By Adam Castle, Director of Venture Services & Partnerships, WEtech Alliance
Ed Dawson and I drove up to Sudbury last week. Eight hours north in a Chrysler Pacifica built right here in Windsor, which feels worth mentioning given everything I’m about to say. We were headed to Mining Transformed, NORCAT and CIM’s underground technology exhibition, part of Mining the Future Week in Greater Sudbury. The week brings together NORCAT, OVIN, OCI, IION, and the Greater Sudbury economic development team, investors, innovators, and industry partners, among others, around mining innovation and its critical role in supplying the raw materials the rest of our economy depends on. As one of the colleagues we met there put it, of all the things we consume, if it isn’t farmed, it’s mined. (or as the joke goes where I grew up in Saskatchewan, “Do you mind not doing that? No, I farm.” )
It’s the first time Ed and I have had the chance to work closely on something since I moved to WEtech almost eight years ago. He’s now the Director, Innovation and Trade at Invest WindsorEssex. Before that, his department was running OVIN’s Regional Technology Development Site for Windsor-Essex. That’s the same role WEtech is taking on now, the same network our team is stepping into. So the drive up wasn’t only two colleagues going to a conference. It was Ed handing me something he’s spent years building, and me trying to absorb what that looked like in practice.
We talked about family and work, about what we’re each trying to build in this next chapter of our roles. Eight hours of listening to someone talk about why they care about what they do is its own kind of education. I came into this work caring deeply about the founders and SMEs we serve. Ed’s been doing it in the OVIN network longer than I have. Seven years, going back to the network’s launch. And you can hear it in how he talks about the people he’s worked with and the relationships he and his team have built. If all of life is about the journey, and who we take it with is the most important part, then I’m lucky to have shared this stretch of mine with Ed.
We also stopped at the outlet malls on Highway 400 on the way up and ended up at the Skechers outlet, because somewhere along the way it became the ultimate dad’s day out. We talked about how there isn’t much in the world that’s actually made for dads specifically. But Skechers has figured out exactly who their market is, and they have not been subtle about it. We both walked out with new pairs (different styles, we’re not that synchronized). No regrets. No laces. #Slipins4life.
We got into Sudbury that evening and went straight to NORCAT’s main facility for the opening reception. The room was packed. From the moment we walked in, people lit up around Ed. Hugs were frequent, as were the words “Uncle Ed’s here!” and “We’re so glad you’re here!” He’d built those relationships over years of showing up for the OVIN network, and staying connected to the people running mining innovation in this province. I watched it happen and thought about what it would have meant to try to do this work without him over a few very long but very rewarding days. It wouldn’t have been possible.
Later that night, we ended up in a longer conversation with colleagues from across the OVIN network and OCI. People I’ve been on Zoom calls with for months. Somewhere in the conversation, first jobs came up. Two people had the distinct honour of achieving the role of Sandwich Artist at Subway, a role that I’m told is really more of a lifestyle than a job. Someone else had worked at Dairy Queen (and as a SpongeBob mascot at Canada’s Wonderland!). Ed had been at McDonald’s. I’d done a couple of summers at Licks Burgers in Toronto (the last location closed earlier this year, which is its own small grief).
Every person in that room running economic programs that touch founders across an entire province had started by serving people across a counter. The symmetry caught me off guard. Having gotten to know those individuals over the course of the week, it’s clear now what I think it says about us (beyond our shared ability to serve up something delicious.) Learning what it means to actually pay attention to someone in front of you. Learning that the work is about them, not you. Learning that customer service is a differentiator that can be used to build strong collaborative relationships, whether you’re building the perfect Home Burger with Guk Sauce, or helping an innovator build a strategy to break into an industrial sales cycle that’s not for the faint of heart. Those aren’t small skills even if we did learn them at our “entry-level jobs.” It’s the substrate underneath every program design choice and every late-night email to a stuck entrepreneur. We came into this work already understanding what service-mindedness costs and what it gives back.
You don’t learn all that on a Zoom call with someone, while hyper-focused on the resting face you’re making or not making, or while half listening and simultaneously dealing with a constant barrage of Teams messages and emails about work you will have to tackle immediately after. You surface it when you have been in a room together long enough that the small talk runs out and the real conversation starts. Which is the case for how critical travel is, even in 2026, with all the tools we’ve built to avoid it.
