Blog

Master of Business, Entrepreneurship, and Technology (MBET) student, Dan Allison, reflects on Ignition Week activity at Innersee.

Each year, the new class of MBET students participates in Ignition Week before classes begin. Ignition Week is a week-long introductory program to MBET, where students get to know each other, and are familiarized with the fundamentals of the program and life at Conrad.

During Ignition Week, our group of MBET students did a lot of team building activities. Among all of them, Innersee was in my opinion the best activity of the week. Innersee’s program consists of challenges that inspire individuals explore new ways of working together as a team in order to be successful, and acts as a way to get people out of their normal environment and comfort zone.

When I started my Enterprise Co-op (E Co-op) term in May, Dominic Toselli and I were just a team of two co-founders looking to use technologies that we used at companies in Silicon Valley to optimize decision making in the oil and gas industry. Since then, we've added 4 others and effectively tripled the PetroPredict team. Over the past couple of months we were able to run a high performance team and enable our company to grow and scale.

Leading and building a high performance team was new to me, but as with any new skill, with effort, it is possible to learn.

Social entrepreneurship has a multitude of definitions and surrounding opinions. In my experience, there is one thing that everyone can agree on: social entrepreneurship is becoming more and more prominent in the Waterloo startup community.

In my two co-op terms as the Conrad Centre's Communications and Marketing Assistant, I have been fortunate enough to meet a number of social entrepreneurs that are taking the Waterloo ecosystem by storm.

If there’s one word that defined my short two-day adventure to New York, and the state of millennial marketing in the current day and age, it's "hustle."

I got into New York the day before the Youth Marketing Strategy conference and started doing some sightseeing. I made my way down to the Centre for Social Innovation in Chelsea, where I introduced myself as a student entrepreneur from Toronto!

Throughout my trip I met a number of entrepreneurs and interesting people from all over the world, with projects ranging from non-profits focussed on water conservation in the United States, to social enterprises, and on-demand radio providers.

What does disruptive innovation look like in the higher education space?

How are we going to assess and measure learning outcomes in times of blended and online learning, big data and flipped classrooms?

These and similar questions brought me to Anchorage, Alaska to attend the Higher Education Teaching and Learning (HETL) conference with my colleague Doug Sparkes and one of our BETS students, Emma Reesor. We were invited to present a paper on our experience of developing the virtual incubation program (VIP).

Our journey to Montreal to present our paper, "Providing Access to Education in Sub-Saharan Countries through Content-Oriented Technology" at the first IEEE International Humanitarian Technology Conference was an adventure to say the very least.

The first order of business was a seven hour drive from Waterloo to downtown Montreal. This provided ample time for team bonding, reflecting on our time spent in the Master of Business, Entrepreneurship and Technology (MBET) program as we realized it is coming to an end, and debating the quality of my choice of music. After driving well into the night, we had arrived with just enough time for a short rest before the first day of the conference.

The Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) Discovery event was a true eye opener. I was proud to attend the event as a representative of the Master of Business, Entrepreneurship and Technology (MBET) program, the Conrad Centre and my practicum project, ULLO.

On May 12th and 13th, 2014, I attended OCE Discovery, an event that showcases leading edge technologies, best practices in innovation, and new and emerging research and researchers in the technology and innovation fields. On day one, the event started with a series of speakers, including former University of Waterloo President, the Governor General of Canada, David Johnson.

Having our startup accepted into the inaugural cohort of the Toronto NEXT pre-accelerator program, powered by Google for Entrepreneurs, was an exhilarating moment for me and my co-founder Hussam Ayyad.

This was my first experience at an accelerator program of any sort. Compared to my background in engineering and working in the corporate sector, the startup space is a different ball game altogether. Startups require you to develop a process and structure conducive to your business, rather than follow an established process or structure as you do in the corporate world. The Toronto NEXT program provided great support as it guided me through the necessary processes for validating our business idea.

Part of my responsibility as a co-founder of SparkGig during my winter 2014 Enterprise Co-op (E Co-op) term was to raise money, through student competitions, to help finance the SparkGig team.

When I started doing some research I was amazed at the number of student startup competitions out there.

While I completed my E Co-op term, SparkGig competed in eight competitions, in seven cities, across three countries. You are probably thinking that all of these plane tickets must have cost us a fortune! Well, one of the big advantages of being a student is that travel expenses are often included in part of the package.

There are many entrepreneurial events in Waterloo Region, but it wasn't until I started the Master of Business, Entrepreneurship and Technology (MBET) program in September 2013 that I was really exposed to them.

I decided to take time off from working in Waterloo's technology sector to pursue an MBET degree and the business idea that I came into the program with, Jük. The September 2013 Startup Weekend seemed like a great way to expedite the process of vetting my business idea and potentially gain a team of designers and developers. Because of the positive experience I had, I also attended the April 2014 Startup Weekend.