Cultivating Startups

Building startup communities and startup ecosystems

  • Episodes
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • About

Ep 03: Bringing Waterloo Expertise to Cambridge and the World with Tim Ellis of Grand Innovations

May 16, 2017 By Gary Will

http://traffic.libsyn.com/cultivatingstartups/Cultivating_Startups_-_03_Bringing_Waterloo_Expertise_to_Cambridge_and_the_World_with_Tim_Ellis.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:18 — 51.6MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

On this week’s podcast: Can the expertise and lessons learned in one startup ecosystem be used to benefit ecosystems in different cities and countries? That’s what Tim Ellis has spent much of the last few years doing.

Tim is the former CEO of the Accelerator Centre in Waterloo and a long-time member of the Waterloo startup community. He has been taking expertise developed in Waterloo and sharing it with startup ecosystems internationally—including in Australia, where the University of Wollongong was so grateful for his help that they awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Science degree.

He’s now also bringing that same expertise to Cambridge, Ontario, heading up the creation of Grand Innovations, a new innovation centre with partners that include the City of Cambridge and Conestoga College. Grand Innovations is scheduled to open a 50,000 square-foot facility in the Galt area in the next year.

In the update: A look at the fate of Startup Calgary, the new Ontario Scale-Up Vouchers program, and Michael Litt’s column in the Globe and Mail on Vidyard’s efforts to resist gentrification in downtown Kitchener.

Links:

  • Grand Innovations
  • The Gaslight District
  • Tim Ellis on Twitter (@tellis)
  • “Startup Calgary finds new home under Calgary Economic Development” (Metro)
  • Ontario Scale-Up Vouchers Program
  • “Can tech uplift a community without gentrifying it?” (Globe and Mail)

Filed Under: Episodes Tagged With: calgary, cambridge, international, ontario

SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST

Recent Episodes

  • Ep 26: Startup Ecosystem Success Factors and Startup Genome
  • Ep 25: Do tech incubators make sense in small urban areas?
  • Ep 24: Ontario Network of Entrepreneurs: The Expert Review Panel Report
  • Ep 23: The Biggest, Fastest Growing, Most Concentrated Tech Hubs in Canada – From the 2016 Census
  • Ep 22: Hot DesQ: Helping Startups Grow in Queensland, Australia with Murray Love and Paul Martyn
  • Ep 21: The Montreal Startup Ecosystem with Isaac Souweine of Real Ventures
  • Ep 20: The Founding of the Velocity Incubator with Sean Van Koughnett
  • Ep 19: Surveying Australia’s Startup Ecosystem with Monica Wulff of Startup Muster
  • Ep 18: The Challenge of Startup Ecosystem Metrics with Jesse Rodgers of Volta Labs
  • Ep 17: The Evolution of Ottawa’s Startup Community with Ian Graham of TheCodeFactory

Twitter

Twitter feed is not available at the moment.

Cultivating Startups

About

Contact

Search

Cultivating Startups · Copyright © 2025 by Gary Will