The Germinator 2022-2023

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of ETSI-BC

I created The Germinator series as a space (both in time and place, physical and virtual) where stories of others may spark ideas in my students and fellow faculty at the University of British Columbia Okanagan campus. Why do we need this spark? because every single entrepreneur and innovator I spoke with, has always contemplated their desire to innovate, to create, to build something worthwhile, but were hesitating. Sometimes months, usually years. And that is OK.

Through the stories that unfold in my conversations with guests on The Germinator, I hoped that the messy, unpredictable, and sometimes less than ideal, reality of innovation, will be uncovered. Any idea you start up with, is most likely going to look and feel different by the time it becomes a reality. 

This is why it was such a pleasure and privilege to have had an amazing lineup of guests. While I’ve known some of my guests for several years, others were newer acquaintances. Regardless, I enjoyed and learned so much from them all, having spend a lunchtime (at least in Pacific time), discussing about their experience with entrepreneurship, with commercialization, and with innovation.

The variety, breadth and depth of our discussions made this such a rewarding experience for myself, and for the students and faculty who were able to join us. For those who weren’t, I am happy to share that our conversations’ recordings are still available on The Germinator website (https://lnkd.in/gCFaPByC)

Thank you to all the amazing guests, Jayiesh Singh, CEO, Able Innovations Inc., Gordon Springate Jr., D’Andre Wilson-Ihejirika, Founder, BrainSTEM Alliance, Bolis Ibrahim, Cofounder and CEO, Argentum, Michael Caley, Founder & CEO, InStage, Ghada Nafie, President and Co-Founder, Litus Inc, Sandra Spencer, Innovation Manager, Office of the Vice-Principal Research and Innovation, UBCO, Conner Tidd, CEO and co-founder, Just Vertical, Darren Anderson, CEO and Co-Founder, Vive Crop Protection, Joella Almeida, CEO & Co-Founder, MedEssist, Nathan Dyck, Chief Product Officer, Nanoleaf, Jedidiah Weller, CEO & Software Guru, founder of StartupWars and co-founder of OpenForge and finally Nisha Sehn, Founder, Aurita Coaching & Consulting.

Jayiesh Singh, CEO, Able Innovations Inc.

Bio: Jayiesh(Jay) holds a BASc in Mechanical Engineering with a specialization in mechatronics from the University of Toronto. He is passionate about leveraging technology to solve society’s problems and has devoted his career to such pursuits. He spent 8 years at a solar energy start-up working on commercializing their robotic platform. He spent 5 of those years travelling up-to 6 months a year in Asia, and getting an appreciation for what it really takes to scale-up a product. He then consulted for other promising start-ups, helping thm scale-up, while at the same time learning through their successes and mistakes. In 2018, he founded Able Innovations to fulfil a sense of purpose he had felt from the days he volunteered in Long Term Care as a teenager. Through Able Innovations, he is in a pursuit to improve the quality of lives of our older adults and our caregivers.

(watch the recording of our conversation with Jayiesh here)

Where do (good) ideas come from? and how important is it to have a good idea?

Gordon Springate Jr

Gordon L. Springate BASc ’81 (CHML) is a proud UBC Engineering graduate, hailing from Burnaby South High School in the Vancouver suburb. During his time at UBC he received the EUS Student Leadership Award in his third year; and to this day continues to help lead and mentor our emerging engineering talent.

Gordon completed his 42-year Engineering career in Upstream Energy, retiring as Technology Research and Development Manager with Chevron. He has worked in 20 countries and is a Life Member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers. He currently resides in New Hampshire, USA.

D’Andre Wilson-Ihejirika, Founder, BrainSTEM Alliance

D’Andre was born and raised in Nassau, Bahamas before moving to Canada to complete her undergrad in Chemical Engineering at McGill University. D’Andre went on to complete her Master’s Degree in the Centre for Management of Technology and Entrepreneurship (CMTE) at the University of Toronto. D’Andre spent over 8 years working in the oil sands before pivoting to work in project management and process improvement in the post-secondary and non-profit space.

D’Andre considers herself a serial social entrepreneur and is the founder of a non-profit called BrainSTEM Alliance. D’Andre is pursuing her PhD through ISTEP (the Institute for Studies in Transdisciplinary Engineering Education and Practice) and is also the Executive Director of work-integrated learning at Calgary Economic Development.

(watch the recording of our conversation with D’Andre’s here)

Bolis Ibrahim, Cofounder and CEO, Argentum

Bolis Ibrahim comes from an electrical engineering and project management background in both the electronics manufacturing and electrical contracting industries. Bolis is passionate about the rise of intelligent buildings that utilize DC (direct current) power distribution, advanced sensors, and intelligent automation to dramatically reduce energy consumption to achieve net-zero operations. He is the co-founder and CEO of Argentum Electronics Inc. a technology company that is conserving energy & emissions for any building type through intelligent modular DC (direct current) power distribution systems, sensors, and building automation software.

