneurial space on campus for students who are interested in starting a business. We offer programs and mentorship through that space and it's a bit of a co-working space as well. So they've been involved all the way along. Great. Now a question from Greg. I know that CamLoops Innovation has worked with the CamLoops Makerspace in the past. Is this an intrinsic part of the innovation intentions considering the Calgary Economic Development Report that showed how important Makerspaces can be on entrepreneurship in communities? I'd like to see more direct support of more Makerspaces. I'm going to quickly note that so I can go and look up that report because that's fascinating. But so how did the Makerspace interact with the Innovation Center? We worked with them really early on when they were just developing. And one of the things that CamLoops Innovation had done when I mentioned trying to get people in and get the word out was we held a lot of workshops and events and we were looking for things that would be interesting to the community. We ended up doing a series of maker meetups and working with people who were interested in that kind of thing. There were people around that time who were also interested in the whole maker movement. This is a couple of years ago. So in our context anyway, it's a really good example of helping other people do really great things because there were some people really passionate about creating a Makerspace in CamLoops. And so we worked with them to help them find a space and create some programming to pull people in and then really got out of their way so that they could go ahead and operate in the way that they needed to and service their membership the way that they needed to. So it's definitely a really great collaboration early on and we continue to work with them as they request or as things come up. But our involvement tests has changed significantly. And they're doing great right now. They've got a large building, they've expanded. They've got all kinds of things. They've got a wood shop, a metal shop. They've got an electronics lab, 3D printer lab. They've got a whole art section as well. They've expanded into pottery. They've got wheels and kilns and all kinds of stuff. It's quite fascinating. Yeah, we'll visit the next time I'm up in CamLoops. Okay, and there was one other question from Barry and he was asking, and I don't, you might have an answer to this or it might just be something that we might bring up again towards the end and get more conversation going. It's can a private corporation offer if they have industrial shop space, can they offer it to the innovator community if it's set up to be a multi-user facility? I don't see any reason why not. I would love to have that conversation. Barry? He's not at CamLoops actually. He's in Edgewater. So, yeah. Well, you might bring this back at the end actually because I think it speaks to the kinds of partnerships and collaborations that happen in the early days of getting innovation spaces set up. Okay, great. Well, we're halfway through our time and halfway through our presenters and that's fabulous. Oh, we have a couple more. Oh, and Greg shared his link to the Economic Development Report. So, what I will do is I will put that into the chat and it'll get sent out towards all of you guys very soon and I'm working on keeping up with all of the questions. So, what I'm gonna do now is I will turn it over to Jeff to talk about the Colonial Innovation Center remembering to unmute Jeff. And typically I'm gonna put you on mute so you don't have to worry about your noise. There we go. Okay, and I'll share my screen or share Jeff's screen with everybody. Jeff, it's coming to you right now. Okay. How's that? Is that working? That is working. We see your screen with the, you were using the PDF, right? Yes, I am, yeah. Okay, yeah, that's what we can see. Great. Okay, perfect. Well, thanks a lot for having me. My name is Jeff Keed and I'm located in beautiful downtown Kelowna. I'd also like to acknowledge that we're broadcasting from the traditional territory of the Okanagan First Nations people. So I'm gonna take a slightly different tact than Kimberly did, mostly because our Innovation Center was started from the ground up and part of the takeaways for the group today is kind of the process of establishing and building and operating an Innovation Center. And so I'll get into a little bit more details around the business model and the structure and why we did this. And I'll share some of the learnings at the end and as well as some outcomes. So this basically the Innovation Center concept became about through my experience at the Accelerate Okanagan. I helped found Accelerate Okanagan December 2010 and we launched actually January 1st, 2011. And Accelerate Okanagan is very similar to the Kamloops Innovation Society. So most of what Kimberly had mentioned about the financing and the intent and the focus on startups and really supporting entrepreneurs is very, very similar. Both the Accelerate Okanagan and Kamloops Innovation Society worked very close over the years and shared programs and shared events and things like that and learnings and knowledge. So we've had a very symbionic relationship as well as several other regions around the province that are involved in the Venture Acceleration Program. So just to give you a brief background of founded in 2011, we were along with Victoria, the first organization to launch the Venture Acceleration Program. And we started to see some early support in helping entrepreneurs start and grow companies. Very quickly, we had 300 startup companies through