Atlantic Canada’s Startup Community Keeps Growing
Since April, there’s been a post-it on the window frame beside my desk that has only a number and a word written on it. It reads: “486 companies”.
Actually, when I first stuck it up, it read “485 companies”, but I had to add one so I took a black marker and changed the 5 to a 6.
The number 486 became really important to me because it was the number of Atlantic Canadian startups I had identified as being in business as of Dec. 31, 2017. That number was the bedrock of Entrevestor’s Atlantic Canadian Startup Community 2017 report, our annual study of the region’s innovation group.
For the past five years, Entrevestor has managed a databank of Atlantic Canadian startups – which we define as locally owned companies that are commercializing innovation to produce a product for the global market. We survey these companies and analyze the data in one big report (it runs to 60 pages this year). By selling that report to clients, we’re able to continue to provide free news on the startup community.
The first step of doing the report each year is to figure out how many of these high-growth companies are active. It’s important because most of the stats – like the percentage of companies in one sector or province – are based on the total number of companies.
Getting to that total is no mean feat. First, new companies are being created all the time. Second, some “companies” are really just projects in university entrepreneurship courses and disappear once the course ends. I try to make sure I only include teams who are committed to their projects.
Read more about this story on Entrevestor.