The shift in Calgary didn’t happen overnight. It built slowly, through hallway conversations, late-night meetings, and a growing sense that the city’s future could look different. One of those conversations took place at the Petroleum Club, where Deborah Yedlin watched an idea start to take root.
Yedlin, now president and CEO of the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, remembers the evening well. Oil prices had crashed, and a small group gathered to discuss what came next.
“We have to diversify,” she recalls one of them saying. “And we’re going to start this process by raising money tonight.”
That meeting sparked the launch of the Calgary chapter of Creative Destruction Lab at the University of Calgary.
It also marked the start of a new conversation about how the city could use its technical expertise and capital to build something that wasn’t dependent on the price of oil.
That same question continues to shape Calgary Innovation Week, hosted by Platform Calgary, which opened with a discussion featuring Yedlin, Guy Levesque executive director of the Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurial Thinking, and Prabh Paul Parmar, founder of TraceRent.
Moderated by Jennifer Lussier, interim CEO of Platform Calgary, the panel explored how the city’s innovation economy has matured, what’s driving growth, what challenges remain, and why now feels like a turning point.
For decades, Calgary has gone through familiar cycles of diversification. Each downturn inspires new ventures, only for momentum to fade when commodity prices rebound.
Lussier said this time the community is moving together rather than reacting in parts.
“Calgary’s innovation story is no longer about responding to crisis,” she said. “It’s about building systems that connect founders, researchers, and investors so progress continues between cycles.”
But this time, the shift feels more durable. Innovation is no longer a side project born of necessity. It has become part of how the city defines economic strength.
A shift from reaction to structure
When the energy sector contracted in 2014, thousands of professionals with backgrounds in science, engineering, and finance found themselves asking where their skills could be applied next.
Many discovered that innovation wasn’t a departure from what they knew, but a continuation of it. The analytical mindset that built one of the world’s most efficient energy sectors could also build technology companies, research ventures, and data-driven startups.
“Everybody in this city has some sort of a science or finance background,” said Yedlin. “That means everybody’s a problem-solver, and they’re also looking to manage risk.”
That shared fluency in systems thinking, de-risking, design, and scaling has shaped Calgary’s evolving economy.
Platform Calgary’s Lussier highlighted data from Startup Genome showing that Calgary now ranks among the top 10 emerging tech ecosystems in North America and top 50 globally.
This growth is evidenced by the over 24,000 tech jobs created in just three years, making Calgary the fastest-growing tech talent hub on the continent.
Unlike earlier diversification pushes, this growth isn’t being led by a single industry or institution. It’s being built through alignment.
The city’s universities, civic organizations, investors, and founders are now operating as an interconnected system. The result is not just new companies, but a new foundation for how economic development happens.
Universities at the centre of the ecosystem
At the University of Calgary, that shift is visible every day, said Levesque.
The Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurial Thinking sits in the middle of campus, where students, faculty, and alumni mix across disciplines.
The Hunter Hub serves as the University of Calgary’s central hub for innovation and entrepreneurship, offering programs, mentorship, and space for students and researchers to turn ideas into ventures. It connects disciplines across all faculties, linking academic research with real-world application and helping embed entrepreneurial thinking into the fabric of the university.
“Our job is to ignite, inspire, empower, and equip,” said Levesque. “We’re creating a community of entrepreneurially curious individuals.”
The numbers tell part of the story. According to the University of Calgary, it has launched 105 research-based companies in the last six years and reported $632.4 million in externally funded research revenue for 2024-25. But what matters more is the mindset.
Commercialization that used to be seen as a distraction from research is now seen as a continuation of it.
That shift struck Crystal Phillips, senior director at the Opportunity Calgary Investment Fund (OCIF), who spoke before the panel. She previously worked at Thin Air Labs and co-founded a neuroscience charity, Branch Out Neurological Foundation.
She recalls being at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute recently, where researchers were talking about open science and the importance of bringing discoveries to market.
“The whole conversation was about open science and commercializing your science,” she said. “That used to be a swear word in academia.”
That shift in thinking, supported by programs like the Creative Destruction Lab, the Life Sciences Innovation Hub, and the Hunter Hub, has created a steady pipeline of companies emerging from the city’s research community.