the door looking for support. We had no idea when we launched exactly how big the startup community was in the Okanagan region or how many entrepreneurs were thinking about starting and growing companies. But to our pleasant surprise, there was several and we put some programming structure around those companies and they successfully raised capital, started and grew their businesses here and created some jobs. And so we were at a point with what to do next with the startup community here, mostly centered in Kelowna. But a lot of the things that we learned that were very helpful in the early days was proximity. And I think Kimberly had mentioned a lot of these in her presentation as well. A proximity meeting, how close together the services and support were to help entrepreneurs. The different levels of access they could get, whether it was mentorship programs or funding or just access to other entrepreneurs. The collaboration that was happening between those companies. We're also big supporters of the Boulder Thesis, which was Brad Feldstarted Community's book and the Give First ethos, which is really all about giving to entrepreneurs in the community without expecting anything in return. And the inclusiveness part, which is everybody's involved and everyone's allowed to participate and encouraged to participate. So those were some of the learnings that we experienced at Exalbert Okanagan and the shared experiences with the Kamloops Innovation Society. So the next kind of step for us was that we also became aware of some other organizations in our community that were doing some really interesting work, whether it was on the academia side or the private business side or the government side around supporting entrepreneurs and startups. But what we also found was that these organizations were working in silos and kind of independent mandates and there wasn't a lot of collaboration going on. And so our goal was to, how could we bring these people together to support entrepreneurs and startups and what would that look like? And in January 2013, we invited 24 community members that were represented actually on that previous slide that you'll see here. And a lot of these organizations had infrequent, or I should say, less formal discussions in the past about the economy and transitioning from a resource-based economy to the knowledge-based economy and how academia could be a part of that and how private business could be a part of that and how the government could be a part of that. And a lot of enthusiasm and discussion resulted but not a lot of tactical takeaways resulted from those meetings. So we invited everybody together in January 2013 and brought in an outside facilitator to kind of guide us through and we made some commitments early on that we were all here representing ourselves as a community member and not necessarily as the president of the college or the president of the university or the elected officials, but because we lived in the Okanagan that we thought what we were about to undertake was important as a community member. And I think that was really important lens to look through because as opposed to, if you're participating in this meeting as the president of UBC Okanagan, your lens would be what's best for the university and not necessarily what's best for the community. So, and our hypothesis was that everybody would benefit in the end if we worked together but looked at it from a community perspective. So we engaged in three, six hours strategic planning sessions over the course of three months. We asked everybody to, if they were not able to participate to let us know early but if they were committing to it that they needed to show up to all three meetings. And again, come out of from a community perspective. So we did that out of the 24 people that initially got together. We had 18 people that stuck it out. We had the marriage from the three different areas here, Kelowna, Penticton and Vernon. We had the president and vice president of the college and university. We had some of the three MLAs and the MP at the time, some private businesses and some local entrepreneurs. So it was a nice mix. We, at the end of those meetings, we came up with three kind of areas of focus that we thought were important to help move our startup ecosystem forward. I won't get into too much detail about the people and marketing one, but I'll just touch on them briefly, but they were people, place and marketing. And the people kind of focus was, if you talk to any growing startup community, there's a lack of talent and a need for talent. So that was really how do we attract more people here but also how do we work more closely with the college and the university and even a little bit with the high schools to create awareness about all the great opportunities to work in the tech community here and try to retain the talent that graduates every year here in the Valley, which is now UBC Okadog is at capacity with 10,000 students just about and Okadog and college between their campuses and all the different programs close to 20,000. So there's a pretty good crop of people that we'd like to attract and retain. The marketing bit was really, how do we change people's perspective on the region about not just being a place to come and hang out in the summertime and play golf and drink wine, but you can actually start and grow a successful company here. And we had lots of historical successes. We just weren't really very great at storytelling or letting people know about them. So those two initiatives are still underway and happy to answer questions about those at the end. But the