I'm very grateful for that question.

At Invest Ottawa, we have worked carefully and closely with a host of different women founders from different walks of life to better understand their needs, the types of technologies and products they are developing, and what type of commercialization requirements they have. In certain cases, there are very unique capabilities, such as those that exist at Area X.O for hardware-based or smart mobility-oriented technologies, for breaking down those barriers, creating access to a host of different types of facilities and experts and access to capital, including programs such as SheBoot that enable the specific training to be investment-ready.

There are so many women founders who have incredible innovations, and they don't know how to scale; they don't know how to commercialize. Here in the capital, we're very proud that we have come together as a community with a host of different organizations, including our post-secondaries and all three levels of government, to tackle this challenge in a very collaborative way. We do a call every year to other communities across Canada, and we look to share our lessons learned to determine how every community can harness specific resources, capabilities and experts with intention in their community. It's a choice.

With the funding that is going into a host of different organizations, creating requirements for a particular percentage and for particular goals and target outcomes to be addressed for women founders and marginalized founders would go a very long way. Again, that takes investment so that you can bring in the right expertise to work with women founders in a way that's conducive to the way they learn, the way they commercialize, the way they export. The access is different.

We talked earlier about tax policy and open banking. The more avenues we have available to support women.... Often they will not even look to go and specifically get the type of investment that would come from a VC, because they're looking to see how much equity they can keep or how they can do it with that bootstrapped capital.

Transcript

Discussions (0)