Alberta Innovates

I came up with the first model.

I got in contact with an engineering company and then reached out to, there's a organization called Alberta Innovates and spoke with a great guy that was working for them at the time, David Bakken, who I did a demonstration for him.

I talked his ear off for like an hour and a half.

And he said, okay, great.

And he's kind of led me down the path, filling out paperwork to get funding from the government.

So over the course of about a year and a half, Alberta Innovates gave me $120,000 to help with the engineering and a little bit of marketing at the time.

With that amount of funding, how many units have you

produced? So, yeah, it sounds like a lot of money.

And we were recipients of a grant, a provincial grant here in Canada.

So our provinces, I live in the province of Alberta, so it's an Alberta Innovates grant.

And they gave us to put something together.

And so it was because of that funding that we were able to translate some of the elements from music therapy and certainly the exercises within the book together.

The number one thing, sort of if you look at my day-to-day in supporting entrepreneurs, is meeting with them one-on-one to help them figure out the system.

And so the RINs, the Regional Innovation Networks are a program of Alberta Innovates, and we have a mandate to build the ecosystem of service providers to ensure that innovators can figure out where the best place for them to go is.

And so, um, I literally spend probably six to seven hours a week meeting one-on-one with entrepreneurs who are building something and trying to help them get access to the right services.

And that can be anything from agriculture technologies, to age tech, to um, you know, deep tech, artificial intelligence, people building, you know, natural health products, pharmaceut- like industry agnostic.

Um, so how does Edmonton Regional Innovation Network support age tech? Because obviously y'all are here as a sponsor of this Silver Tech Summit.

So, like, what support do you guys specifically provide in this domain?

Um, the really great thing about the Regional Innovation Program through Alberta Innovates is that it's not prescriptive, and so we get to be able to respond to the needs of the community, and that's why we get to fund events like this.

Uh, and because, A, we're looking to fund things that fill a gap.