one that really bubbled to the surface was this concept of place. And, you know, after a lot of discussion, you know, we kind of looked at the region and, you know, our first concept was maybe we should create this map or this, you know, this network of nodes that represented all the different places in the region where entrepreneurs could get support. And whether that was office space or mentorship or programs or funding. But when someone showed up in the region, we should be able to point them to the right place. And, you know, so we kind of went down that path and this working group, I should have mentioned that, you know, eight or nine people joined each one of these groups and the place working group started to do quite a bit of research around what other regions were doing interesting and cool things around supporting startups. And, you know, we visited Austin, Texas and we visited Boulder, Colorado. And this theme that really resonated with us was this theme of entrepreneurial density. And that's really about, you know, it's great to have startups and entrepreneurs in your region, but if they're not close together and close together in terms of bumping into each other throughout the day, then that's a really lost opportunity of learning and sharing and networks and knowledge. And the things that Boulder and Austin have done really well is that, you know, their startup communities were started by entrepreneurs that encouraged people to start companies in a certain part of town so that they could network and share and collaborate. Competitive companies would end up in the same building, sometimes on the same floor of the building, because as we all know with startups, a lot of companies fail, but that's just a lot of talent and access for companies across the hall. So a unique way of looking at things, but I think Boulder now per capita is the number one entrepreneurial community, you know, in the US, which for a population of 110 or 20,000 people is pretty impressive. So we took that and, you know, we started to talk about, you know, what if we could bring the region's economic engine together? What if we could maximize the collision points where innovation happens? And, you know, the entrepreneurs that direct access to the things needed to be successful. And, you know, we could start to work on the talent, on the talent piece with the educational institutions as well. And a real, you know, and one of the key points to this structure is it's kind of an old artifact here that was created a long time ago, but it kind of represents a community or a building or a district. But one of the key areas highlighted in orange there is the shared space bit, which we thought all along was really critical. But we thought if we could bring these types of groups together that we can attract capital, talent, companies and students, and the spin-offs would be jobs, companies and economic development. So that's when we really started to look at if we're gonna do this, you know, what kind of business model would make sense. We were fortunate enough to have strong private support in terms of capital investment to build a building. And we looked at a pure private model of just offering full commercial retail space, but we also realized that it was a narrow market. It would require standard leases. Didn't have a lot of community engagement and it really didn't work for entrepreneurs and founders of early stage companies that can't afford, you know, long-term leases when they don't even know on the next day-to-day basis what the status of their company is gonna be. So the model that we came up with, and that, you know, eventually came to be was a proposed model to the government that we would like to provide some subsidized space. If we were to build a building, if we could provide some subsidized space, we would really solve a lot of our challenges and it would create some shared space in the building as well. We called this the Delta and that was the difference between a purely private model and a partially subsidized model. And our commitment to the government was that for every dollar of public money we got into the project, we convert that into subsidized space. And so jumping forward, it was a total project of $33 million. We got private money of 26 and public money of six and a half. And as a result, we converted the building into a strata unit. One strata unit is owned by the province of BC, which is the second floor of our building which has become the shared space. One strata unit is a theater on the main floor that's owned by the city of Kelowna. And we were, because we had the city and the province behind the project, the federal government paid for the tenant improvements in those spaces. So a total of $10 million of public money into the project, three and a half of that was for build out and not capital costs. So we ended up with about 20,000 square feet of space in the building that's subsidized. And I flipped through a few quick pictures here. You know, we designed, as Kimberly alluded to, this concept of collaboration and collisions that are really important for supporting entrepreneurs and startup companies and knowledge sharing. So we created some spaces in the building that really foster that. We've got a floor to ceiling atrium in the building, a green wall, we have bike racks, coffee shops, restaurants. Here's a quick look at the shared desk in the second floor. We have 48 desks there that are at capacity. We also have a kitchen lounge area, some meeting rooms, board rooms that are all accessible, not only to tenants in the building, but people in the community