Skip to content
Innisfil Accelerates
The Town of Innisfil's Economic Development Team
Innisfil AcceleratesInnisfil Accelerates
  • Business Support
    • Local Support
      • Innisfil Business Mentors
      • Business Licenses
      • Opening & Event Requests
      • Get Your Business Online
      • Work From Innisfil
    • Startup Support
      • DMZ Innisfil
    • Simcoe County Ecosystem Support
  • Development
    • Business, Planning and Development Resources
    • Downtown Alcona
    • The Orbit
  • Blog & News
    • Blog & News
    • Innisfil Accelerates Podcast
    • Tech Town Podcast
  • Contact
  • Business Support
    • Local Support
      • Innisfil Business Mentors
      • Business Licenses
      • Opening & Event Requests
      • Get Your Business Online
      • Work From Innisfil
    • Startup Support
      • DMZ Innisfil
    • Simcoe County Ecosystem Support
  • Development
    • Business, Planning and Development Resources
    • Downtown Alcona
    • The Orbit
  • Blog & News
    • Blog & News
    • Innisfil Accelerates Podcast
    • Tech Town Podcast
  • Contact

Author Archives: Innisfil Accelerates

You are here:
  1. Home
  2. Article author Innisfil Accelerates

Get your ad in the Innisfil Journal for only $49 for this holiday season!

UncategorizedBy Innisfil AcceleratesNovember 4, 2021

  The Innisfil Economic Development Team is giving back to our local businesses this holiday season! We’ve partnered with the Innisfil Journal to bring local businesses an opportunity to share their holiday advertising and greetings with residents in this special ‘Shop Local’ holiday edition. We are sponsoring 80% of the cost of ads for local…

The State of Small Business in a Post-COVID World

Innisfil Accelerates Podcast, News & PressBy Innisfil AcceleratesJuly 13, 2021

It’s never easy running your own business. There’s the hours, the stress and the constant stream of problems both big and small. But this last year things have gone from difficult to basically impossible for many entrepreneurs. Mandated closures and lockdowns left many businesses either closed or without any customers to service. Between March and…

Are there enough women working in tech? Canada’s workplace is changing. And it’s changing rapidly. The last 12 months have illustrated that point vividly. Almost overnight most of us went from office workers to remote workers. And the kinds of jobs we’re doing are changing too. Technology is already a huge part of the economy and it continues to grow. Nearly two million Canadians work in the tech economy. And that is growing by around 4% every year. But men are still hugely overrepresented in those jobs. And that’s something our guest this week is trying to change. Sara Bentham is the Director of the Henry Bernick Entrepreneurship Centre at Georgian College. The Centre is a cornerstone of the local start-up community. And is a key collaborator with the Innisfil DMZ. So, Sara is doubling down on efforts to empower local entrepreneurs with projects like the Xccelerate and XccelerateHER Conferences. Prpojects intended to increase the number of local women working in the tech economy.

Successful tech business ideas for women

DMZ Innisfil, Smart CitiesBy Innisfil AcceleratesJune 21, 2021

Are there enough women working in tech? Canada’s workplace is changing. And it’s changing rapidly. The last 12 months have illustrated that point vividly. Almost overnight most of us went from office workers to remote workers. And the kinds of jobs we’re doing are changing too. Technology is already a huge part of the economy…

This healthcare app aided in the fight against COVID

DMZ Innisfil, Innisfil Accelerates Podcast, News & PressBy Innisfil AcceleratesJune 7, 2021

The GoEasyCare app makes life easier for frontline healthcare workers. Over the last year the healthcare system has been challenged like never before. And the people shouldering most of the load were front line healthcare workers. There were many displays of support and encouragement for our frontline health workers during the worst of the outbreak.…

