Driven by experience

We don’t just study regional economies. We have built them, funded them, and led them across Canada and internationally.

Core capabilities

Diagnose honestly, design around your assets

Economic Development Strategy

There is no copy-and-paste template for economic growth. Traditional playbooks rely on incentive bidding wars and imported strategies that fail because they ignore local reality. We evaluate your region's honest position against peers, spot hidden barriers and isolate distinct local assets. Led by practitioners who have run economic development functions and represented national policy interests globally, we deliver diagnostic benchmark reports and implementation roadmaps backed by hard metrics.

Policy, talent and capital working together

Programs, Policy & Capital Strategy

Strategy only works when it yields real programs, policy and dedicated capital. Applying our proprietary framework, we analyze your whole ecosystem to clear bottlenecks before they stall momentum. By aligning all levers at once, we stop organizations from funding the easy pieces and ignoring the rest. From regulatory sandboxes to access-to-capital strategies, we build ecosystems that attract talent and scale companies.

Activate partnerships, unlock capacity

Cross-Sector Partnerships & Coalitions

Real growth happens where government, industry, academia and community priorities overlap. Most regions have strong institutions working in isolation rather than together. We bring cross-sector partners together around one plan, setting clear ownership and governance so the vision actually gets built. Durability is key. We build train-the-trainer frameworks into the work so your local team can run it without us after we leave.

What we’ve built

Rethinking Economic Development

We build economic development strategies designed around a community's own assets and challenges. These are strategies built for the economy we are actually in, where AI-enabled companies can grow revenue without growing headcount, and where company attraction only pays off when it is tied to a clear sector strategy.

Ecosystem Mapping and Assessment

We map innovation ecosystems to show what a region has and how well the pieces are working together. The result surfaces the differentiators that are hard to see from the inside, the gaps nobody has filled, the places where several organizations are duplicating each other, and the pathways worth building between organizations and programs.

Regulatory Sandboxes

We design regulatory sandboxes that let new technology be tested safely in the real world. They create durable partnerships between companies and regulators, get innovations to market faster, and make innovation-friendliness a competitive differentiator for your jurisdiction.

Incubator and Accelerator Programs

We design and run incubator and accelerator programs end to end, from intake criteria and mentor networks through to delivery. We build the operating model that keeps programs relevant and sustainable over the long term.

Regional Coalitions

We build coalitions that get a region's organizations working toward one goal. That includes the governance, the shared brand and the protocols that keep partners at the table collaborating rather than competing.

Capital Strategies and Fund Design

We design capital strategies that give growing companies access to the risk capital their stage requires, covering the investment thesis, the fund structure, the governance and the path to co-investment. Access to risk capital is one of the most common challenges across ecosystems and one of the hardest to solve.

Research Commercialization Pathways

We build pathways that move research out of academic institutes and into the market, connecting labs, companies and investors around technologies that can drive global progress.

Innovation Policy Frameworks

We design innovation policy frameworks that put real instruments behind a jurisdiction's ambitions, from intellectual property regimes and high-skilled talent attraction to innovation procurement and the incentives that decide where private R&D lands.

International Ecosystem Building

We lead innovation ecosystem design with governments and development banks outside Canada, focused on economic diversification and the move from traditional industries to innovation-based growth. We co-design the institutions, programs and capital structures with local partners, and build the local capacity and entrepreneurial culture that keep them running.

Cross-Border Collaboration and Partnership

We bring together the partnerships that connect innovation ecosystems across borders, from practical guides showing founders and investors how another country's ecosystem actually works to joint programs between jurisdictions working on the same problem.