the innovators

Sometimes it’s the big idea that infiltrates 


the tiny reaches of our quotidian life. And sometimes it’s 
the small idea that has a game-changing impact. 


In this year’s survey of innovation, we look at 20


organizations both big and small, from a wide variety of 


fields, that are shaking up their industries, 
our province, and even our world

The way we value

those who are truly innovative says something profound about our time and culture. We no longer look up to the classic heroes of industry, who extended railways or increased mill production. Our role models today are not content to simply expand and improve but feel compelled to create – their inspiration comes from what might be, rather than what is. 


In celebration of that inspiring and mysterious combination of imagination and action, we present our second annual ranking of B.C.’s top innovators. A panel of 13 experts (listed below) representing many sectors, including technology, marketing, real estate and health, helped us to come up with our long list of contenders. We found 50 solid candidates and, with input from our panel, chose 20 for the final list. Read more about our methodology on page 61. 


We were specifically looking for stories that haven’t been told before, projects that are having a real impact today and ideas with the potential to change our world tomorrow. It’s an eclectic mix that chronicles the restless intellects and relentless energies that typify this province’s top minds. We hope you’ll have as much fun reading it as we did putting it together.

The Innovation Experts Panel

David Allison 


is a co-founder of Vancouver marketing firm Braun/Allison Inc., which has helped define many brands in the West Coast real estate market. He previously served as vice-president of marketing for Sotheby’s International Realty Canada and Blueprint Global Marketing, with past positions at MacLaren McCann, the Alligator Group and McKim Advertising. He writes a weekly blog for the BCBusiness website.





David Berkowitz 


is a general partner at Ventures West Management Inc., leading the firm’s clean-tech practice. He currently serves as a director of the Vancouver Enterprise Forum, 6N Silicon Inc., Angstrom Power Inc. and SiXtron Advanced Materials Inc. He is also a past winner of Business in Vancouver’s Top 40 under 40 Award.





Jim Charlton 


is senior vice-president with GrowthWorks Capital Ltd. He has more than 20 years of venture-capital experience, including past positions with Discovery Enterprises Inc. and Ventures West Management. He is a board member of CellFor Inc., LightHaus Logic Inc. and Mixpo Inc.


Ida Goodreau 


is the former CEO of LifeLabs, and before that she headed Vancouver Coastal Health for seven years. She currently works as a consultant and also holds director positions at several companies as well as the Vancouver Foundation, Vancouver Board of Trade and Streetohome Foundation.





David IAN Gray 


is the owner and principal of DIG360 Consulting Ltd., a Vancouver-based retail consulting firm. His MBA from the Schulich School of Business includes a focus on sustainability. David is an event speaker and is quoted regularly in business media across Canada. 





Brent Holliday 


heads the technology practice at Capital West Partners, a Vancouver-based investment bank, and writes the Tech Talk column for BCBusiness. He sits on the boards of the B.C. Technology Industry Association and the Vancouver Island Advanced Technology Centre, and is a former board member of New Media BC.





Paul Lee 


is co-founder and general partner of Vanedge Capital Inc. and former president of Electronic Arts Worldwide Studios. He is chair of D-Wave Systems Inc., a member of the Premier’s Technology Council, and a director with the Vancouver Board of Trade, the Vancouver International Financial Institutions Sector Steering Committee and New Media B.C.





Lisa Payne 


is the CFO of the B.C. Innovation Council and president of Aegis Mobility Inc. Prior to Aegis, she served as president of TeraSpan Networks Inc. and director of finance and business operations for Wavemakers Inc. She is a CGA and co-founded Scientific Atlanta Canada and Criterion Service Laboratory. She has served on the board of the Focus Foundation of B.C. since 2005.





Mike Sherman 


is a partner with Chrysalix, a Vancouver venture-capital firm focused on alternative energy. He is chairman of the board of ReliOn Inc., a director of PurFresh Inc., an observer on the board of Epyon BV and an observer of Lilliputian Systems Inc. He is also a partner with BC Social Venture Partners.





