Fostering Innovation in the Community
Welcome to the latest edition of RIC News. We’re excited to be embarking on promising new initiatives that will strengthen the Region of Peel’s commitment to fostering innovation, jobs and economic prosperity.
With the recent release of the report An Action Plan for Innovation in Mississauga, the City of Mississauga now has a roadmap for promoting innovation. Innovation is about bringing fragmented communities together to generate ideas, build connections and showcase the relationships that foster economic prosperity. This is what the Action Plan is about and its foundation is in the Mississauga Innovation Leadership Alliance (MILA).
MILA is the central recommendation from the report and has the goal of bringing stakeholders together from the academic, civic and business communities to implement a strategy of cooperation and develop a culture of innovation in Mississauga. The report recommends that the Mayor’s office partner with the RIC Centre Advisory Board, Economic Development Advisory Council, Mississauga Board of Trade, University of Toronto in Mississauga and the Ministry of Research and Innovation, to centralize the leadership of the innovation community.
The RIC Centre is already working to promote and expand the culture of innovation in Mississauga and is creating two new programs in support of the Action Plan. The first event will be a new Peer-to-Peer networking event focused on innovation. Currently, the peer-to-peer program at the RIC Centre is geared towards CEO’s but soon we will be launching a new program for the technology officers of mid-size companies. This program, known as the CTO/CSO Peer-to-Peer, will bring together the technology builders of the innovation community and offer an opportunity for these stakeholders to come together and be excited by new ideas. The goal of the program is to stimulate their imaginations and build the relationships necessary for Mississauga to excel as an innovation hub.
But, seeing a new idea and understanding the process that it takes to bring that idea to market are very different. This is why the RIC Centre will be launching a new event early in 2012. This event will be centred on the critical need for innovation in the manufacturing sector and the challenges that companies face in bringing new ideas from the drawing board to the customer.
These new events will bring the cycle of innovation full circle, from making the first connection, through to developing an idea, on to manufacturing and turning that idea into reality.
