The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada is the major federal agency responsible for funding natural sciences and engineering research in Canada. NSERC directly funds university professors and students as well as Canadian companies to perform research and training. With funding from the Government of Canada, NSERC supports the research of over 41,000 students, trainees and professors at universities and colleges in Canada with an annual budget of CA$1.1 billion in 2015. Its current director is Alejandro Adem.
Thompson Rivers University is a public teaching and research university offering undergraduate and graduate degrees and vocational training. Its main campus is in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada, and its name comes from the two rivers which converge in Kamloops, the North Thompson and South Thompson. The university has a satellite campus in Williams Lake, BC and a distance education division called TRU-Open Learning. It also has several international partnerships through its TRU World division. TRU is accredited by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NWCCU) at the associate, baccalaureate and master's degree levels.
In Canada, the Regional Development Agencies (RDA) are the seven federal government agencies responsible for addressing key economic challenges and furthering economic development, diversification, and job creation specific to their respective regions.
Science World is a science centre run by a not-for-profit organization called ASTC Science World Society in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. It is located at the end of False Creek and features many permanent interactive exhibits and displays, as well as areas with varying topics throughout the years.
John Yap is a Canadian politician and former banker. He represented the electoral district of Richmond-Steveston in the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia from 2005 to 2020, as part of the BC Liberal caucus. During his time in government, he served as Minister of State for Climate Action, Minister Responsible for Multiculturalism, and Minister of Advanced Education, Innovation and Technology in the cabinets of premiers Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark.
Crown corporations are government organizations in Canada with a mixture of commercial and public-policy objectives. They are directly and wholly owned by the Crown.
Enterprize Canada is a student-run, not-for-profit organization with the focus on promoting entrepreneurship while providing opportunities to young entrepreneurs to grow and develop their ideas. Established in 2001 under the leadership of founder Michael Lee and other undergraduate business students from the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia, Enterprize Canada hosts Canada's largest student-run business plan competition and entrepreneurship conference. Over 250 student-delegates, industry professionals, and young entrepreneurs from across Canada meet annually in Vancouver, BC in this two-part event. While the conference and the business plan competition are the highlight events of the organization, Enterprize Canada hosts and participates in a number of community-based activities through workshops, conferences and social events that connects students in universities across Canada. Since 2009, Enterprize has also hosted the annual miniEnterprize conference which connects young innovators in across twenty high schools throughout British Columbia.
Higher education in British Columbia is delivered by 25 publicly funded institutions that are composed of eleven universities, eleven colleges, and three institutes. This is in addition to three private universities, five private colleges, and six theological colleges. There are also an extensive number of private career institutes and colleges. Over 297,000 students were enrolled in post-secondary institutions in British Columbia in the 2019-2020 academic year.
The BC Tech Association, formally the British Columbia Technology Industry Association (BCTIA), is a not-for-profit member-funded trade association in British Columbia, Canada, which promotes the technology industry in the province. The technology industry in BC has been growing steadily since the late 1990s and constituted 5.9% of British Columbia's economic output in 2007.
Aneesh Paul Chopra is an American executive who served as the first Chief Technology Officer of the United States. He was appointed in 2009 by President Barack Obama and was at the White House through 2012. Chopra previously served as Virginia's Secretary of Technology under Governor Tim Kaine. Chopra was a candidate in 2013 for the Democratic nomination for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia. He is the author of Innovative State: How New Technologies Can Transform Government (2014) and co-founder and president of CareJourney. In 2015 he joined Albright Stonebridge Group as a senior advisor.
James McEwen is a Canadian biomedical engineer and the inventor of the microprocessor-controlled automatic tourniquet system, which is now standard for 15,000-20,000 procedures daily in operating rooms worldwide. Their widespread adoption and use has significantly improved surgical safety, quality and economy. McEwen is President of Western Clinical Engineering Ltd., a biomedical engineering research and development company and he is a director of Delfi Medical Innovations Inc., a company he founded to commercialize some results of that research and development. He is also an adjunct professor in the School of Biomedical Engineering, in the Department of Orthopaedics and in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia.
Daiya Foods Inc. is a Canada-based dairy-alternative food company located in Burnaby, British Columbia. The company was established in 2008 by Andre Kroecher, Greg Blake and Mike Slinn. Daiya's original products are cheese analogues made from coconut oil and tapioca flour that are known for their cheese-like consistency and melting properties. They contain no animal products or soy, lactose, wheat, barley, gluten, or nuts.
The Presidential Innovation Fellows program is a competitive fellowship program that pairs top innovators from the private sector, non-profits, and academia with top innovators in government to collaborate on solutions that aim to deliver significant results in months, not years. It was established in 2012 and has operated continuously since then. The program focuses on generating measurable results, using innovation techniques from private industry such as Lean Startup, Design Thinking, and Agile Development.
Harvard Innovation Labs (i-Lab) is an institution which aims to promote team-based and entrepreneurial activities among Harvard students, faculty, entrepreneurs, and members of the Allston and Greater Boston communities.
MediaCore was an educational technology company that was founded in June 2011 in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada by Stuart Bowness and Damien Tanner. It aims to help educators capture, manage and share educational content to students, faculty and staff through its cloud hosted media platform. It was acquired by Workday, Inc. in 2015.
Maryam Sadeghi is an Iranian-born Canadian computer scientist and businesswoman in the field of medical image analysis.
British Columbia (B.C.) is the third largest Canadian province by population and fourth largest provincial economy. Like other provinces in the Canadian federation, B.C. consists of both private and public institutions. However, as Canada's westernmost province, located between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains, B.C. has unique economic characteristics that distinguish it from much of the rest of Canada.
Elicia Maine is a Canadian academic. She is the W.J. VanDusen Professor of Innovation & Entrepreneurship within Simon Fraser University's Beedie School of Business. She was the founding educational coordinator for New Ventures BC, and the founding Academic Director of Invention to Innovation (i2I), an award-winning graduate program in science & technology commercialization offered in traditional and online formats. Within Simon Fraser University, she serves as Associate Vice President, Knowledge Mobilization & Innovation, providing oversight of SFU Innovates.
The Open Learning Institute of British Columbia (OLI) was a single mode, distance education post-secondary provincial institute in Canada, created in 1978 by the Government of British Columbia. Its mandate was to improve access to higher education across the province by means of distance education and other open learning methods. Inspired in part by the UK Open University model, it used a combination of print-based courses, audiovisual media and telephone tutoring to offer courses up to the baccalaureate degree level. In 1988, it was subsumed in part as the BC Open University under the new Open Learning Agency (OLA). In 2005 it was amalgamated as the Open Learning Division with the newly designated Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops (TRU), BC. TRU was formerly known as the University College of the Cariboo.