The next day we went into the mine. NORCAT operates an active working mine that doubles as a technology testing ground. Startups, SMEs, and large industrial firms bring emerging technology underground to validate it in real operating conditions. There isn’t another facility like it anywhere in the world. We spent the day underground, talking to companies demonstrating battery management systems, automation, sensing tools, monitoring infrastructure. Real technology, being stress-tested in the environment it was built for. Every stop along our path was a conversation about what the tech does now, and what they’re building it to do next. The iteration we teach to our earliest founders at WEtech was on full display in these global companies working with innovation in the built environment.
I also had to put on coveralls and full personal protection equipment to go underground, which was a small adventure of its own. Coming back out, peeling it all off in the locker room while still sweating through every layer, I got genuinely stuck. The kind of stuck where you start to wonder if the fire department would have to be called with the jaws of life, or if it would be better to save the embarrassment and just act like I was genuinely committed to wearing PPE for the rest of my time at the conference. I ended up shimmying out the same way Ace Ventura did when he was trying to escape the mechanical rhinoceros in Pet Detective. Not my finest moment professionally. There was another guy in the locker room with us, a mining engineer who hadn’t been underground in six years himself. He told me you just get used to the heavy boots, the hot coveralls, and the shimmying. Then Ed pulled out his Skechers to change, and the engineer looked over and said he had the same pair, and then I pulled out mine. The three of us standing there as unofficial dad influencer brand ambassadors for Skechers, mid-shimmy. A genuinely perfect moment.
NORCAT’s whole model is what I’ve been writing about for the last two years, for anyone who’s been following my blog, I’ve talked a lot about leveraging our regions keystone sectors to build and attract the kinds of innovators who will help propel our economy into the future. The mine is the asset, and the expertise is rooted in Sudbury. But the companies coming through their facility aren’t tied only to Sudbury. They validate underground, then take what they’ve built to wherever mines operate globally. NORCAT has built an exportable engine on top of a legacy industry that isn’t going anywhere, and the technology validated inside it travels with the companies that brought it in, or that engage with NORCAT as a trusted source for innovation. While I’ve been theorizing about this for an economy rooted in automotive and agriculture like Windsor-Essex, they’ve been doing it for years.
The night two event was at Science North, in a reception hall carved directly into rock. My inner child had a moment when I learned we’d get to go explore the science centre after the formal part of the evening concluded. The space sits inside the geology of Sudbury, exposed and improbable, and it’s one of the more disorienting and beautiful event venues I’ve ever stood in. A reminder of why this region exists in the form it does, and an example of just how much the entire city leans into what makes its geography and geology so special.
The panel they convened at the Science North reception was, at its core, about adoption and change management. How you actually move technology into legacy industries that have been running for generations. The speaker traced mining technology back to its origin, which was essentially the need to communicate and coordinate efforts. Two-way radios. Knowing what was happening underground, being able to mitigate and respond to potentially unsafe situations, and being able to relay that to the surface. Every piece of mining technology that has come since is a variation on that original need. Eventually you get data-driven environments, autonomous robots, real-time asset tracking, and a thick cybersecurity safety layer, because the communication infrastructure has become sophisticated enough to be critical for protecting the health and safety of mine workers.
The framing around all of it, the idea that adopting new technology is what drives a safer, more cost-effective, more productive sector, sounds a lot like the same framing we’ve been using in conversations with representatives from our advanced manufacturing, agriculture, construction, healthcare, and supply chain logistics sectors in Windsor-Essex. These are legacy industries running on accumulated knowledge that goes back decades or in some cases more than a century. Adoption in those environments is slow on purpose. New technology only moves when it speaks the industry’s language and solves a problem the industry already knows it has. Sudbury has built an entire economy on top of that principle, and there’s no structural reason Windsor-Essex can’t do the same.
And I don’t think it would take nearly as much of a stretch as people might assume. Different legacy industries, same structural opportunity. We build vehicles, grow food, and move freight across what’s historically been the busiest commercial border crossing in North America, and we have manufacturing capacity and skilled trades depth that took generations to develop. None of that is going anywhere either.