There’s something incredibly exciting about the startups working in and around Innisfil. These new businesses work across a range of industries, from technology and automation to agriculture and personal care. And while some are bigger than others, all of them signal an important change in the local economy. But supporting this relatively new ecosystem requires real thought and planning. To ensure that there is the investment, guidance and mentorship that are so critical for new businesses. So, a constellation of local organizations have come together to offer a really unique support system. There’s the Ryerson DMZ, Georgian College’s Henry Bernick Entrepreneurship Centre and the Georgian Angel Network, among many others. One of the people that has been a keystone to all of those groups is Chris Adams. Chris has been successfully creating and managing companies for over two decades now. And recently he has started to reach back to help the next generation of entrepreneurs. And at a time when small businesses are struggling as never before that help is in high demand

The post-COVID business mindset your business needs

DMZ Innisfil, Innisfil Accelerates Podcast, News & PressBy Innisfil AcceleratesMay 24, 2021

Success in business is all about mindset. And that is especially true in a post-COVID world. There’s something incredibly exciting about the companies in and around the Innisfil DMZ. These new businesses work across a range of industries, from technology and automation to agriculture and personal care. And while some are bigger than others, all…

This is why your small business needs a mentor

DMZ Innisfil, Innisfil Accelerates Podcast, News & PressBy Innisfil AcceleratesMay 10, 2021

Innisfil has developed a lot in the last few years. The town has given birth to some incredible startups and is now offering unique opportunities to entrepreneurs and residents by being one of the most technically advanced towns in Canada. One such entrepreneur is Joy Adams, the founder and CEO of Covenant Wealth, with whom…

Humans have been living in cities for a long time now. Something like six thousand years ago the first human settlements grew large enough to earn that title. Over the millenia great cities rose and fell. The center of a great empire in one century could be left empty and abandoned the next. But while the fortunes of individual cities were always precarious the idea of the city continued to thrive. But it wasn’t until the 20th century when the majority of humans moved to large densely populated cities. Electricity, plumbing and the car allowed cities to grow to previously unimaginable sizes. Now, in the early 21st century information technology is giving us the chance to rethink what the city can be. Managing resources like water, power and sanitation can be far more efficient if you know exactly when to deliver those services when people need them. But redesigning the city for the information age isn’t going to be easy. There are many stakeholders that need to be oriented towards a common vision. And in a democracy like Canada getting people to agree about anything is always a challenge. So, explaining that vision is hugely important. Suresh Parmachand has been thinking a lot about that vision. He previously worked with the Canadian Standards Association to develop smart technology rules and regulations for Canadian industry. Now as the VP of marketing for Trend Hunter he helps brands to prepare for the next phase of the digital economy.

What life in the smart city will be like

Innisfil Accelerates Podcast, Smart CitiesBy Innisfil AcceleratesApril 26, 2021

Humans have been living in cities for a long time now. Something like six thousand years ago the first human settlements grew large enough to earn that title. Over the millennia great cities rose and fell. The center of a great empire in one century could be left empty and abandoned the next. But while…

Town of Innisfil partners with The Innisfil Journal to Support Local Businesses

UncategorizedBy Innisfil AcceleratesApril 22, 2021

The Town of Innisfil is partnering with Metroland Media to create a special edition of the Innisfil Journal that will highlight and reinforce the importance of local businesses. The edition will include the opportunity to claim cost-effective ad space and a listing of available services and support for the Innisfil business community. “It has been…

