“Without a cohesive central strategy, everyone is just firing off in different directions, hoping to get lucky,” said Nima Najand, executive director of innovation and IP at Innovate Calgary.
The comment reflects a wider shift taking place across Calgary’s innovation economy as the city works to connect its many moving parts into one coordinated plan.
The plan calls for more than 187,000 new jobs and $28 billion in economic activity by 2034. Delivering on those goals will require new levels of coordination, shared infrastructure, and execution across Calgary’s innovation ecosystem.
At Calgary Innovation Week, four leaders working to help shape that system — Najand, Platform Calgary’s Jennifer Lussier, QAI Ventures’ Saeed Neyshabouri, and the ETC Foundation’s Nannette Ho-Covernton — joined CED’s Chelsea Hallick to share their perspectives on bringing this plan to life.
Calgary’s plan reflects a larger question facing many regions. Can innovation be scaled through design rather than chance? The next decade will offer insight into what happens when cities move from competition to coordination in how they build capacity.
Turning ambition into infrastructure
If the strategy defines the destination, these organizations are building the pathways to reach it. Their work connects university research, venture investment, and entrepreneurial support into the kind of infrastructure that allows ideas to scale.
Innovate Calgary is the University of Calgary’s innovation transfer and business incubator arm, helping researchers and founders turn discoveries into commercial ventures through startup support, funding programs, and access to lab and accelerator facilities.
“Having the strategy that one group leads, but does it in a collaborative way so everyone can contribute, is essential,” said Najand.
That coordination is already taking shape through a network of sector-specific nodes focused on energy, life sciences, quantum, aerospace, and creative industries.
Each combines lab space, accelerators, and funding partners to create what the strategy describes as “a roadmap to guide innovators from startup to scaleup.”
Together, these hubs are designed to function as a connected system that turns Calgary’s distributed innovation districts into shared infrastructure. From the Energy Transition Centre downtown to the Quantum City campus at the University of Calgary, each node has its own focus, but the value lies in how they work together.
At Platform Calgary, a non-profit that connects entrepreneurs to education, mentorship, and investment through its downtown innovation hub, interim CEO Jennifer Lussier says the goal is to make that roadmap visible and accessible.
“Being able to provide infrastructure that entrepreneurs, investors, people looking to work in tech, and corporations can feed into seamlessly or barrier-free is the most important thing that we can do,” she said. “Formalizing pathways that are highly visible and highly accessible for any stakeholder to access and connect.”
For Nannette Ho-Covernton, executive director of the ETC Foundation — a non-profit that supports clean energy and technology ventures through the Energy Transition Centre — progress depends on stronger alignment across sectors.
“Streamlining all these different initiatives, allowing us access to each other’s networks, makes a huge difference,” she said. “A centralized strategy with a hub-and-spoke model is the right strategy in order for us to advance faster.”
What Calgary is building reflects a challenge seen across Canada. Innovation depends on clear pathways between research, capital, and talent. The lesson is that when those links work in sync, the results can extend far beyond one city.
Building capacity for scale
The panellists agreed that physical infrastructure alone won’t deliver the city’s goals unless it’s matched by the financial and human capacity to scale.
“We have a lot of early-stage funds, but once a company gets to a stage where they need to raise serious amounts of capital, that’s a little bit lacking,” said Najand. “There’s a real danger of these companies moving to a different jurisdiction.”
Lussier added that the other missing link is market access.
“Programs can help an entrepreneur become resilient and learn the skills,” she said. “But fundamentally, they need customers. That’s the biggest gap.”
Ho-Covernton echoed the same challenge from the energy sector, noting that commercialization depends on companies having the capital to deploy their technologies at scale, a step that often becomes the biggest hurdle for startups moving from prototype to market.
From a global vantage point, Saeed Neyshabouri of QAI Ventures, said the existence of a clear, city-wide strategy helped bring international investors to Calgary.
QAI Ventures, a global venture capital firm and accelerator for quantum startups, has hubs in Switzerland, Calgary, and Singapore. Neyshabouri said QAI’s decision to establish a presence in the city followed early conversations with local researchers and ecosystem leaders, including the University of Calgary’s Quantum City team.
When QAI’s executives visited, he said they saw not just ambition but a coordinated plan backed by municipal, provincial, and federal support. That clarity made Calgary stand out from other cities where interest in quantum technology remains more fragmented.
“It made an impact for us to see that this is a city that has ambitions, and they had a plan for that ambition,” Neyshabouri said. “It’s not just about hype. It was an informed decision by seeing that support from the ecosystem and a city that has a strategy to get where they want to get.”
A decade to deliver
When asked what success could look like a decade from now, the group returned to the same three priorities that underpin the strategy: speed, talent, and long-term vision.
“The most transformational thing through the strategy in the next 10 years is speed,” said Lussier. “Speed from seed to commercialization, to scale, to potentially to exit.”
Najand pointed to the need for consistent direction as Calgary transitions beyond its traditional industries, saying the city cannot afford to wait for global markets to shift away from fossil fuels before acting. He stressed that maintaining a long-term vision will be critical to the strategy’s success.
Ho-Covernton highlighted talent readiness as another key factor, pointing out that Canada continues to lag in AI adoption and productivity. She said improving AI literacy and workforce preparedness will be essential for the next decade of growth.
Their perspectives reflect a broader truth. The coming decade will show whether Canada’s innovation systems can deliver results through alignment, investment, and execution instead of relying on ambition.
Final shots
- Calgary’s Innovation Strategy launched in April, setting a 10-year goal to create 187,000 jobs and add $28 billion to the economy.
- The city is shifting from momentum to infrastructure, building coordinated systems that link research, capital, and talent across sectors.
- Innovate Calgary, Platform Calgary, QAI Ventures, and the ETC Foundation are each developing parts of that infrastructure through commercialization, navigation, investment, and energy transition work.
- The biggest hurdles are scale-up capital, access to enterprise customers, and talent readiness for emerging technologies like AI.
- Success will depend on execution, maintaining long-term direction, speeding up commercialization, and proving that coordination can work at city scale.
Digital Journal is an official media partner of Calgary Innovation Week.