NORCAT has proven the model is sound when you’re willing to specialize and go deep (mining pun clearly intended). The remaining question is whether we’re willing to commit to it the way they did.
I’ve been reading Dr. John Howard’s recent work out of the Acton Institute in Australia. His Complementarity Thesis argues that the same institutional ingredients (universities, government, industry, capital, talent) produce transformative results in some places and almost nothing in others, and the difference comes down to which underlying complement is rate-limiting at a given stage of an ecosystem’s development. Social capital, talent density, patient capital, governance capacity, market access. Each one can be the binding constraint depending on where an ecosystem is. The diagnostic question is figuring out which one is constraining the system in your region. Applying the wrong intervention to a complement that isn’t actually binding doesn’t move anything forward.
What I saw in Sudbury was an ecosystem hitting on most of those cylinders. Industry, capital, institutions, talent, government, and startups, all in the same rooms. Deep social capital binding them together. The trust didn’t have to be re-explained or re-earned in real time, because it had been built over years.
When I look at Windsor-Essex through that same lens, the report card is still uneven. We have strong industry and serious talent depth. There’s good institutional support through the University of Windsor and St. Clair College, and elected officials who are, for the most part, engaged and supportive of this work. Where we’re thinner is on the social capital piece. The frequency and depth of interaction between our industry and our startups still isn’t where it needs to be. Not enough to build the kind of trust that quiets risk aversion and makes adoption easier. There is also significant private wealth in our region sitting with individuals who aren’t engaged with the local innovation ecosystem in the way they could be. Patient capital, in Howard’s framing, that’s locally rooted and locally deployed.
The ingredients are mostly here. What’s not consistently here is the collisions between them. That’s the strategy piece I’m bringing back, alongside the partnerships, the company connections, and the validated theory.
Some of the companies I connected with this week are exploring applications that have real relevance back home. Battery and energy solutions that could connect to vehicle technology. Sensing, tracking and automation capabilities that could support manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare, and municipal infrastructure, including potential applications with NextStar and our local municipalities. None of these conversations are public yet, and I’m not going to get ahead of any of them. The opportunities are real though, and they’re emerging because Windsor showed up north, and people in the north were generous enough to share what they’ve built.
The team at NORCAT, the leadership across OVIN and OCI, and the colleagues from other RTDS sites across Ontario didn’t have to bring us in the way they did. They did it because the network is built on the same service-mindedness we’d realized through our conversations the night before. People who care about the work, helping other people who care about the work, get a little further faster.
We started heading home the morning after. Eight hours back south, a good stretch of it spent singing throwbacks with Ed at the top of our lungs the way two dads on a Sean Paul kick only can. Two days is a long time to be away when you have a three-year-old, and I swear she’s older every day from when I put her to bed to when she wakes up. I wanted to be home in time for bedtime, for the questions she squeezes out of every last minute of the day. “Why do we have blood?” “Why don’t you have any hair, did you not want it anymore?” I was also heading back with a list of opportunities that need real work to make happen, and the sooner I got home the sooner I could get started.
On June 23rd, WEtech officially launches as the Regional Technology Development Site for Windsor-Essex under OVIN. The framework-building, the partnership work, the program design that’s been happening behind the scenes for months, all of it goes public then. It moves from internal architecture into the open, where it can actually start doing what it was built to do. OVIN itself is its own department under OCI, and we’re one of seven RTDS sites across the province now taking up that work in our regions. The network we get to plug into has years of depth and a very specific point of focus, which is what makes the next chapter actually possible.
We spent those two days both above ground and below, mining the relationships and opportunities the week presented, and there’s a lot of critical minerals in this ore. Sometimes the most important work happens in the dark, before anyone sees it. And then there’s a moment where it surfaces, and you get to spend the next chapter of your career building in the daylight. That moment is just under four weeks away for us at WEtech, and we are so lucky to get to work on it with local partners like Invest WindsorEssex, the Windsor-Essex Chamber of Commerce, the City of Windsor, the University of Windsor, St. Clair College, and the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, along with others across the region on the pieces that come next.
Adam Castle
Director of Venture Services & Partnerships,
WEtech Alliance