as well to book out. We've got a theater that gets used by all the tenants and it's also bookable by people in the community. We've had over 4,000 people use the theater or 4,000 people have attended events in the theater in the past year. So it's going quite well. So quick summary and I just, unfortunately these are really boring slides, but I wanted to touch on the points that we were asked to touch on. So what was the need to identify in the community? It was really to basically how to pour gas on what was already happening here, how to support entrepreneurs, how to help transition economies, traditional economies, knowledge economy and really create affordable space that would help people have a place to do that. And who are the players that came together was a really a mix of community leaders and the key there was everybody that came to the table had a community first perspective and around the form and function it was really designed to foster those collisions and encourage people to network and collaborate and share and provide that subsidized space that we were looking for. So that's why the building was designed the way it was. And very similar to Kimberly, one of the biggest challenges we had was just finding a business model that worked for everybody. And going through this presentation, it sounds like everything came together quite quickly but not so was when you're dealing with three levels of government, it was over two years of trying to find a business model and contract negotiation and funding agreements and everything else that went into it. So it was quite a taxing process. Some of the successes we've just been open a year were over 70% occupied and actually in negotiation with other lease agreements that should get us 100% full in the next six months. UBC Okanagan and Okanagan College are both full-time tenants. We've got a great mix of startup entrepreneurs and other technology companies are shared spaces at capacity through different program services that are offered in the building. We've had over 360 companies receive some form of support. The companies in the building are on those programs that have raised close to $14 million of capital. As I mentioned before, the theater is getting quite good utilization as well as the rooftop park, which we have, which I didn't really show you, Petro. And it's really helped, along with a lot of other organizations that are relocating to downtown Corona, really increase the vibrancy of what's happening here. So that's it, that's my stick. I've got a few other slides at a backup capacity, but maybe just open it up to questions. Great, thank you very much, Jeff. That's, it is such an impressive looking building. It's amazing to hear the story of how it all came together. So I'm gonna try to make myself a presenter again here and we're back, we're back. So a number of questions have come in and actually I've been frantically running. I'll answer a couple of quick questions that came up first. Can we share the slide presentations? Yes, we're gonna have Kim, Kimberly and Jeff's slides. I'll collect them. We got requests for them. So we'll post them when we post the webinar recording. And what you'll notice when you watch the webinar recording is you just get the slides. Unfortunately, our beautiful faces don't get captured with the recording. So no Hollywood squares for us later. So yeah, a number of questions came in, but first I, well, no, I'll just ask the questions. I think people are attentive enough. I don't need to run another pop quiz, but we do have some other questions for you just to hear to what's going on. Scrolling up here, okay, this is a question from Craig. And I heard you mentioned the Boulder thesis. I think this was actually a question when Kimberly was doing her presentation. So I'm actually just gonna unmute both of you and ask about, do you feel you followed the Boulder thesis closely in terms of supporters and how did you feel that quite differently? Well, I think our takeaway from the Boulder thesis was the same takeaway that you'd probably get if you go to the Silicon Valley and try to go back to your region and replicate the Silicon Valley. It doesn't happen because every region is so different, but there's some really great learnings and takeaways from what's happening in Boulder that you can bring back to your community and implement bits and pieces of. And for us, the biggest takeaway was to drop the ego and invite everybody that wanted to participate in the community to allow them an opportunity to do that. And just this give first kind of ethos, let's just commit to doing something with no expectation of return and see where we go from there. There's lots of co-working spaces and venture capital firms and other things in Boulder that we don't have necessarily here, but the concept of what they're doing is what really inspired us. I would agree with everything that Jeff said. As you mentioned earlier too, Kamloops Innovation, when we were starting out, we looked to the Okanagan for support and very generous in sharing. And that's kind of that inclusive give before you get kind of attitude that we really appreciate it as well. So I think, like Jeff said too, looking at it, getting ideas from that and then figuring out how to implement it best in your community, because we're all different. What's your? Awesome. Okay, we had a little conversation before about a private company that has some space. What's interesting is since that happened, we have someone in Vermeer who's looking for space for the Maker Space Group. So I'm gonna try and connect to you guys. I know in Vermeer is