James Topham 


is now retired after serving for 20 years as a partner in KPMG’s technology practice in Vancouver. He was a founding member of both the B.C. Technology Industry Association and BC Social Venture Partners, where he is currently chairman. He is currently on the board of three technology companies. He is a chartered accountant.





Mike Volker 


is the director of SFU’s commercialization and entrepreneurship office. His latest projects include the Western Universities Technology Innovation Fund and Greenangel Energy Corp. He runs the Vancouver Angel Network and is active with New Ventures BC. He was previously the executive director of the B.C. Advanced Systems Institute.





Tony Wanless 


is a certified management consultant and the principal of Knowpreneur Consultants, specializing in marketing, innovation and reinvention. A member of the Canadian Association of Management Consultants, he is content director for the Katerva World Innovation Challenge. He writes the Game Plan column for BCBusiness and a blog for the BCBusiness website.





Boris Wertz 


founded W Media Ventures in 2007, which invests in new consumer Internet companies. He was the founder of JustBooks, which was later acquired by AbeBooks Inc., and served as COO of AbeBooks until it was aquired by Amazon.com Inc. in 2008. He is also a former Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award winner.








1. Westbank Projects Corp. / 


The Woodward’s Development

The transformative aspect

of real estate development is mostly a fiction reserved for florid marketing brochures and breathless sales pitches; “cutting edge” and “a new way of living” are almost always cookie-cutter replicas of the same old thing. Or so it was until Woodward’s opened its doors last September. 


The most complicated and ambitious development in Vancouver’s 
civic history – reimagining, in one bold stroke, the Downtown Eastside – 
consists of more than one million square feet of mixed-use space for residents, businesses, bureaucrats and students; and for rich, middle-class and poor. Some critics have called Woodward’s a big gamble for developer Ian Gillespie and his company, Westbank Projects; others, more charitably, call it a bold social experiment. The full truth won’t be known for several years, perhaps decades, but there are many early signs of promise: a complete sellout of the 536 market condo units, an already bustling retail cluster (which includes JJ Bean Coffee Roasters, London Drugs Ltd. and Nester’s Market Ltd. – the Downtown Eastside’s first grocery store in 15 years) and glowing national and international media attention. 


Surrounding blocks are now being referred to, by business owners and real estate agents alike, as the “Woodward’s District.” “Woodward’s is going to do great things for everyone involved: for the area, for the industry and for Westbank,” predicts one of our panellists. “Bravo to Ian Gillespie and crew for pulling it off.” – Eds

2. Macdonald Dettwiler 
and Associates Ltd.

Macdonald Dettwiler and Associates (MDA) has built some of the most impressive machines ever to come out of B.C.: the Canadarm space robots and Radarsat surveillance satellites being the most well known. But surviving as a company on government engineering contracts alone can be a risky business, so MDA completely reimagined itself in the mid-’90s and now earns a substantial chunk of its revenue selling data and data services related to its orbital imaging expertise. “Their whole business model changed,” notes one panellist. “They’re an information company.” 


The double-edged business model has proven itself resilient. Revenues dropped by 14 per cent between 2008 and 2009 but profits nearly doubled. The last two years also saw the rollout of a new business platform, with both the Canadian and Australian armed forces signing up for the company’s new unmanned-aircraft surveillance services. – Eds





3. Vision Critical 





Everybody knows that the days when pollsters could phone up a diverse sample of people and get measured responses to an in-depth survey are, well, gone. Long gone. What’s surprising is how slow the market research world has been to follow Vision Critical’s lead. 


The company was founded in 2004 by Andrew Reid – son of legendary pollster Angus Reid (now Vision’s CEO) – and, unlike the competition, the software-and-services firm operates solely in the realm of web-based research. Calling upon a database of nearly 100,000 households (who get nominal remuneration to participate in various studies), Vision Critical now serves the research needs of many of the world’s top brands (Starbucks, General Motors and Kodak, among others), using interactive technology, strategic researchers and global online panels. As one of our experts puts it, “No one comes close to their breadth and depth.” (Read Frances Bula’s story on Vancouver’s cutthroat polling scene in the May issue of BCB.) 


