Tech for Good – Welcome to True North

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The True North conference headline of Tech for Good tackles the difficult question of ethics in innovation. #TrueNorth18 is a ground-breaking international conference that will provide a forum for critical conversations about issues at the intersection of society and technology.

It will focus on how to re-imagine and reaffirm tech as a force for good in the world. Here we took a speak-peak to help orientate you to this stunning showcase. The conference has attracted 2,000 attendees from 15 countries and 45 high-calibre speakers on three-stages. The result is anticipated a Tech for Good Declaration.

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Design Thinking in Action – Health Innovation Program

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The hacking mentality brings together the ideal mix of patients, healthcare professionals, physicians, technologists, designers, entrepreneurs, decision-makers, business leaders, researchers, administrators and governments. Collaboratively they can break down barriers to innovation in healthcare.

While a hackathon creates inspiring embryonic projects, we need to help these startups to sustain and scale. This mindset led to the Health Innovation Program. Here we learn more about this improved model through #HIP613.

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Patients Included | Toronto Health Innovation

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Toronto Health Innovation Week provided a spirit of optimism for the newest innovations. Patients Included should be the default way of working in health innovation and improvement.

We selected four 1-minute video interviews to include here to capture the essence and optimism of Toronto Health Innovation Week. Read our reflections on the MEDEC MedTech conference.

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Lightning in a bottle | What True North means for Waterloo Region

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ONE may not be a familiar acronym to many, explaining why the expert review panel suggests renaming it as Innovation Ontario. Here we explore the intersection of the strands of tech debate and activities in the Toronto-Kitchener-Waterloo corridor. There is a spirit of optimism with Toronto Health Innovation Week, True North and Velocity 10-year anniversary, yet both the Building Global Winners report and the poignant book How We Can Win point squarely to the paramount need to gain global reach.

Steven Woods, Senior Director Engineering at Google Canada described “What we have, up here in the North, is lightning in a bottle.” He said that Google “recognized there was something special happening up here – the entrepreneurialism, the quality of higher education and the loyalty of the talented engineers who just want to do good work.” In the 2015 Global Startup Ecosystem ranking the newly combined Toronto-Waterloo corridor entity ranked 16th. The Region of Waterloo tech sector employes 30,000 people.

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Growth and scale for startups at the first Communitech HubSpot workshop

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According to HubSpot, starting a business is easier than ever, while scaling one is harder than ever.

This is strong advice from the drivers behind the inbound movement for the 2,299 startups in the Waterloo Region. HubSpot ran its first workshop at one of the regions foremost incubators, Communitech.
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BrightGuide illuminate path in health tech ecosystem

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Krysta Traianovski’s presentation at the Hacking Health Waterloo Cafe goes a long way to understanding why this health start-up is attracting attention in Waterloo Region.

Sharing their journey and experiences with the group provided us with a glimpse of the compassion and flair of the team. There will be close to 1 million Canadians living with dementia in 15 years. Their technology is poised to bring caregiver relief and autonomy for persons living with dementia.

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Rise of Waterloo Region Medtech start-up ecosystem

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“What we have in this community in KW [Kitchener-Waterloo] and in Canada is equivalent of capturing lightning in a bottle,” described Google Canada’s Managing Director, Sam Sebastian, opening the Go North event.

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10 top posts from the last year

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These top posts and content resonated with you the most. They were not necessarily what we expected. The underlying topic insights will guide our future content curation.

We had lots of view and engagement analytics from among the 77 posts on the Opencity Inc. blog plus another 73 on other platforms and sites, through 2016.

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Aging Health National Ideathon prize

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Growing old is crap. A new collaboration between AGE-WELL and Hacking Health seeks to bring new energy to challenge our aging health.

Dr. Alex Mihailidis, Scientific Director at AGE-WELL introduced the joint ideathon with Hacking Health, where teams could win $75,000 of prizes to advance their solutions.

“It is no secret that our population is aging. And the challenge is the same everywhere: To help people maintain quality of life, dignity and indepence as they get older,” describes Dr. Mihailidis.

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