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Building Success from Scratch with Adrien Cote
January 24 @ 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
FREE
Get ready to push boundaries, break barriers, and unleash your creativity at Innovating Beyond Limits – where innovation knows no bounds!
What is it like when groundbreaking work is in its early days? How can you build success at scale? The journey is ambiguous, hard, and money is scarce. Failures happen daily, but success means achieving something transformational.
Velocity is the University of Waterloo’s flagship entrepreneurship center, established in 2008. It started unconventionally as a student service, and over 16 years, its participants have created nearly CAD 40 billion in enterprise value. Velocity shows why universities are crucial for Canada’s innovation economy. But like businesses and governments, universities need to move beyond 20th-century approaches to innovation.
In a time of upheaval and crisis, we need to speed up innovation and do it more effectively – it’s time to go further, faster.
This presentation shares how Velocity inspires and drives innovation. Examples of starting from an idea and quickly entering the market will be shared from startup journeys and intrapreneurial efforts. Discussed is our focus on fostering personal development for entrepreneurial success and how universities, along with their students and researchers, can use entrepreneurship to tackle consequential challenges and win outsized opportunities.
This event will be held in Anthony P Toldo Health Education Centre room 102
About Adrien:
Adrien leads Velocity’s mission, strategy, and coordinates its two programs: student founders and the Velocity Incubator to maximize experience for students and productivity for founders, respectively.
Prior to being named Executive Director, Adrien served as the Deeptech and Science Advisor from 2017 to 2019 where he supported companies with his expertise in product development, market positioning and fit, strategic planning, team management, and IP creation and management. As Velocity’s ‘voice of the entrepreneur,’ he will bring his passion to ensure that great business ideas and technologies can break out into commercial success.
Before joining Velocity, Adrien led many initiatives at Xerox ranging from corporate R&D projects to creation of new businesses. Previous to his work at Xerox, he was a principal investigator at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA.
Adrien holds a PhD in Inorganic Chemistry from the University of Calgary and earned his BSc in Applied Chemistry from the University of Waterloo. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan. While working at Velocity, he also completed an Executive Master’s in Technology Management program at the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics.
Adrien has 25 research publications (with more than 11,000 citations), holds over 50 patents and a number of awards for business and technical accomplishments.