Vision has grown 70 per cent in each year of its existence and now counts more than 300 employees in 10 offices worldwide. According to a recent Deloitte & Touche survey, it’s the fastest-growing tech company in B.C. This February Vision Critical announced revenues had increased 50 per cent in 2009 over 2008, marking the most successful year in the company’s history. – Eds








4. Teradici Corp.





The story of how Teradici chose a product to develop is almost as impressive as the product itself. About six years ago, Teradici’s founders, with backgrounds in the computer-chip industry, were looking for a tough problem to solve and took the question to some of the biggest computer makers around. The problem these giants were most interested in was one that had been kicking around for some 15 years without a decent solution.


The idea is to take all the computers in, say, a large office and move them to a central server room. What’s left on workers’ desks is just what’s necessary for human interface: the screen, keyboard, mouse, etc. Done right, computer users wouldn’t be able to tell the difference and IT could reap huge efficiency and security benefits. No more sensitive data sitting on hundreds of different hard drives; no more journeys around the office installing new software one machine at a time.


The brains at Teradici worked out a solution together with their partners (companies such as IBM Corp., Dell Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., The Samsung Group and VMware Inc.), which have gradually become customers since the first marketable chip was ready in 2007. The number of chips sold is now in the hundreds of thousands, according to president and CEO Dan Cordingly. The company does not disclose revenues, but Cordingly says they’re in the millions and have more than doubled since last year, although the company is not profitable yet. As one of our panellists explains, “They went to their customers and said, ‘What do you need? What would work for you?’ Then the customers helped them develop it.”


“It’s funny how that’s revolutionary,” quips another: “Ask the customer what they want.” – Eds


5. HootSuite

Today everyone and their dogs are tweeting, with about 50 million tweets daily, and even the most conservative corporations recognize that social networking has revolutionized the way we do business. But way back in 2006, with early adopters often hearing crickets chirping, Ryan Holmes, president of Vancouver-based brand management agency Invoke Media, knew there was gold in the Twittersphere’s hills. 


But to get those solid results, his clients – which include Wells Fargo and the Gap Inc. – needed picks, shovels and hard hats: free tools that would help marketing managers find, filter, track and statistically analyze tweets. Exploiting Twitter’s open platform, which allows third-party developers to play around within the site’s architecture, Holmes launched a free app called HootSuite in December 2008. This software survival kit helps businesses manage an otherwise daunting barrage of Twitter messages and respond with their own messaging campaigns, as well as track whether those tweets bring traffic to corporate websites and other social media sites. 


HootSuite’s dashboard design is a streamlined, customizable cockpit that controls an airport’s worth of traffic. You don’t have to speak computer code to organize and sort messages from multiple social media sites, target the most active users such as journalists and popular bloggers, create sophisticated messages with uploaded files and images, and track readers’ clicks to gauge whether your message is effective. 


Within six months of launching, HootSuite was the app of choice for 100,000 tweeters, and a year later it had received numerous awards. The company has adapted it for LinkedIn, WordPress and Facebook’s estimated 350 million users, as well as a mobile app for iPhone. HootSuite now has 400,000 users including The Walt Disney Co., Fox Broadcasting Co., the U.S. Army and Dell Inc., along with thousands of individuals from power-bloggers to amateurs. 


“Today everyone is a media channel,” says Holmes, who starts each day groping for his iPhone and uses words like “truthiness” and “stickiness” to describe effective social media brands and technologies. “Corporations need tools to deal with that constant stream of information quickly.” 


Of course, like Twitter and Facebook, HootSuite is feeling the pressure to monetize. Until recently it was bankrolled by Invoke Media, which Holmes co-founded in 2000, but this past January HootSuite became an independent company. That’s when HootSuite received $1.9 million in financing from venture-capital firms including Hearst Interactive Media and Blumberg Capital (Holmes became the new company’s CEO, while maintaining his stake and position with Invoke). HootSuite aims to turn a profit by mid-2010, with new apps and mobile partnerships in the pipeline and plans to charge corporate users a nominal fee.


