“We can honestly say that every assumption we made about how we thought it was going to work was wrong.”

Iain Klugman has spent the last 16 years bringing together government organizations, businesses, and talent to make Communitech an integral part of the Waterloo Region ecosystem. In this episode, he joins AQ to reminisce on his career of building Communitech to the intentionally collaborative and ambitious environment it is today.

Iain shares how his team worked to keep talent in the region when RIM went through a massive downfall, and how Communitech reviews their strategies yearly to adjust to this ever-changing community.

They discuss the comparison of Waterloo Region to Silicon Valley, the Future of X Initiative, the experiment that became the Corporate Innovation Program, and how the Waterloo Region has the potential to become a healthcare innovation hub.

 

Time Stamps:

0:21 Background of Iain Klugman and his role at Communitech

3:08 Last 16 Years at Communitech - Focus on Ecosystem

4:13 Comparison – Waterloo Region is NOT Silicon Valley

6:22 Future of X initiative

7:45 Google’s Expansion and it’s effects within the community

9:05 The War on Tent – status

10:43 Where Communitech’s Corporate Innovation Program Started – bringing in organizations as partners and the evolution of those relationships

14:30 Iain’s Public Administration Degree – worked in Government

16:06 Reworking strategies to suit the ecosystem’s maturation

17:48 Top 3 Communitech highlights of Iain’s last 16 years

22:27 When RIM lost its way and the impacts it had on the community and entrepreneurial ecosystem

24:55 Rise of MedTech in Waterloo Region

 

More on Iain:

||  https://www.linkedin.com/in/iain-klugman-136410/

||  https://twitter.com/iainklugman

More on Communitech:

||  https://www.linkedin.com/company/communitech/

||  https://www.facebook.com/communitechpage

||  https://www.instagram.com/communitech/

||  https://twitter.com/Communitech