Episode 41 of Bloom catches up on a bunch of innovation news, including what's been going on with the bevy of accelerators that have been active in Alberta throughout 2022.
Co-hosts Faaiza Ramji and Karen Unland discuss Plug and Play Alberta's latest batch and how the various accelerators that Alberta Innovates set up through the Alberta Scaleup and Growth Accelerator Program (Scaleup GAP) have differentiated themselves.
The seven Edmonton companies involved in Plug and Play Alberta's Batch 2 were among 50 later-stage startups and scaleups from elsewhere in Canada as well as the U.S., Poland, Germany, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Finland, China, and Israel.
"I could imagine that a lot of these companies would end up being either strategic partners or customers to each other or something like that," said Ramji. "There must be a lot of really interesting synergies, and I wonder if there's any way to map that."
As the founder of Field Notes, a company that makes herbal liqueurs using distilled field peas, Ramji has been known to muse about a desire for an accelerator focused on consumer packaged goods. What would that look like? She imagined a combination of expertise like that assembled by 500 Global, revenue-focused training like that provided by GrowthX, and corporate connections like Plug and Play generates.
"Put that together for consumer packaged food goods? That would be amazing," she said.
Dream along with Ramji in the Dec. 8 episode of Taproot's podcast about innovation in Edmonton, which also takes a look at Startup TNT's sector investment summits, as well as a couple of cleantech companies that have been deemed highly investment-worthy.