My much anticipated ebay Nikon Coolpix 4100 USB camera cable arrived today. Here are a few shots of the second and fourth floors prior to fit up starting. Will have an update on the progress toward the end of the week.

20080428-465.JPG Second Floor Looking from Queen Street the length of the building

20080428-466.JPG Second Floor co-working space, unfinished

20080428-467.JPG Fourth Floor Looking down the hallway

20080428-472.JPG Fourth Floor Looking from 408 to 405 and 406 entrance

20080428-473.JPG Fourth Floor The view from 406 and 407

Updated pictures on the progress at the end of the week.

Ian Graham

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LavaBlast is a very cool and exciting Gatineau Start-up, certainly one to keep an eye on. LavaBlast is a software company dedicated to streamlining and improving efficiencies in franchise operations. LavaBlast provides a platform that allows an entire franchise to be managed by the franchisor from a central location. The LavaBlast solution manages point of sale terminals, touch screen kiosks at franchisee locations and can be customized to meet the clients specific needs. The POS management, reporting capabilities and customization provide franchisors with a powerful software tool for managing and integrating the entire franchise under a single centralized point of control.

I found LavaBlast from a post on StartupOttawa and thought they seemed like an excellent fit with theCodeFactory business model. Jason Kealey promptly responded to my query on their website. After exchanging a few emails, Dominique Gingras provided a demo of their software on Tuesday of last week which blew me away, what an awesome product. Friday I met with Jason Kealey at Bridgehead on Bank Street. We chatted a bit and then went for a tour of the semi-finished, theCodeFactory. By the end of our meeting we had a hand shake agreement.

LavalBlast has an excellent product and I am really looking forward to furthering our partnership as we move forward.

Expect another partner announcement or two later this week. theCodeFactory prefers to do business with local companies and true to our mission we want to help local start-ups as best we can. If you are an Ottawa company with a product or service that you think might benefit theCodeFactory please feel free to contact me at ian ((-@-)) thecodefactory.ca

Ian Graham

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My good friend and life coach Jeff Eisen kindly offered to give me a couple of boxes of business books because he is clearing the shelves. This generous donation will form the foundation of theCodeFactory library. The library will be open and accessible to all members of theCodeFactory.

Thank you Jeff.

Ian Graham

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Here is a cool little link that was forwarded to me with a very pro-Canadian solution on how to avoid being just another .com bust.

http://hugehuge.tumblr.com/post/32663254

Have a great weekend,

Ian Graham

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DemoCampOttawa9 is scheduled for 26-May-2008, we are not sure where it will be yet but there are a couple of prospective locations. TheClockTower is a great location and very funky, however, we have actually outgrown the venue which only has a capacity of 90.

If you want to demo or attend please feel free to sign up. We already have our first demo spot taken and they tend to fill up quickly so act now to avoid disappointment, this is a limited time offer.

Ian Graham

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Good question.

Government can play a big role in helping to facilitate and grow an industry. The two examples that immediately spring to mind are the gaming industry in Montreal and the film industry in Canada. The flourishing gaming industry in Quebec is a great story, and I believe there is significant economic development and world class expertise that has been established and continues to grow at a phenomenal rate. Montreal is now home to some of the leading gaming companies in the world, a great success story.
The important points to consider about this success are the approach of all three levels of government. Government incentives should be focused on developing world class expertise. There are only so many dollars to go around, spend them wisely.

The type of incentives were primarily tax credits targeted at gaming and IT companies, multi-media tax credits and salary tax credits. While government had a role in the building of the gaming industry the success came more from the private sectors use of these incentives. The government incentives essentially acted as a catalyst for the existing Montreal ecosystem.

Montreal was a city already rich in artistic talent with many design studios and an artistic culture. I attend Montreal’s first barcamp and was inspired by two things; the artistic influence and the harmony and balance of the cultural duality of English and French. Montreal is also a city rich in technology talent with a number of Universities, Colleges and tech companies. A natural extension and logical choice was to develop the gaming industry. Would Ottawa have achieved the same success if we had tried to create a gaming cluster, probably not? Not for lack of technology talent, but for the lack the same level and depth of artistic culture. Governments need to provide specific incentives relative to the depth and breadth of the regional strengths.

The other key aspect in all of this is that the government indirectly incented the growth and success of the gaming industry. This hands off approach that provides minimal government administrative bureaucracy and maximum benefit to the ecosystem is without a doubt in my mind the most effective use of government funding. Success comes from the grass roots and other elements of the ecosystem the best use of incentives is to ensure that funding gets into the hands of those within the ecosystem, not into building bureaucracies.

