Bayview Yards

The First Entrepreneurial and Innovation Hub of Its Kind in Canada’s Capital: Ottawa’s One-Stop Business Acceleration Shop

INNOVATIONS

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Since its launch in 2016, the facility’s become an epicentre for job creation; walk through the hub, and you’ll find the ultimate ‘mashup’ of technical, business, and market capabilities.

It’s the place where budding and flourishing firms – from startups to scales-ups – go to build, launch, grow, and thrive. Bayview Yards serves as a springboard for these ventures, helping them to reduce risk, accelerate growth, and spur commercial success and economic development in our community.

Constructed in the 1940s, Bayview Yards once served as the public works building with critical operational and storage facilities for the City of Ottawa, housing machinery storage and repair shops, stables, and stock rooms. Today, it is a revitalized heritage building with edgy, industrial-style architecture.

Future-focused in its design, it is home to an array of advanced tools and technologies, as well as community gardens, outdoor terraces, and other unique areas that foster creative and collaborative exchange.  Founded on this rich history, Bayview Yards is now catalyzing a new wave of entrepreneurship, investment, and urban renewal in the surrounding region.

Serving as the basecamp for some of Ottawa’s greatest homegrown technology talent, capabilities, and companies, the innovation centre is home to brilliant trailblazers, founders, and firms in emerging fields from Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning to robotics, analytics, the Internet of Things (IoT), cybersecurity, connected and autonomous vehicles, and Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (AR/VR).

The innovation hub is committed to clean and connected communities and a proud recipient of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certification. This independent rating system promotes high performance building standards, including sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection, and indoor environmental quality. It also further inspires Ottawa entrepreneurs to build companies, products, and services that address these very same objectives.

What we do:
Leveraging significant investment from all three levels of government and industry, Bayview Yards brings together many organizations that catalyze innovation, fuel entrepreneurship, and deliver services and support to firms. This list includes Invest Ottawa, anchor tenant and strategic partner that delivers economic development programs and works closely with fellow academic, public, private, and non-profit partners.

Harnessing the power of these partnerships, Bayview Yards assembles many ingredients for commercial success under one roof. These include incubation and meeting spaces, business programs, services and support, prototyping tools and technologies, market linkages, and access to investment. These offerings work together to accelerate business growth and success and stimulate new jobs and wealth creation in the Ottawa economy. It also helps to facilitate productive and impactful collaboration with Ottawa’s outstanding post-secondary institutions with 120,000 students, the National Research Council, and many of the other 65 government labs across our region.

Bayview Yards welcomes hundreds of events annually, attracting more than 22,000 visitors from industry, academia and the investment community. These visitors include technology developers, government representatives, media and global dignitaries. It is truly the place to host innovation, technology and business-focused activities. Bayview Yards is a thriving hub located only steps from a new Light Rail Transit station, next door to Ottawa’s downtown core, surrounded by green spaces and overlooking the Ottawa River.

The Prototyping Lab
The Bayview Yards Prototyping Lab is a custom design, prototyping and manufacturing workshop. The lab’s expert team supports clients through any or all phases of a project. Their resources and guidance enable the rapid and cost-effective transformation of a concept into a proof-of-concept prototype.

What we do:
From an industrial designer and a multi-media expert to a welder, a sculptor and a robotics inventor, the Prototyping Lab team helps entrepreneurs, small-to-medium enterprises, R&D-intensive multinationals and innovative public sector teams to:

  • Design
    Design, develop, manufacture, adapt and/or refine a new or existing innovation, concept, technology, product or process that serves as a sample, model, or release build. The result is meant for:
    • Testing a concept or process
    • Creating something replicable, interactable or informative
  • Build
    Build a proof-of-concept prototype that can be piloted, validated and demonstrated to customers, investors and partners to increase market, customer and investor-confidence. The result is meant to:
    • Acquire end-user feedback
    • Validate a value proposition
  • Launch
    Transform ideas into working prototypes with desired functionality. Leverage the latest digital media, design and commercial-grade manufacturing tools, technologies and processes.
    • Optimize quality and performance
    • Reduce R&D risk, cost and future hurdles

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An Entrepreneur’s Story:

The Growcer

Co-founders Alida Burke and Corey Ellis saw first-hand how the high costs of fresh, healthy food were hurting Canadians in the North, so they decided to act by creating better, more efficient food system solutions. Today their agri-tech company, the Growcer, is a scaling social enterprise that builds hydroponic growing systems: repurposed shipping containers transformed into indoor farms that produce up to 12,000 pounds of product annually. These systems enable farmers, in all climates, to grow fresh produce all year round.

When the Growcer’s hydroponic growing systems had entered the fourth-to fifth-stage prototype, the startup turned to the Bayview Yards Prototyping Lab for help. They leveraged critical design and prototyping services to fabricate growth tray components, evolve supporting system elements and receive essential advice for their electronic environmental monitoring system. They were able to demo their product before going to market by working with the prototyping team. And when they were ready to tell their story, they relied on the lab’s digital media gurus to do it. In the end, the Growcer was able to keep costs low, validate their solution and launch.

Capabilities in house and onsite are always expanding. Visit the Bayview Yards website, www.bayviewyards.org and explore the facility for yourself at 7 Bayview Station Rd., Ottawa On.

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