0:00 We'll start just by asking, could you introduce yourself? Hi, my name is full name and title, please. 0:06 Hi, my name is Ryan Franks. I'm the business director with energy safety responsible. 0:10 You know, you must hear so often in the news, it's almost daily about some new smart city initiative. Indeed this morning, that was a another story that the head of Walmart's eecom site is left to go start a new smart city initiative. And part of that is inevitably about sustainable energy. It's without question that's always in that kind of the laundry list of what a smart city can achieve. And when you hear that, you kind of roll your eyes a little bit sometimes about the way that that's so casually tossed around without people fully understanding just how complicated that would be to actually pull off. 0:50 Yeah. You know, the thing about smart cities is that it requires a tremendous amount of bias, because there's so many people that are affected, you have businesses, civic organizations, citizens, and depending upon how it's how it's formed, and where it is, really, there's difference amongst countries and cultures, it can be very difficult, or relatively simple, in some instances, to form them and get it going. 1:17 Yeah, talk to me a little bit more about developing sustainable energy inside of a city, what are the biggest engineering challenges to pulling that off right now as the technology, the off the shelf technology, as it exists right now, one of the biggest challenges to try and get one off of fossil fuel production, for example, 1:36 the challenge with renewable energy, I mean, specifically, is that there are a lot of regulatory barriers. So there's a lot of soft costs that are involved in terms of permitting and terms of interconnection, in terms of getting the right sighting, you're talking about this new energy economy, where you're going from a very centralized plant structure that distributes energy out the transmission lines down to the distribution level, you know, most of the concepts in Smart Cities revolve around having energy produced very close to if not directly adjacent to the point where it's consumed. It's a completely different kind of mindset that has a lot of entrenched interests, that that's hard to overcome that kind of inertia of development. 2:18 Can you talk more about some of those entrenched interests and why they're so difficult to change? I think it's kind of obvious on its face, but maybe you can spell it out a little further. 2:27 Yeah, well, you have all of these sunk costs, really, it comes down to economics for me, and that you have all of these interests that have cost spread out over a certain number of decades to be able to pay for transmission costs to be able to pay for power plant costs. And the vision has kind of dramatically changed. And if you look at any sort of graph, or any sort of forecast for the cost of PV explicitly comes to mind, but a lot of energy sources, it's rapidly decreasing. And it's the only option that makes sense, really, in the long term for most locations around the world now to to develop new new power, new power generation, I should say. So we're just like with anything, I mean, I it's sort of just like another business challenge that has to be figured out and overcome. 3:18 Do you see that on the near horizon? in the near term, we I just was reading a piece last week about how solar production is just starting to pass by like natural gas production. It's just kind of crossed that threshold. And as you point out, it's all about the dollars at the end of the day. I mean, you can't get people to buy in when the product is going to be twice as much as the existing product. It's just never going to win. Do you see this coming? And then in the near term, I've been talking about this as a reporter in various ways for upwards of 20 years. And it's just, it's always just around the corner. You don't I mean, it's always seems to me, like the target keeps getting moved up. What's your sense of that? If you want to gaze into your crystal ball a little bit? Yeah, well, one of the Achilles heels of a lot of distributed energy resources is that they don't always generate electricity. So that's one of the one of the things that has really been a hindrance, I would say, they've needed that connection to the broader electric grid in order to function because, you know, it's cliche to say at this point, but you know, the sun doesn't always shine, the wind doesn't always blow, however, enter energy storage, energy storage, you know, just really fundamentally decouples the use of energy from the generation of electricity. And that plays into smart cities in a whole lot of ways. Yes. Talk to me more about that. I was interviewed Steve Levine a couple of years ago wrote this book called The power house about the kind of battery race that's underway and various nations to try and find a replacement for lithium ion that has an even greater energy density on par with fossil fuels. Is that the ticket Do you think or is it just about scaling up existing technologies or some common For the two, 5:00 well, yeah, I mean, with smart cities, especially, you're looking at usage patterns, right. So you might have people that are, you know, at least pre pandemic times were away from home during the day. But that's when the most the most sunlight is typically available depends on where you live, of course, but that's when the most the most sunshine is available. And you have to have a way to transfer and displace the time when it's generated to the time when it's used. So you know, getting to your question, though, I mean, a little bit more specifically, I don't think anybody really I mean, aside from maybe some battery manufacturers would say that lithium ion, is the perfect battery. In battery talk, there are really two things that come to mind in terms of scaling up. I mean, one is this innovation factor, like you're talking about, where you're constantly on the search for better anodes, better materials, better separators, better construction of the whole module, and also reducing those soft costs for deployment. But the other really important thing is the manufacturability, the costs have really decreased to lithium ion, kind of, for stationary storage, piggybacking off of the mobility and the electric vehicle usage of them, you have these massive plants constructed in a lot of places, you know, primarily China, at this point, are just screaming out batteries, let's say. And there's a lot of momentum behind that that is really hard to change. So when a technical technological innovation comes to light, it's going to take that other component of the manufacturer ability in order to make it successful, truly, 6:39 when you think about that distributed network in a new development, like innisfil is pursuing with this orbit where it's kind of centrally planned, obviously, they're trying to get buy in from other stakeholders, but there's a large degree of ability to kind of plan from the ground up, which, you know, a lot of existing jurisdictions just don't have in developing the kind of smart grid, you know, distributed generation, perhaps using solar batteries, as you say, to kind of shift the actual usage. Is this a workable model? As currently, with the technology on hand right now, do you think? Or do we still have some more work to go to actually make it make it feasible for a development? That's gonna be potentially be breaking ground here, right away? 7:22 No, it's absolutely possible that technologically there, I don't see any sort of barrier whatsoever? Well, let me back up for a second. So there are under construction, massive fields of PV, massive wind turbines, massive standalone battery structures, but also better structures connected to two generation sources. So getting it in the ground, having the product available, that's not a problem. It's figuring out the right way to do it. And figuring out again, the the economics of it, potentially, that are really going to be the crucial point and innisfil really any other smart city. 8:02 That's great. Anything else you'd want to hit on? Before I let you go? 8:05 Yeah, the I would say that, you know, energy is kind of one of these pillars, like we talked about just to kind of come full circle hits with energy is one of these pillars of smart cities. And I think it's really important in the development of a smart city concept to connect to the energy with all of the other aspects. So to connect it with the digitization, to connect it with good governance. And really, you know, there's a lot of wonderful things that people can do with their lives. There's a lot of wonderful things that cities can do with, with with how they're developed. But the most beneficial outcome is when it makes sense for individuals, for groups and for society as a whole. And I think that's kind of a pillar that energy supports in the Smart City world. 8:49 Yeah, you make a good point there about getting buy in and not having just kind of elites make these choices that it actually you get buy in from the people on the ground who are ultimately gonna have to pay the bills. If you can't get them on board. It's just not going to work. Is that right? Okay. I appreciate it. Thanks so much for making time. 9:05 Thank you, Danny.