“HootSuite will still be the fastest, cheapest and easiest way to get a grip on disruptive mass communication platforms like Twitter and Facebook,” says investor David Blumberg, the 50-year-old managing partner of Blumberg Capital and a specialist in social media technologies, who compares his pre-HootSuite Twitter experiences to “drinking from a fire hose.” By contrast, “HootSuite filters that torrent of information and makes it useful whether you’re an individual or a corporation.” 


Tools like Twitter have levelled the 
playing field, says Blumberg, who notes that as the debate on social media’s stickiness percolates, the pace and clout of online communities accelerates. “Younger 
generations live and swim in this soup. It has smashed traditional hierarchies. Corporations can’t hide out like dictators – they have to dive in.” Whether brands sink or swim, HootSuite is clearly riding the wave. – Danielle Egan


6. BuildDirect Technologies Inc.





It’s all too easy to look at BuildDirect, a fast-growing business that sells building supplies online, and see just another Internet store. But according to our experts panel, BuildDirect is really a logistics company shaking up a major market.


The company, which shipped 25,000 loads to 60 countries in 2009, has developed a software system that manages the complex process of getting the right goods onto the right container ship and then to the right address. This has allowed it to cut importers, exporters and distributors out of the supply chain and give customers access to quality flooring, tile and other building material from small-scale manufacturers at a big price advantage. In fact, the system works so well that some manufacturers that don’t even sell their product on the BuildDirect website are now using the company to handle their logistics, firing their traditional distributors. 


The BuildDirect system also allows customers to influence the supply chain. All customers are invited to review the products they’ve purchased, and every reply is posted on the website, good or bad. Poorly performing manufacturers are gradually weeded out as their products collect bad reviews, helping BuildDirect save on its quality-control efforts. – Eds


7. Westport Innovations Inc.


You can put together a long list of B.C. companies developing green technology, but single out those with real solutions at work in the world and the list gets a whole lot shorter. At the top of that list is Westport Innovations. Westport makes heavy truck engines that run on natural gas instead of diesel, reducing the emissions they produce. But its most impressive achievement is securing partnerships with a top-notch list of truck makers, including Cummins, Kenworth, Daimler, Sterling and Mack. 


To many environmentalists, truck producers might seem like the enemy, but it is precisely they who must be converted in order to enact major changes in industry. And Westport is doing so with some solid business fundamentals, selling its partners on the cost of natural gas relative to diesel in addition to its environmental benefits. Westport is not yet profitable but shows strong growth: it shipped more than 4,000 units in 2009, up from 2,700 the year before, with revenues growing by 70 per cent. – Eds

8. Tantalus Systems Corp.

Pity the poor meter man. The guy who checks to see how much power, water or gas you’ve been using has to run a daily gauntlet of angry dogs and foul weather. And soon, if Burnaby-based Tantalus Systems has its way, his job will go the way of the chimney sweep. 


The company, in the simplest terms, designs and builds communications equipment for utilities. Tantalus’s networking system, TUNet, gives utilities a two-way link between themselves and their customers. They can read meters remotely, from the relative comfort of their desks. But this is like saying the Internet is a way for computer users to connect. A “smart” network such as TUNet is the gateway to a whole suite of applications that should ultimately help utilities and their customers reduce consumption, increase reliability, and cut costs and greenhouse gases. 


Some 30 utilities – 29 of them in the U.S., including in Anaheim, California, and a host of smaller municipalities – are already using TUNet to shed labour costs, instantly detect power outages and give customers detailed, every-15-minute breakdowns of their energy consumption. Gregg Kiess, the president and CEO of Tantalus customer Northeastern Rural Electric Membership Corp., likes to tell the story of one homeowner who discovered his power bill was spiking at 2 a.m. “The parents were not home,” says Kiess. “Who was home were college-aged kids – and they had a hot tub.”


Most utilities start with these relatively basic applications, but in due time the same network will enable them to do much more. Customers will be able to program their appliances to operate when electricity prices are cheapest, or when they are powered by the greenest sources. They can agree to have their power shut off to certain devices when demand on the system is too high and be compensated by the utility for helping stave off a brownout. Homeowners with rooftop solar panels will be able to sell power to the grid, then buy power from the grid at night when prices are cheaper. These are just some of the applications on the horizon.


