Stories of Innovation

It was March 2016 and VeroSource had to lay off its sole employee. Picture it: Everything was looking great for VeroSource, the digital healthcare start-up based out of Fredericton, New Brunswick. The company was about to celebrate its second anniversary. It had just landed a deal with a large company...

C2GRID didn’t start life as a company with a polished business plan or venture capital pitch. It began at Estonia’s Darkstar Defence Hackathon – an event uniting innovators, veterans, and investors to build technologies that strengthen NATO and its allies. The founders, originally exploring human–robot integration at Tallinn University of...

FOUNDED IN 2008 IN MARYLAND WASHINGTON DC, 2U, INC. SET OUT TO CREATE THE WORLD’S BEST ONLINE EDUCATION AND THEY’VE BEEN DEFYING THE ODDS EVER SINCE. ALSO AROUND THE EXACT SAME TIME AND COINCIDING WITH THE BEGINNING OF THE MOOC REVOLUTION, GETSMARTER WAS ALSO FOUNDED. Early on in the industry,...

Long before innovation becomes a product or a breakthrough technology, it often begins with a different question: What becomes possible when people are given the opportunity to be seen for their abilities rather than their limitations? For more than four decades, Athelas Institute has worked to answer that question. Across...

Stockholm is globally recognized as a hub for innovation, particularly in sustainability, and Next Agents plays a pivotal role in advancing this ecosystem. Sustainability-driven innovation lies at the heart of Next Agents’ mission to empower businesses to create solutions that benefit people, the planet, and profitability. Central to this approach...

A PARTNER AND BACKER OF FOUNDERS AT THE INNOVATION, EARLY AND ACCELERATION STAGES. Madrona starts working with leadership teams before the first investment, supporting them with capital and hard work. We have been doing this since 1995 and actively invest in AI, enterprise technology, marketplaces, and more. As the tech...

Today, as Toronto strives to be a model of wellness and sustainability, the city looks to learn from Indigenous communities, combining many traditional practices with contemporary medicine, design and green technologies....

Every founder has a version of the story: the idea comes together, early users respond well, and the product starts to feel real. The prototype works, the pitch lands, and the roadmap fills up. What tends to get overlooked in that moment is the engineering reality waiting on the other...

In a world where storytelling has the power to inspire, educate, and connect people, two Georgetown MBA students, Dumi and Paul, have embarked on a mission to democratize the podcasting medium with their innovative startup, Shanda Studio. Born out of Dumi’s personal experience growing up in Zimbabwe, where media freedom...

In a world of chaos, our happiness is being tested everyday. According to the World Happiness Report, the United States is the unhappiest it has ever been. Finding innovative ways to protect and sustain our happiness levels is the basis of The Positive Life Company.   We believe that, through...

Jason Dispenza, an energy exec running a solar energy and building performance company in D.C., meets Ryan Molecke, cryptocurrency exchange technical officer, on a tour bus taking the Icelandic Southern coastal tour, Jan 2016. By the next year, they are paired up with a new blockchain energy applications company, pitching...

INNOVATING IN FINANCIAL SERVICES FOR MORE THAN 165 YEARS Founded in 1857, Northwestern Mutual, a FORTUNE 500® financial services company, embodies a unique culture dedicated to helping people achieve financial security. As a mutual company, Northwestern Mutual answers to its policy owners — not Wall Street. Through a comprehensive planning...

Serious back injuries in the workplace are often preventable. The logistics, manufacturing, and construction industries have long struggled to prevent worker injuries, which impact the quality of life for workers and collectively cost companies billions of dollars each year. In fact, workers in warehousing and transportation who are keeping our...

SmartBarrel is the ultimate construction workforce management solution. Solar powered, self connected and loaded with the latest computer vision technologies, it’s able to manage labor workforces from anywhere.  SmartBarrel was founded by Albert Bou Fadel, a glazing (glass) project manager with years of experience in construction. The concept sprouted from...

S’unir pour plus de puissanceLe Québec est un pionnier dans le domaine du calcul informatique de pointe au pays. Dès 1992, plusieurs collaborations interinstitutionnelles voient le jour. Ces collaborations permettent d’acquérir des superordinateurs et de développer l’expertise locale nécessaire pour soutenir la communauté de la recherche. Il y a 30...

Institute for Health Computing Primed to Partner with Life Science Companies. The University of Maryland Institute for Health Computing (IHC) is a new academic health research institute in North Bethesda, Maryland, that serves as a hub for health computing innovation and collaboration in Montgomery County. Founded in November 2022, the...

If you woke up tomorrow and decided to start a company, how would you do it? Where would you begin? The reality is that most founders start companies alone, spending the first few months in a metaphorical (or, oftentimes, literal) garage figuring out how to get off the ground and...

Driving Efficiency, Accuracy, and Sustainability in Warehouses and Distribution Centers Meeting the ever-growing demands of modern distribution and order fulfillment requires more than incremental improvements—it demands innovative solutions that revolutionize how businesses operate. FastFetch, powered by ABCO Systems, has emerged as a transformative tool that combines efficiency, accuracy, and sustainability...

WHERE INNOVATION MEETS EDUCATION At the International School of Tallinn (IST), we do more than teach—we shape globally-minded, tech-savvy changemakers. We are Estonia’s most international and fastest-growing International Baccalaureate (IB) school, located in Ülemiste City—Estonia’s innovation hub. We nurture young minds through future-focused learning, cutting-edge technology, and a community that...

IVADO is a Montreal-based AI research and knowledge transfer consortium. It mobilizes unique academic expertise to bridge the gap between current AI and human intelligence, leading the way to the development of AI capable of operating in changing and complex environments. To achieve this vision, IVADO acts on three levels:...

Auchan Retail is a global and family group, a people-centred company, a historic distributor and a next generation retailer present in 13 countries. In Portugal Auchan claims to be a militant brand of what is “Bom, São e Local” (Good, Healthy and Local). This is a movement that invests in...

HEC Montreal’s Tech3Lab specializes in the evaluation of user experience in the context of business technologies. The research conducted at the Tech3Lab is characterized by the use of tools derived from neuroscience to develop a rich understanding of the experience actually lived by users, whether they are consumers, employees or...

Un acteur clé du développementresponsable de l’intelligence artificielle (IA) Le CEIMIA est un acteur clé du développement responsable de l’intelligence artificielle, fondé sur des principes d’éthique, de droits de la personne, d’inclusion, de diversité, d’innovation et de croissance économique. Notre rôle est de développer et de mettre en œuvre des...

The game Splinterlands may evoke a world of magic and mayhem, but the wizards who built it live firmly in the realm of modern gaming technology. Splinterlands was founded in 2018 to combine two concepts that founders Matt Rosen and Dr. Jesse “Aggroed” Reich were already both passionate about: blockchain...