not Edgewater, but there could be some talking that happens there and some networking. Alicia asked, are there any examples of a live work or work rental innovation centers? So when you combine residential with one of these innovation spaces. Anyone familiar or heard about those things? Well, there isn't anything in Kelowna that is doing that, but I know that WeWork is getting into WeLive now. I believe it's called, which is combining shared working spaces with accommodation as well. I imagine it's just a matter of time before it'll happen in, I think initially probably in bigger centers, but it's something that's definitely on its way for sure. Did you guys think about doing a residential component in your building? No, we didn't think of that at the time. I think that we were hoping that by encouraging more companies to relocate downtown and kind of the building would act as a hub of a resource center that other people would start to develop some affordable housing around our region, which is happening now, which is nice to see. It's not right in the downtown core, but close enough proximity where people can get to and from work pretty easily. How many retail tenants are in the building and what kind of businesses are they operating? So we have on the main floor, we have the theater, a coffee shop and a restaurant. The coffee shop's been open for a while. The restaurant will be opening in May. On the third floor, we call it our kind of professional floor we've got is quite interesting interior savings credit union moved in and became a tenant on the third floor, but they actually moved their IT department here, not their banking operation. So it was really awesome to have four of their, I think like four or six people now that are working out of the third floor. And obviously they're financial banking experts and in the technology field. So they've actually become a bit of a resource to companies that are starting and growing businesses around e-commerce. So it's been an awesome kind of high product. We've got a couple of law firms. We have BDC as well on the third floor. So, and then the rest of the company. I'm going to interrupt you guys. I just got an alert from my go-to webinar theme that I apparently, because I started this, I quartered to 12, our webinar may in fact be ending in 20 seconds from now. If that in fact happens and it cuts us off, what I'm going to do is I will take the questions that haven't been answered and get answers from our speakers and I will email them out to the attendees today and make sure that happens. So if I get a countdown of five seconds. So I'm going to say, now just in case when this gets to zero, we get completely cut off or it could keep going into overtime. So I believe folks, we have made it into overtime. Okay, so I've made all issues that I did not know could actually happen already then. Okay, so now we can get back to asking questions. All right, okay, a couple more questions. Do you have specific resources or advice for communities that want to create an innovation space but are much smaller than Canlips or Kelowna? I know that one of the things that I'll show when we get there is as Terrace is looking at one and Canal Flats mentioned that they have one as well. So there are some of the Chinese communities, sorry, smaller communities out there who are doing these things. What did you guys run into when you were building this? Was size a factor, was size of market considered for you? Well, again, I think to the question, and they're totally right is that it has to be specific to their region and their population and things like that. I think my advice would be to start with something and whether or not it's meetups at a coffee shop or finding a private business that has space that they're willing to let people use in a subsidized way. I know that that was our first approach was to look kind of for a philanthropic real estate holder that would allow us to take over part of their building. And I'll let Kimberly speak to that but it resonates well with what they've done at the Kelowna Innovation Center. But I think holding coffee meetups led by an entrepreneur in your region at a coffee shop and just see what kind of interest there is there. It's amazing what can happen, what can spin out from that and that would be my kind of first step is just to put it out there that you're gonna hold coffee meetups every Wednesday at eight o'clock at your local coffee shop and see who shows up and see what transpires from there. I think that totally works. We started off doing a series of startup coffees as what we called them and we just held those consistently. And that's another thing too is that when people know something's happening on a regular basis, then they'll plan for it and they can book that. And then the engagement also grows from that. And in our context as well, as Jeff was saying we had a super supportive entrepreneur landlord who was interested in growing this or creating this and giving us a lot of runway and runway way to do things in the way that we wanted to do but that evolved over time as well. So it's kind of trying things and seeing what works. And then going with that and talking to people too. It's kind of the advice that we give our startups go out and talk about what your vision is and test your business idea and get feedback from people and find out what it is that they want. When we tried to guess on the early stages about the kinds of events that our community was interested in, it was really difficult. And even when we asked them, we would say what do you want? And they'd say, well, what do you got? To