Tantalus, of course, is not the only company trying to build the power grid of the future. The Smart Grid, as it’s known, has attracted US$3.4 billion from the Obama administration, part of its $862-billion stimulus package, to further prod a power industry already desperate to upgrade antiquated infrastructure. Big players such as General Electric Co., IBM Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. are all getting into the fray. Yet many utilities are finding that Tantalus can give them solutions not found anywhere else.


The word that Tantalus’s clients keep repeating is “flexibility.” Tantalus works with a wide array of communications platforms including radio, fibre optic, power line, cellular, WiMax, WiFi and more. Customers use whatever mode suits them best and change if the situation calls for it. And flexibility also means scalability, the ability to adapt to new technologies and applications in the future.


Wes Kelley is the president and CEO of Pulaski Electric System in the small-but-high-tech city of Pulaski, Tennessee. “We went through a full evaluation,” he says of his search for a Smart Grid supplier. Only Tantalus gave him the flexibility he needed. A third of his customers live in the small city of about 8,000 and have access to a state-of-the-art fibre optic network. But the other two-thirds live in the countryside, where the distances make fibre too costly and radio a more ideal solution. “TUNet enables us to serve both our rural customers and our urban customers on the same platform and the same software database,” he says.


It will be a gargantuan, capital-consuming task to modernize an American power system that Time magazine calls “a dinosaur – a leaky, money-wasting, carbon-dioxide-
spewing system that remains shockingly vulnerable to accidents and terrorist attacks.” Canada’s situation is equally grim. But with efforts like Tantalus’s to bring greater efficiency to the grid, the future looks brighter – and greener. – Dee Hon

9. Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers Inc.








Last year BCBusiness recognized a local online retailer for creating a global market for used books, and AbeBooks Inc. is indeed a remarkable story, linking millions of bibliophiles around the globe. But Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers takes online selling to another level: when the products are not books but Caterpillar tractors and backhoes, online selling becomes a whole lot more complicated.


Ritchie Bros. is the world’s largest industrial auctioneer, selling US$3.57 billion of used and unused equipment at 340 unreserved auctions in 2008. The company’s secret is a sophisticated online system that allows bidders from around the world to easily participate in auctions. 


In the words of one panellist, “Ritchie Brothers has turned local markets for used industrial equipment into a worldwide market by continuously expanding its services to buyers and sellers.” – Eds

10. Burnaby Centre for Mental Health and Addiction

Sometimes the most

effective innovation is the most obvious one. For health-care providers struggling to help B.C.’s most severely troubled citizens in the Downtown Eastside, that light bulb idea was simple: instead of dealing with each health problem separately, why not create a centre where patients could access integrated treatment for addiction, mental health and other significant health problems under one roof? 


Before the June 2008 opening of the Burnaby Centre for Mental Health and Addiction, there was no treatment specifically for those with such a mix of serious health problems. “What we have been doing for the last decade is just keeping them alive,” says Heather Hay, who worked for Vancouver Coastal Health in the Downtown Eastside for years as a regional director of complex mental health and addiction before becoming director of the centre. “We were making contact but had no long-term solutions.” Hay, who was also involved in establishing the Insite safe injection service, pushed for a dedicated centre that would allow health-care providers to better reach these challenging clients, and Premier Gordon Campbell announced funding in February 2008. Vancouver Coastal Health, the Provincial Health Services Authority and the Ministry of Health partnered to open the centre: a 100-bed facility that provides long-term care specifically designed for people with a complex combination of addiction, mental illness and other health problems such as HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. 


“In the current climate, the focus has been very much on pushing people into the community and accessing a collection of community resources that are all spread out,” says Douglas Saunders, a clinical psychologist and assistant professor at the University of Toronto. The Burnaby centre’s innovation lies in bucking this trend, he adds.