My premise is that Quebec’s success in building the gaming cluster and incenting innovation is directly related to their use of tax incentives and providing funding to early stage businesses through LSIF. Ontario has cancelled the LSIF (don’t get me going) and has a more direct method of administering funding for innovation. With the recession deepening it will be interesting to see how Quebec’s indirect model or Ontario’s direct model fair.

Next post, Innovation – how do you measure it?

Ian Graham

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I have some very exciting announcements that I hope to make in the near future. I secured my first technology partner today and have two other technology partners that I hope to announce soon. I also have another very entrepreneurial service partner that I expect to come to an agreement soon.

Still waiting for my camera cable from eBay to show the before pictures. Will be visiting the site tomorrow to take some new pictures. Things are looking good in order to be ready for the May 9th Web Weekend Event.

Expect to be able to announce the openning date early next week.

Ian Graham

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This is the second post in my ICE (Innovation, Commercialization and Entrepreneurship) series of posts. This post will delve a little deeper into what is Innovation. Defining Innovation is nebulus and a bit of a slippery slope. The dictionary definition about creating something new seemed a little hollow so I have taken a different approach.

The methodology that I decided to use is relatively simple; think of some of the greatest innovators in the world today and see what they have to say about innovation. I thought good reference points would be; Apples – Steve Jobs, Google and Peter Drucker. Here is what they had to say:

“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.”
– Fortune, Nov. 9, 1998 – Steve Jobs

Finding a quote from the Google founders on the definition of innovation proved to be a real challenge. My thought was that Google lives innovation rather than defines it; therefore I have taken a few snippets from their “culture” page, which actually refers to how they foster innovation.

“Google’s emphasis on innovation and commitment to cost containment means each employee is a hands-on contributor. There’s little in the way of corporate hierarchy and everyone wears several hats.”

Finally, a third quote by business guru Peter Drucker.

Innovation is change that creates a new dimension of performance. Peter Drucker

Both Apple and Google are knowledge based companies that focus on innovation. The third definition by Peter Drucker is much broader and related to business in general rather than just technology. This leads nicely into “what are the different types of innovation”. Depending on how you define innovation and the type of innovation are directly related into how government should incent innovation.

There are a number of key take aways from this definition of innovation exercise, at least from my perspective:

- Innovation is not easily defined
- There are many different ways to innovate
- The key to knowledge based innovation is corporate culture

Next post in the series will be a post on how government can incent innovation in the private sector. A future post and certainly fertile ground for some serious pondering is the connection between innovation and culture in knowledge based companies.

Ian Graham

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Kareem Sultan, co-founder of RaceDV, care of Rob Villeneuve forwarded me a very cool and inspirational video that I wanted to share with everyone. Some very valuable lessons on building community.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/233

Ian Graham

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In my opinion, government absolutely has a role in Innovation, Commercialization and Entrepreneurship.

Part of the mission of TheCodeFactory is “Entrepreneurs are also supported through fiscal and policy advocacy.” Consider this series of posts your opportunity to comment on what is important to you in terms of government policy regarding Innovation, Commercialization and Entrepreneurship. The thoughts expressed in this series of posts are my own based on coffee shop conversations with approximately 300 – 400 Ottawa area entrepreneurs.

Before you cast stones and say something to the effect of “government has no place in private enterprise” hear me out. I tend to agree that government should not have a direct role in Innovation, Commercialization and Entrepreneurship (ICE); however, they have an incredibly important part to play in influencing the process. Government should be involved in ICE by setting the policy and framework to facilitate the growth of ICE.

Why shouldn’t government be involved directly? This isn’t black and white and there may be areas where publics interests are served by having the government involved directly. In most cases, however, the public is probably better served by having the government involved indirectly. Governments are the ultimate bureaucracy and this environment is generally not conducive to ICE.

How should government be involved in ICE? In my opinion, ICE occurs in the private sector particularly the CE of ICE. The sequence of events is typically Entrepreneurship, Innovation and then Commercialization, but ICE makes a cooler acronym than EIC. Back to the original question of how should government be involved in the ICE process. Government should set policy and incent the sort of Innovation and Commercialization behaviours that they want to promote.  This is a hands off approach where the government creates the proper conditions to facilitate the growth of ICE. This is done through tax incentives, grants and tax credits. The important distinction between this type of involvement and the typical government program is incentives are lean and the majority of the benefit is passed directly to the innovator. Programs should benefit the entrepreneur and innovators rather than create large administrative bureaucracies.

This will be the first in a series of posts on ICE and the role of government in the process. The next post will start at the beginning so to speak and attempt to define “Innovation”.

Ian Graham

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