How to power the smart city with sustainable energy

Innisfil Accelerates Podcast, Smart CitiesBy Innisfil AcceleratesApril 12, 2021

Over the last few episodes we’ve been talking a lot about the smart city. And about how to integrate technology into the future city in a way that makes life better for regular people. An emphasis on ubiquitous internet connectivity could allow for easier access to public goods and services. But all of those technologies…

Are there enough women working in tech? Canada’s workplace is changing. And it’s changing rapidly. The last 12 months have illustrated that point vividly. Almost overnight most of us went from office workers to remote workers. And the kinds of jobs we’re doing are changing too. Technology is already a huge part of the economy and it continues to grow. Nearly two million Canadians work in the tech economy. And that is growing by around 4% every year. But men are still hugely overrepresented in those jobs. And that’s something our guest this week is trying to change. Sara Bentham is the Director of the Henry Bernick Entrepreneurship Centre at Georgian College. The Centre is a cornerstone of the local start-up community. And is a key collaborator with the Innisfil DMZ. So, Sara is doubling down on efforts to empower local entrepreneurs with projects like the Xccelerate and XccelerateHER Conferences. Prpojects intended to increase the number of local women working in the tech economy.

A different kind of smart city

Innisfil Accelerates Podcast, Smart CitiesBy Innisfil AcceleratesMarch 29, 2021

Who gets to build the city of the future? Are such enormous projects only going to be possible for autocratic governments or freewheeling billionaires? Those questions are ones that Noah Redler wrestles with on a daily basis. The founder of the Smart City Experience, Noah works with Municipalities, community organizations and businesses to envision a different…

12345
Innisfil Accelerates
© Innisfil Accelerates
  • Business Support
    • Local Support
      • Innisfil Business Mentors
      • Business Licenses
      • Opening & Event Requests
      • Get Your Business Online
      • Work From Innisfil
    • Startup Support
      • DMZ Innisfil
    • Simcoe County Ecosystem Support
  • Development
    • Business, Planning and Development Resources
    • Downtown Alcona
    • The Orbit
  • Blog & News
    • Blog & News
    • Innisfil Accelerates Podcast
    • Tech Town Podcast
  • Contact
hom menu
Go to Top