Startup Edmonton is a social enterprise that amplifies creative innovation and activates startups in our community.

We help connect creators, innovators and entrepreneurs to start and scale bold new ideas through events, mentorship, workspace, and accelerators. Our vision is to make Edmonton a hotbed for creativity and entrepreneurship. Our mission is to amplify creative innovation and activate startups. Our goal is to invest in 500 creative entrepreneurs over the next 5 years.

Cultivating a community from which startups can emerge from

We believe that innovation comes from the collision of ideas and people. Our events and programs are designed to bring a mix of people – creators and entrepreneurs, artists and geeks, designers and engineers, experienced and emerging, local and global – together. This cultivates a community built around new ideas, shared knowledge, entrepreneurship, mentorship, and outputting Edmonton’s innovations to the world.

Designing and building great products for global audiences

Great products and loyal customers are what great startups are built around. So it’s critical that we hone entrepreneurs around the value of great products, user experience, and customer/market validation. We want to help entrepreneurs get their products in front of customers and users early and often. We want to focus them on asking questions like “Are we actually solving a customer problem? Is what we’re creating worth paying for?”

Accelerating early stage creators and entrepreneurs

Startup accelerators are intense, highly focused incubators where early stage startups can make meaningful progress within a short time and where mentorship is the key ingredient. In our accelerators, startups go from formed ideas to prototype and market validation. We’ve also structured our accelerator model so that it can be leveraged for a range of industry sectors including software/digital media and creative industries.

What we believe

Our guiding principles shape our approach to mobilizing entrepreneurs in our community who can connect dots and build a new generation of startups based on the following principles:

Invent new jobs. Smart, connected people are the key. Without them, new ideas and approaches can’t be formed. We have top post-secondary educational institutions and talented engineers, designers, programmers, scientists and creators. The key is forming new startups from teams of smart people who want to invent new jobs instead of finding jobs.

Don’t wait, start now. Recession or not, there’s never been a better time to start something new. Time and resources will always be limited. It’s about maximizing what you have so you can act. If you want to make a difference, you need to think big and dream big from day one. Leadership is needed to transform ideas into products, and take companies from startup to scale.

Create, build and share. There’s a time for strategizing, and then there’s a time for doing. Build startups and products you’re passionate about, and solve real customer problems. Share your experience with other creative entrepreneurs. Share networks, technologies, resources, space. Give back as much feedback as you get to invest into the community.

Dominate niche markets. Unless you have a stockpile of cash, mass market wins are tough to come by. But in the new economy, small is the new big. You can directly connect with customers and markets anywhere in the world online and through app stores. Dominate niche markets by creating products that customers will buy and use.

Proof goes a long way. Get your products in front of customers and users early and often. Are you actually solving problems? Is what you’re creating worth paying for? Find ways to get small wins along the way as you go from idea to startup to scale. Proven traction (small and large) goes a long way with customers and investors.

Money isn’t the main problem. It doesn’t take millions in government spending and venture capital to create a thriving industry cluster. Top-down money isn’t the solution. A lack of good investable products and deals is our problem. It just takes a little luck, hard work and hustle to tackle the problem from the bottom up.

Fail fast, fail hard, start again. Entrepreneurs are comfortable with failing. Everyone fails. As Steve Blank, one of Silicon Valley’s leading minds on entrepreneurship, puts it: “Startups are about the search for a repeatable and scalable business model.” You don’t know the answer, and sometimes it just doesn’t work out, and that’s okay. The key is being able to fail fast, learn from it, and move on. The worst thing is taking years to figure out that maybe your product just isn’t that good and that’s why no one’s buying it.

Success breeds success. Edmonton has been quietly outputting some of the most successful companies in technology, engineering, arts, and design – all key areas in the new economy. It’s about inspiring and mentoring future generations of creative entrepreneurs to follow in their footsteps.

Startups can come from anywhere. Startups come from creative entrepreneurs who aren’t defined by social status, ethnicity, or education. Instead, creative entrepreneurs and their startups are defined by hustle, passion and an unrelenting ability to find solutions to problems.

Let’s be a great city, not a big city. It’s easy to get caught up in the rankings game, constantly comparing ourselves to other thriving cities. We can’t pretend to be something we’re not. It’s easy to think that if we only attracted more head offices, more big brands, more venture capital, we’d stake our claim on the world stage. But that’s just not the case. Because, in the new economy it’s not about being big – it’s about being great.