Entrepreneurship and innovation

Entrepreneurship panel with Jay Shah, Feridun Hamdullahpur, Sam Pasupalak and Donna Litt

The Faculty of Mathematics was an innovation at the new University of Waterloo. We have continued in that spirit. Mathematicians, statisticians, and computer science are natural problem solvers.

From the first spinoff company, Structured Computing Systems in 1974 (later known as WATCOM, acquired by Sybase, and later SAP) to an impressive, growing list of startups and spin offs, our faculty, students, and alumni are solving interesting problems and commercializing their ideas.

“There is definitely a spirit here at Waterloo that encourages entrepreneurship. Other schools try to imitate that in some way, or try to foster it – they have courses in entrepreneurship, they have little startup labs and things like that,” he said. “But the course here is in the ether, rather than being in a classroom.”

-- Frank Tompa, Distinguished Professor Emeritus

The University of Waterloo's decision to have a creator-owned intellectual property policy fosters entrepreneurship at Waterloo. Waterloo didn't stop there. Today the university's Velocity program enriches students' world-class education and provides them with the tools to start their own ventures.

In Fall 2018, we kicked off a Capstone two-course sequence in the Cheriton School of Computer Science that gives students an opportunity to go from project ideation and selection, to implementation and demonstration, to testing and a final demo day.

Thanks to support from alumnus Sam Pasupalak and Microsoft, we had our first Capstone presentation on March 28, 2019.

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