Building confidence through collaboration
Levesque said that what sets Calgary apart is how collaborative its innovation culture has become.
He described it as an ecosystem where “the concept of a zero-sum game doesn’t exist.” Companies and institutions are learning from one another rather than competing for attention.
Platform Calgary has played a visible role in that process.
Lussier said the goal isn’t only to grow startups but to connect the city’s innovation infrastructure so it functions as a single ecosystem.
“When we measure success, it’s not about any one program or company,” she said. “It’s about how the whole system works together.”
Since opening in 2022, Platform Calgary has supported more than 4,000 founders through its education and acceleration programs and, in 2025 alone, hosted more than 1,000 events. It has also helped create physical and social infrastructure for the city’s innovation network, said Lussier, something previous diversification waves never had time to build.
That foundation is now reinforced by complementary institutions. OCIF channels public capital into venture firms and community programs that strengthen the local pipeline. Calgary Economic Development has identified sector strengths in energy transformation, life sciences, agriculture, and creative industries, giving the city a clearer sense of where it can compete and win.
“Calgary used to wait for the next cycle to start again,” said Yedlin. “Now, the cycle is the system.”
Together, those efforts have turned what was once a recovery play into a standing economy — one designed to adapt rather than react.
The next test: Scaling at home
The challenge now, Yedlin said, is ensuring that the companies born in Calgary can grow here.
“We have the success, the track record, and now the focus is, how do we scale?” she said. “We need to unlock that capital and make sure these companies aren’t thinking about their first market being in the U.S. It should be Canada.”
She argues that scaling depends on policy and tax changes to encourage more private-sector investment in research and development (R&D). Yedlin noted that Canada’s record has lagged its G7 peers, with R&D intensity remaining weak.
That challenge has national implications.
If Calgary succeeds in building a diversified innovation economy, one that endures the next commodity cycle, it will offer a model for how regional ecosystems can balance resource strength with technological transformation.
A national signal
Across Canada, innovation policy tends to operate in silos.
Federal programs, provincial funding, and local accelerators often move on separate timelines. But as Lussier and Levesque described, Calgary’s post-secondary institutions, civic organizations, and business community have developed unusually close working relationships, aligning around shared goals for commercialization and talent.
Other regions, including Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal, benefit from larger venture capital pools and deeper corporate clusters. According to Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), Ontario, British Columbia, and Quebec accounted for 86% of the total VC activity in 2024.
Calgary’s strength lies instead in coordination. The city’s network of universities, funds, and civic bodies has created a clearer line between research, entrepreneurship, and policy. This approach offers lessons for sustaining momentum between funding cycles in regional ecosystems.
If Canada wants to strengthen its overall innovation performance, it may need to think more like Calgary, not by replicating its industries, but by adopting its sense of shared ownership.
A culture built on second chances
For all the data and strategy, Yedlin believes Calgary’s real advantage is cultural.
“Because of the sometimes merciless nature of the energy sector, we’ve also learned to deal with failure,” she said. “I often see Calgary as the city of second chances. People here start, fail, and start again. And others back them again. That doesn’t happen anywhere else in Canada.”
That willingness to try again is what anchors this phase of diversification. Innovation depends on iteration. On the freedom to test, learn, and rebuild. Calgary’s economic history has already trained its people to think that way. The difference now is that they’re applying it to a broader canvas.
If earlier generations built Calgary’s identity through what it extracted from the ground, the next generation is defining it through what it builds above it. The work is slower, less visible, and more complex. But it’s also more sustainable.
And this time, the momentum isn’t waiting for a price signal to keep going.
Final Shots
- Economic diversification has taken hold in Calgary after decades of false starts tied to oil’s boom-and-bust cycles.
- Platform Calgary and the University of Calgary have contributed to the structure previous diversification efforts lacked, turning momentum into a lasting system.
- Collaboration has become Calgary’s advantage, with businesses, researchers, and civic partners working as one ecosystem.
- A culture of second chances defines Calgary’s innovation story, where failure fuels reinvention instead of ending it.
Digital Journal is an official media partner of Calgary Innovation Week.
