From Toronto With Love — The BCTech Summit

9000 Participants, 270 Exhibitors, and 200 Speakers

​Last week I had the opportunity to attend the BCTech Summit on behalf of App-Scoop.
I am a TechTO groupie. The Toronto-Waterloo tech corridor is my habitat and I have grown accustomed to the style and approach of how we do things here.
BC was different. Everything from the beautiful physical setting of being by the water and mountains at the Vancouver Convention Centre to the diversity of topics that were covered, the 3-day BCTech Summit felt like a distillation of Canada’s unique west coast tech culture.

Photo by Mike Benna on Unsplash

The West Coast Is About High Impact Ideas

“You’ll find the west coast is all about high-impact ideas” explained a colleague from Foresight, a cleantech accelerator.
The BCTech Summit was exactly that. This was the first time at a tech event where I was suddenly found myself interacting with a different breed of tech.
The BC Innovation Council, BC Government, and UBC were a few of the public anchors buttressed by large corporate sponsors like Microsoft and Google. All necessary partnerships to enable the rich diversity of west coast tech to discuss ideas, educate each other, and continue paving the way to becoming unified supercluster.

Here are a few topics that were covered:

• Transforming Key Sectors — Ocean, Industrial, and the Carbon Economy
• Building Global BioTech Success
• Spaceflight — laying the groundwork for all industries to participate
• Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Realities
• Innovation Through Data — health, aging populations, and global logistics

Connecting You With Canadian Tech

These are a few of the influencers that were present at the summit.

1. Female Funders —empowering thousands of women to become the angel investors of tomorrow.
2. Innovative Solutions Canada — Innovative Solutions Canada is a new program with over $100 million dedicated to supporting the scale up and growth of Canada’s innovators and entrepreneurs by having the federal government act as a first customer.
3. Build in Canada Innovation Program — This program helps Canadian innovators get their product to market faster, and helps them succeed in the marketplace, by buying and testing innovations in real-operational settings.
4. Foresight Cleantech Accelarator Centre — BC is definitely the spot to go if you’re looking to innovate in cleantech. Concept to commercialization, they’ve got you covered.
5. BC Innovation Council — An innovation hub that runs a variety of programs to foster innovation, this link will take to their current programs.

​If you ever have an opportunity to attend the summit in the future, definitely check it out, it’s a wonderful display of BC’s rich tech culture.

Author- Vishal Tiwari

Using creativity talent to solve business problems