I had the invigorating experience of spending today (Saturday, January 21st) with the next generation’s brightest University of Saskatoon graduate and undergraduate students.
This morning’s i3 Workshop challenged 16 teams to express their ideas as opportunity based businesses plans. We worked through establishing a value proposition, segmenting markets and prioritizing the endless things that tug on an entrepreneur’s time.
In an afternoon talk to engineering students, I shared examples of excellent agility our portfolio company entrepreneurs have demonstrated in the past year, and talked about the how world class innovative companies can be built anywhere today.
Sanj Singh and the W. Brett Wilson Centre for Entrepreneurial Excellence are doing an excellent job inspiring passion for true innovation across multiple schools.
I believe the most important thing we need to do to foster innovation economies in addition to the resource based one we’re so fortunate to be born into is influence our next generation business leaders.
I’m proud to have been asked back to support the program again this year.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/W-Brett-Wilson-Centre-for-Entrepreneurial-Excellence/161795279088
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About Shawn Abbott
A partner with iNovia Capital, Shawn Abbott has a passion for building communications and Internet start-up companies. Shawn is presently an investor and board member at Tynt, CoolIT Systems, SiXtron, Peraso and Reflex Photonics. He has played entrepreneur, investor, technical and general management roles across fifteen technology start-ups in three continents over 20 years.
His work pioneering internet security as CTO, then President, at Rainbow Technologies (NASDAQ:RNBO) saw the company grow ten-fold in profitability before being sold to SafeNet (NASDAQ:SFNT) for nearly a half billion dollars. In the late 1980s, he established and built the AND Group, which pioneered the CD-ROM locking used on several million discs.
He is an accomplished public speaker, having presented at more than one hundred conferences on digital security and entrepreneurism, and taught software design courses internationally. He is past chair of the Banff Venture Forum and on the Venture Capital Association of Alberta executive.
He holds an early patent as one of the inventors of now popular USB keys. His publications include a chapter on hardware cryptography in the ICSA Guide to Cryptography. Shawn earned his Bachelor’s of Science in physics at the University of Alberta and has done postgraduate study at the University of Calgary, Stanford, and UC Irvine. Shawn is also an active rotary wing pilot.
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