Waterloo’s VeloCity launches
By Francis Moran
I had dinner Friday night with about 70 students and several other folk at the University of Waterloo as the school celebrated the official opening of its innovative VeloCity, a mash-up of student residence and business incubator. The energy in the room, as one speaker put it, was electric and I was blown away by the enthusiasm of the students, the speed with which the university brought this facility from concept to reality, and the massive support shown for it by a wide swath of the Waterloo business community. The prime rib was pretty good, too.
I wrote about this so-called “dormcubator” when it was first announced earlier this year. I said at that time that I’d “keep an eye on this initiative and let our readers know how it’s working.” Well, I did one better than that. That same day, I emailed the organizers and offered to help out in any way we could. Contrary to my expectation that, being a university, they’d take their time responding, I heard back scant hours later from VeloCity founder and director Sean Van Koughnett. Sean took me up on my offer and now inmedia Public Relations is a partner with VeloCity, along with such exalted company as Google, Microsoft, Rogers Wireless and what looks like most of the Waterloo-area technology and entrepreneurship brain trust. I’ll be back on campus next month to deliver a session on media and analyst relations.
Sean, who has been at Waterloo for only about a year, said the genesis for VeloCity lay in his wondering “where will the next innovations in technology come from?” The answer for him was that innovation “will come from students” and he set out to create a facility that “cluster(s) talent and ambition in one place.”
The speed with which his vision was realized strikes me as nothing short of breath-taking, even allowing for the fact that, as Sean pointed out when he showed me around Friday afternoon, a glass wall had been installed just the day before, the furniture in the great hall was borrowed from elsewhere on campus and a couple of other finer touches have yet to be completed. The 70 students are housed in a traditional student residence but have access to a state-of-the-art mobile-device lab outfitted by Rogers with a few dozen of the latest cell phones, smart phones and other handheld equipment. There is also a boardroom for presentations and a great hall for social events and larger presentations, and the entire facility was rewired over the summer to support its focus on applications in mobile communications, the web and new media.
The students are expected to form teams and develop business ideas that will be evaluated every term by a panel of business people who can, as the facility’s web site says, “help take things to the next level.”
If Ayushi Patel is at all an example of the rest of the students, get ready for a torrent of new ventures. This spark-plug of energy and excitement and a third-year honours economics major told me she was working with a group of students who had already met to brainstorm ideas and were working towards soon finalizing the first one they’ll pursue.
It’s an impressive facility with an ambitious mandate, but one that synchronizes nicely with the university’s pro-business-creation attitude. I don’t know how unique Waterloo is with what one speaker called its “creator-owned IP policy,” the philosophy that if you develop something of commercial value while a student, faculty or staffer at the university, you own it, and the school doesn’t try to hone in on your action with licensing or partnering demands.
I intend to get to know Waterloo, both town and school, and its technology community better. This was my very first visit to the city that spawned Research in Motion Ltd., Open Text Corporation, Sandvine Inc. and many other companies that trace their roots back to university-based research. While there Friday, I also dropped in to the very impressive Accelerator Centre housed in the Waterloo Research and Technology Park across the road from the university. (My thanks to Claude Haw of Venture Coaches for insisting I go see the centre.) I have an invitation from operations director Tim Ellis to come back and do a PR lunch-and-learn for the centre’s dozen or so client companies, something I’m very much looking forward to doing.