Most addiction services typically offer 30- to 60-day programs, while programs offered at the centre last between nine and 12 months. This allows staff to build trusting relationships with clients, fully address their health issues and help them prepare to resume normal life. Instead of focusing solely on fixing their problems, clients are encouraged to develop their strengths. “People usually talk about these clients as addicts or the homeless, but they all have another face. Are they a good parent? A poet? Musician? It changes their identity,” Hay explains.


While other programs that concurrently treat addiction and mental illness exist in Canada, the centre in Burnaby is bringing integrated treatment to the next level. “As soon as you throw in homelessness, you’re into a whole different ball game,” says Saunders. The holistic model of treatment extends even past health-specific issues, with wide-reaching collaboration between the justice system, the Ministry of Housing and Social Development and the 
Ministry of Children and Family Development. Although it’s too early for comprehensive statistics, anecdotes abound of patients gaining the ability to live in independent housing, care for their children and pursue higher education. Nearly 150 patients have completed the program so far.


BCB’s panel believes there is also an economic benefit to society as a whole in treating these people more effectively. As one panellist argues, “The enormous cost to public safety, enforcement, emergency departments and the cost to the health-care system overall through secondary medical conditions is another reason the national and international communities are interested in the success of the Burnaby centre.” 


There is still much work to be done. With more than 700 referrals to date, the centre’s waiting list is long. Five per cent of potential patients die while waiting for treatment. But it is continuing to grow and search for innovative models of care. In January, 22 new beds opened for female patients who need additional support after completing the program, and 22 beds for young adults (between the ages of 19 and 24) will be made available in May. 


– Erin Millar








11. NowPublic





It’s either the death of journalism or a sign of its imminent renaissance. “Crowd-sourced news,” otherwise known as citizen journalism, is reshaping the way we consume media, and Vancouver’s NowPublic, one of the revolutionary forces in the nascent movement, is now taking its bottom-up approach to newsgathering global. Our profile of NowPublic’s co-founder, the peripatetic entrepreneur Leonard Brody, begins on page 62. – Eds





12. Renewal Partners


The modus operandi of venture capitalism is quite simple: make money – the more the faster, the better. Social venture capitalism (SVC) – or what Joel Solomon, president and CEO of Vancouver SVC pioneer Renewal Partners, calls “patient capitalism” – puts a more nuanced emphasis on “triple-bottom-line” accounting, with equal weight on people, the planet and profits. 


The idea isn’t that money is irrelevant, just that it’s only one of several considerations – another being that investments be measured in decades even centuries, not months or years. While Renewal Partners didn’t invent SVC, it is widely credited with being a North American leader in socially responsible investing – and making good money doing so: on average, at least a two-times rate of return. 


Notable successes over the years include Small Potatoes Urban Delivery Inc., Happy Planet Food Inc., Salt Spring Coffee Co., Capers Whole Food Market and cleaning products outfit Seventh Generation Inc. In early 2009, the firm launched Renewal2 Investment Fund, bringing in 40 wealthy outside investors – half from outside B.C. – to participate for the first time (heretofore, Renewal’s efforts had been bankrolled by Solomon and his silent partner, Carol Newell). By year’s end, Renewal2 had raised $20 million, with another $20 million expected by mid-2010. – Eds


13. Day4 Energy Inc.


The technology that allows us to generate electricity through solar power has the potential to radically change the world; however, the process is simply too expensive to replace traditional polluting techniques. That is why Day4 Energy is a B.C. company worth noting. The company has developed a photovoltaic panel with significantly less electrical resistance than others on the market, generating more juice per hour of sunlight and driving down the cost per kilowatt. 


Like many companies in this market, Day4 was hit hard by the recession: revenues for 2009 were 60 per cent lower than those for 2008. However, the company has several ongoing contracts in Germany and Ontario, and it is in the process of moving its manufacturing efforts from Burnaby to Poland to lower the costs to its prime European customers. And it’s precisely the question of cost that will ultimately determine the fate of the entire solar industry. – Eds


14. Tekmira 
Pharmaceuticals Corp.

Some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world are putting big money into developing a class of drugs that many