a certain degree, we had to go back and forth with that a little bit until we found those other people that were really passionate about certain things. And then again, tried to help them live those passions and take on those other projects. I just got a little note here, relevant to small communities as well, but it's actually a live work and a work-live initiative that's planned for Canal Flats. So Alicia, who would ask that if you wanna get in touch with me or I'll follow up after this and get you in touch with Kelly, who's in Canal Flats, you guys can connect and just share information about that. There's a lot of questions. Also, Arc and Vancouver is like that, live work, work-lives. So that's it, we talked about smaller communities. I think also it's important just to note that every initiative needs to be localized for your own community and begin with what you have. I know that Squamish begin sort of by looking at companies that were in the recreational technology and also health and wellness. And so they gather together like-minded entrepreneurs like that who realized that there was benefits to be gained from sharing spaces. And I mean, this can start as small as three people deciding that they're gonna share an office space and growing from there. So it doesn't have to start with a six-story building or taking over the entire floor of a building. Terrace, we heard from Terrace. Terrace has huge support from tech entrepreneurs. They're looking for funding for 70K. They have a space and a large partner on the board for a two-year pilot. Governance and an operator up to space are the current challenges. What did you guys have for governance structures? We have a board, is that what you mean? Like a board that we report to for sure. Yeah, and those are largely made up of entrepreneurs in the region. And there's some support from TRU which we're partnered with. And so we look to them to help with strategic planning and that sort of thing. We have regular board meetings. And they've been a huge asset for us as well because of the networks and the knowledge that they have. So for example, in our context, one of our board members is involved with the city. And so we've really benefited from that as well. And with TRU, they're all there. So the board is a really great asset. That's what they're looking to do to set up a board. So you're a nonprofit society. And Jeff, is there a nonprofit society that runs the Innovation Center? Yeah, so Accelerado-Kanagan has its own board. And when I was there and they show up, they have a great board. And they're, as Kimberly was alluding to, super helpful in moving things forward. And then in terms of the Innovation Center itself, all the public space in the building that we had government funding for is managed by the Clona Innovation Society. And we have a board as well. So yes in both cases. Yeah, yeah. I know from looking at innovation spaces in other cities, a lot of places will form a nonprofit society that just allows all the different stakeholders to have a seat on the board. Another thing that's possible here in BC is the community contribution with the company, which is a public model that lets people invest. Sort of a proportion of the profits from a venture can be returned in the form of dividends to those shareholders, but a certain amount is also retained in the society or in the company for the community purpose. So if people have sort of private investors that want to get on board with us, then the 3C company can actually give them a way to have that blended private public model. It's something that I actually don't know if other provinces have done it yet. I know that BC introduced those. I think you could register them in 2013 and there's 61 community contribution companies in BC. I just looked up that stat last week, actually. Just a quick problem in terms of board composition. Assembling the right board is probably more important than having just a board or a sake of having a board. And I think that not-for-profits can save a lot of money by having a legal lawyer on your board and accountant on your board. Someone from academia on your board as well as entrepreneurs because it can really help move things forward a lot quicker and a lot more affordably than otherwise. Cool, I'm just doing a quick question. All right, I'm aware that we're getting close to time. I want to share two of my favorite stories of innovation centers with the audience. Oh, and here's our list of innovation spaces in BC. So this is what you wrote in. There might be some, of course, that are out there that just nobody on today's call knows about, but it shows we've got big communities, we've got small communities, North, South, Island, Trail. Trail has got it going on, they've got several. And yeah, it sounded like the Columbia Valley had a lot going on too, so that's an interesting collection there that we may have and it'll be in the webinar recording if you want to go back and look at that list later. I want to share two examples with you really quickly of innovation spaces that I've found. So for people on the call who don't know, in my other life, I'm a local government counselor in Esquimalt for another five months and we get to go to conferences and part of that experience is going to see fascinating and innovative things across the country. So I learned about these two places as field trips. One of them is now called the North Forge Technology Exchange, it's in Winnipeg. And it actually started out, when I went to visit two years ago, it was mostly a makerspace with a tech entrepreneurship startup thing and they've now actually, I