Entrepreneurship

Projects by students from Waterloo Engineering took both runner-up prizes in the Canadian leg of the James Dyson Award competition for student inventors.

SmartPatrol, which uses computer vision to prevent injuries at ski resorts, and Scope, which is developing a better zoom function for smartphone cameras, now move on to the international portion of the 27-country competition.

Welcome to Career Perspectives, where we share a conversation between two Waterloo alumni. In this conversation, Akailah Wilson (BA ’15) and Joanna Woo (BA ’09) discuss their experiences as Human Resources (HR) professionals in the Kitchener-Waterloo technology industry. Read on to get an inside view of talent recruitment in tech and uncover new inspiration for your own career.

A group of exceptionally talented incoming students are making their way to Waterloo with a prestigious scholarship in tow.

Thanks to a $100+ million investment by businessman and philanthropist Seymour Schulich, Waterloo has more than doubled its recipient pool from previous years allowing selected students pursuing STEM to begin their post-secondary careers with an extra $80,000 or $100,000.

The year 2020 has been a trial for people across the globe. For many, this year’s crises have also inspired growth and motivation. When Jackie Lee (BSc ’06), Alan Soong (BASc ’08) and Dr. Brian Li (BASc '09) saw that health care professionals were struggling from a shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE), they created Masks for Covid. The organization combines off-the-shelf, full-face snorkel masks with readily available filters to make a comfortable and cost-effective PPE solution.

The global pandemic is accelerating the pace of social and technological change, a dynamic that is serving as a “great equalizer” for innovators and entrepreneurs.

Among many of the technological disruptions advanced by the outbreak, working and conducting business remotely is knocking down traditional barriers, leaders from the worlds of entrepreneurship and academia say.

Randall Lane, Forbes CCO and editor, facilitated the panel discussion on how talent and innovation collide in the race to reset today's workforce and rebuild economies.

Every graduating class must be prepared for new challenges. But the class of 2020 confronts a particularly difficult reality, entering the workforce in the midst of a recession and pandemic.

On June 5, alumni from the Faculty of Math participated in a virtual event to celebrate the class of 2020 and share strategies for success in these difficult times.

 Here are a few of the strategies for success our participants shared:

Sukh Singh (BASc ‘12) and Harleen Kaur were frustrated with how they saw news being presented and how it was fueling the spread of misinformation. In 2017, the brother-sister team launched Ground News as a way to provide the public with a full picture of the news stories they’re consuming.

Dubbed as the world’s first news comparison platform, Ground News helps users see how news stories are covered around the world and across the political spectrum. It then goes deeper to reveal where and when the story originated and how the narrative changes over time and across geography.

While many live events are being cancelled due to restrictions for in-person gatherings, Concept continues to showcase their achievements and successes by hosting virtual competitions. Similar to Velocity’s virtual Fund Pitch Competition (VFPC), Concept pivoted two of their major in-person events to video submissions which garnered more than one hundred applicants combined. Audiences were then invited to virtually attend each event where a panel of local startup founders scored and selected the final winners.

Eric Migicovsky (BASc ’09) had no idea what to expect when he started his own company. Although he created the Pebble — one of the world’s first smartwatchs — Migicovsky had only just completed his engineering degree at Waterloo.

“I had no expectations,” Migicovsky said. “I was fresh out of school and just happy to build stuff. I have great memories of running the assembly line to build the watches in the garage behind our house.”

A world-leading University of Waterloo spinoff company, that decodes blood samples for potential treatments for illnesses like cancer and COVID-19, is expanding operations with the help of a $5-million USD investment.

Bin Ma, a University of Waterloo computer science professor who co-founded Rapid Novor in 2015, says the company’s technology is the most advanced in the world when it comes to deciphering the complex workings of antibody proteins, a process called sequencing.