Fredericton Looks to Entrepreneurs For Ideas to Address Urban Issues Like Transit and Housing
FREDERICTON – The Startup Fredericton Task Force and the City of Fredericton are teaming up to inspire some budding entrepreneurs to solve some of the city’s pressing issues in areas like public transit and housing.
The task force is hosting a Startup Weekend event February 23-25 at the Ville Cooperative in Fredericton. All startup weekends follow the same model. Any participant is welcome to pitch their startup idea and receive feedback from their peers. Teams form around the top ideas, which are determined by popular vote.
From there, the teams spend three days developing business models, market validation and designing everything you need to make a great pitch. The weekend wraps up with presentations in front of local entrepreneurial leaders where they receive critical feedback and a winner is chosen.
But this time around officials from the City of Fredericton will be presenting some of the city’s challenges for the participants to create businesses to solve. They will also have people from different departments on-hand to offer guidance and insight for teams.
Startup Fredericton Task Force chair Norm Couturier says the idea to team up with the city came when he became chair of the task force at the end of last year. He says since the city was already looking for outside input as part of its Digital Fredericton initiative, teaming up with Startup Weekend was a natural fit.
“They’re calling entrepreneurs and third-party providers in the industry and startup companies to bring solutions to the city for specific challenges that they have. They’re also calling on citizens to bring ideas. They’re trying to build this collaborative approach to being a leader,” says Couturier
“We have a startup weekend that’s trying to bring a bunch of entrepreneurs together to come up with ideas that have a social impact. You got in parallel, a city that’s trying to be a leader nationally as a digital municipality and they’re looking for entrepreneurs and innovators to come up with solutions to their challenges.”
It’s not uncommon for Startup Weekend events to have themes, however, seldom do they have an organization or municipalities actually pitching problems they’re looking to solve. Couturier says this not only gives participants ideas but also gives them a potential customer that they can gather information and insight from. Whether it be things like improving city transit or accommodating tiny homes, they will have specific problems that can help guide their business idea.
“To me, that’s a fabulous partnership, versus entrepreneurs just sitting in a vacuum coming up with ideas and imagining what the practical use for those ideas would be,” Couturier says. “You now have a practical endgame, which is a municipality right there who also has open arms saying, ‘I’m in for innovation.’ “
Joanna Killen, co-facilitator of the event, says partnering with the City of Fredericton brings a new level of social impact to the weekend’s mission. It’s not just people coming up with cool ideas for a business, it’s also engaging citizens to solve problems in their own community.
“This isn’t just all about the city fixing everything, it’s about what we can do as community members. We can actually make businesses out of this stuff. We’re not all super unique in our problems. There’s many mid- to small-sized cities that have issues too,” says Killen. “For me, why wouldn’t we take what we know as problems in our own backyard and then create something we can go solve for other people everywhere.”
Couturier says the partnership also shows that the city is serious about innovation and getting input from residents.
“We’re not just talking about being innovators, we’re actually practicing it because we’re here,” he says. “It might send a bit of a message that extends the reach of the message out beyond the audience that the city might get on their own.”