4 For Friday: Catapult News Coverage, OCI, Wednesday Warmups, and Our First CTN Meetup
We haven’t shared a 4 For Friday in a little while, and we have so much to share! David and I are teaming up for this week to share some highlights from this week’s events and the Grey Bruce ecosystem.
1. Catapult in the news
Grey Bruce is known for its production of beef and lamb, as well as our beautiful beaches and shorelines, but innovation is not something that immediately pops to people’s minds. That is slowly changing and stories like these are helping.
Following the launch of the Catapult Tech Network (CTN) at our Grand Opening, we were delighted Farmtario, one of Ontario’s leading agricultural publications, wanted to share what we were up to. Seems others are interested too; the story was the most trafficked on their website last weekend!
And we can’t talk about Grey Bruce without talking about energy, specifically nuclear power. If you didn’t catch it, last week’s Financial Post story on Bruce Power CEO Mike Renchek and his economic development legacy provided a balanced look at the opportunities and challenges facing Grey Bruce. Our Executive Director, Jen Christie, weighed in on the opportunities and bright future she sees ahead.
“Peering into the future, she envisions a great mix of talents — be they nuclear engineers, local artists, heavy mechanics, organic farmers, small-business owners or all of the above — exchanging ideas, trying new things and building something metaphorically bigger than the power plant that powers the region.”
2. OCI
This week, we had the opportunity to join the Grey County team to learn more about Ontario Centres of Innovation (OCI) and the work they’re doing to accelerate innovation and help entrepreneurs commercialize their ideas in Ontario.
OCI’s primary focus is helping researchers and startups to develop, commercialize and adopt emerging and advanced technologies.
In addition to their autonomous vehicle network and 5G testbed programs, OCI provides seed financing to startups through their Market Readiness Co-investment Fund and is a partner in the International Soft-Landing Program that’s aiming to bring international entrepreneurs and startups to Ontario.
We’re looking forward to OCI joining our Grey Bruce Entrepreneurship Ecosystem and developing a relationship with their innovation and commercialization experts. With our region’s strengths in agriculture, manufacturing and clean energy, OCI will be a great resource to tap into. Visit their website to learn more about all their programs.
Source: Ontario Centres for Innovation, January 2022
3. Wednesday Warmup - Branding
The title slide of Brooke Hagan’s Wednesday Warmup event
This week’s Wednesday Warmup was memorable for David because it was the first Catapult Grey Bruce event he attended. Hosted by Brooke Hagan from Digital Main Street, the topic was business branding, which was also quite convenient for David, who is responsible for our social media pages.
During the event, Brooke explained the four pillars of branding:
Target audience
Mission
Personality
Logo
Conducting a thorough market analysis and narrowing down your target audience allows you to craft a stronger message that resonates with your preferred demographic of people, hopefully resulting in better sales. Having a mission is key because it lets the market understand how you strive to make a positive difference in the community, the environment, and even the world. Personality is how you stand out among your competitors, and an effective logo can immediately display your product/services, values, and mission to the market with just a symbol.
In the breakout rooms, we then discussed the four pillars of branding relative to our own businesses. For David, this was quite rewarding because despite not being an entrepreneur, it allowed him to discover new businesses in the Grey Bruce region.
We love how these events bring entrepreneurs from different sectors and backgrounds together. You learn things about people you might never expect and these new connections may also lead to future collaborations you wouldn’t expect.
Like Matt Grant, a Bruce County farmer and founder of Rancho Nexo, an agtech services company based out of Mexico and helping agtech create opportunities between Canada and Latin America. As David says, “Just the fact his business operates in Mexico was interesting enough to catch my attention.”
Or Sarah McComb-Turbitt, a marine biologist and wildlife artist. David eyed up the axolotl painting in the back of her studio, while Jen didn’t know what an axolotl was until seeing Sarah paint it. Not only did Sarah conduct an entire research project on penguins, but also 15% of her art sales go into wildlife conservation efforts.
Finally, Russ Ellis of CTRE Productions said that he embraces awkwardness in his company and that his company is “not chasing perfection, but excellence.” David says, “I found it very interesting because I wouldn’t have expected a company to choose awkwardness as one of its values, but the fact that he did and transformed awkwardness as a positive trait was also admirable.”
4. CTN Meetup #1 - Cyber Security with Dave Sheffield, Tugboat Logic
This week we also hosted the Catapult Tech Network’s first meetup!
It was centred around cybersecurity and compliance software. This was an all new topic for us, but a great learning experience and an important one. The purpose of compliance software is to constantly monitor, assess, and resolve business processes to ensure they fit a certain criteria, such as industry-standard cybersecurity measures.
Dave Sheffield was the discussion leader of the meetup. He is an API Developer at Tugboat Logic and is involved in producing compliance software for businesses. He explained that cybersecurity compliance software is crucial for a business because in the event of a security breach, it could take up to 9 months to resolve issues. He also explained that most security breaches are caused by other people exploiting an employee or business owner’s trust — also known as social engineering — and therefore it’s important to properly assess a situation, ask for help if needed, and avoid taking offers that sound too good to be true.
One of the takeaways for us was that compliance software isn’t just for cybersecurity.
Because the demand for environmentally sustainable products and services has grown over the past few years, there are now startups designing compliance software that track a company’s carbon footprint. If companies manage to reach a certain threshold of compliance, then they can safely state on their packaging that they’re carbon neutral, potentially attracting more customers. We love examples of innovating how we provide services to promote environmental sustainability. We’re intrigued to discover more!