think they've merged as an organization with three other spaces in Winnipeg. So they have the Manitoba Technology Accelerator and startup Winnipeg as well. So when I went, one of the fascinating things about this place was it's the makerspaces on the third floor of a fairly old industrial building in downtown Winnipeg and they had to do all kinds of things with the city to get the building permits to bring that equipment in there. So this is one of the ways that local government gets involved in supporting these spaces is in having that yes attitude for looking at maybe creative interpretations of building permits and having your building inspectors really get on board and thinking about, well, this is not something we would normally maybe put in a space like this, but how can we make it safe and make it happen? So there's the website, if you wanna go and look at it, if you're ever traveling through Winnipeg, they were delightingly happy actually that I just phoned them up and said, hi, can I have a tour? So the other innovation space inspiration is the Bayview Yards, which I went on tour of. Now, this is really interesting because this is where the local government actually contributed the space. It was these designated, I think they were actually designated heritage buildings and they hadn't been the public works shop, lots of mechanical space and there was all kinds of contaminated materials. The buildings were slated to be torn down, but Invest Ottawa came forward and said, we would like to use them for an innovation space. And so Invest Ottawa, Carlton University, there's so many different organizations that play a part in this. So there's sort of a picture on the right is the what it used to be and then on the left is what it is now inside. So there's incubator space for I think 28 companies as well as Carlton runs their master's degree in global cyber security from one of the second story, that second story studio that you can actually see in the old picture. There's also a big public space that is open to the public for organizing events and there's a maker space, not as big as the one in Winnipeg, but still fairly impressive and a digital media lab where people can go and get help to make videos and edit music and that sort of thing. So those are two spaces fascinating because it shows even though these are in bigger centers, what it does is show that the local government can be a partner in innovation spaces by looking at what buildings they have available, land and also by providing permitting that taking a yes attitude towards the permitting of it. Okay, we have four minutes left. I'm gonna go through my wrapping up spiel here. The upcoming webinar, we're gonna take a little bit of a break because a lot of local area association conferences are coming up and I know you're all busy right now. So May 3rd will be our next presentation. Topic is crowdfunding your economic development projects and we're gonna have a demo from the folks at Community Futures, Stuart and Chaco and they're gonna be highlighting their Invest Local BC platform for crowdfunding. And also we're gonna have Robert Quabelle from Prince George come on and talk about how to build a successful social campaign for your funding project. The link to register for that, I made it human readable. So hopefully you can remember bit.ly slash May 3rd dash one. You can also find out about these things if you just go to the economic development webinar series, go down a little bit, look under BCID as exchange and we're the webinar series. But that's a quick link for you. The other way to find out about our upcoming webinars is to get onto our innovation or our invitation list. Hopefully you can write that down quickly. You can't click on things in my presentation unfortunately. Yeah, so cm.pm slash three INJ, so memorable. And you can sign up and you'll get all our invitations. I'm just gonna give one more pitch for our Tech Dev 101 workshops. We're bringing these on the road to communities. So we've been to Campbell River, Port Alberni, Castlegar and Cranbrook so far and I know there's more coming up this spring. What's the name of the group? Capacity Consulting from Ferney BC is actually partnering with the Ministry of Jobs, Trade and Technology to have these and these are really localized conversations about what the tech and innovation space is like in your region or your community. So we'll bring the content to you and localize it and what we want you to do is help us find a venue and make sure that the right people in your community are invited to get that dialogue going. So email us if you wanna request a workshop in your community. After the webinar, a feedback survey will pop up. Please take the time to do it. And we will also post the recording of this webinar in about a week to our Economic Development Portal in that webinar section. And please don't forget to register for our next webinar because I know that Graham and Tom and Robert are very excited to do their demo and then want lots of people to show up. Thank you very much for joining us. There were some other questions and what I'm gonna try to do is take those questions and connect you with the speakers or see if I can get the information for you. Any final words from our speakers before I let everyone go? Well, thanks a lot for having us. That was a lot of fun. Yes, thank you very much. Thank you guys for being great sports and bringing your experience and passion. So thanks. I'm gonna close the webinar and this happens awfully abruptly. It just ends just like that. So thank you everybody and we'll see you in a few weeks. Bye.