(watch the recording of our conversation with Bolis here)

Michael Caley, Founder & CEO, InStage

Michael graduated from the Richard Ivey School of Business in 2006.  During business school and for several years following graduation Michael was self-employed in a variety of brick-and-mortar start-up ventures including Duey’s (Ontario 2-locations), Putt Hutt (Ontario 2-locations), and Ogo’s (Penticton, BC). After selling these businesses in 2012 Michael began working at DECO Windshield Repair as an Operations Executive. In 2018 Michael founded InStage, a soft-skills training & practice platform. InStage is currently growing throughout the Canadian Education market and is launching in the US Market in Q4 2022.

(watch the recording of our conversation with Michael here)

Ghada Nafie, PhD, PEng, PMP, President and Co-Founder, Litus Inc.

Dr. Nafie heads entrepreneurial activities at the Schulich School of Engineering, at the University of Calgary, as an Assistant Professor (Teaching) in Engineering Entrepreneurship. She has developed the new Certificate of Engineering Entrepreneurship, and an undergraduate and a graduate course designed to propel students to reach their maximum performance. Her courses include both teaching and active learning components with hands on activities to prepare them for real-life problem solving.

Dr. Ghada Nafie received her PhD degree from the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Calgary in October 2020, after over a decade of global experience in industry and start-ups.  Dr. Nafie has been honored with a dozens of awards and recognitions for her work. This year, she has won an ASTech Award for Excellence in Clean Energy, the Mission from MaRS Climate Venture Diversity Award, the Elevate Firehood Angel Investment Prize, and the Inventures Award in the Net Zero Category.  

Dr. Nafie is also the Co-founder and CEO of Litus, established in 2019 as a vehicle to deliver nanotechnology solutions for global energy sustainability, and especially focused on the elegant recovery of battery metals. She has developed a lithium extraction solution positioned to enable automobile manufacturers to meet the lofty EV targets collectively put forth. Prior to Litus, Dr. Ghada Nafie successfully founded two other companies, one of which wasbacked by the energy expert Enbridge. 

(watch the recording of our conversation with Ghada here)

Sandra Spencer, Innovation Manager, Office of the Vice-Principal Research and Innovation, UBCO

Sandra Spencer has worked in the entrepreneur & innovation ecosystem for the past 10+ years.

Currently, Sandra is Innovation Manager at UBCO supporting innovative partnerships, commercialization and entrepreneurship for the campus community. Sandra has supported hundreds of startups and companies to start, build, and scale their businesses, across a number of sectors.

Additionally, Sandra started Nimble Strategizing in 2017 to provide additional opportunities to work directly with startups and support organizations in areas of raising capital, securing funding, commercialization, and business modeling through coaching and program delivery.

Conner Tidd, CEO and co-founder, Just Vertical

Conner Tidd is the CEO and co-founder at Just Vertical where they build indoor vertical gardens for the home and custom commercial scale indoor vertical farms. Just Vertical was started as a spin-off of Conner’s capstone project during his MSc. at the University of Toronto and has gone from an academic project to having thousands of products in consumers homes across North America. Bringing Just Vertical around the world Conner has represented the company on a game show in China, worked as a TV chef, and been on Dragons Den (only to be cut from TV air!)

(Watch the recording of our conversation with Conner here)

Darren Anderson, CEO and Co-Founder, Vive Crop Protection

Dr. Darren Anderson is a co-founder and CEO of Vive Crop Protection and serves on its Board of Directors. Darren is passionate about using technology to improve the sustainability of agriculture while creating quantifiable results for growers. Darren is on the Board of CropLife America, the trade association for the pesticide industry in the USA; a member of the Advisory Committee for CHLOE, an organization committed to increasing STEM learning through agriculture and natural resources; and a founding member of ElectSTEM, a non-profit encouraging people with STEM backgrounds to run for political office.

Under Darren’s leadership, Vive has raised over $43M CAD of equity and debt, launched the first nanotechnology-enabled pesticide products that are approved by the EPA, and doubled its commercial business annually for the last 4 years. Dr. Anderson is the inventor on 13 issued patents and 44 pending applications. Dr. Anderson earned his PhD from University of Toronto as an NSERC doctoral fellow.

Joella Almeida, CEO & Co-Founder, MedEssist

Joella is the CEO and co-founder of MedEssist – a digital health platform enabling a more personalized healthcare system through modernizing local pharmacies. MedEssist pharmacies are equipped with world-class clinical solutions, business tools, and support systems to deliver new and innovative healthcare services for their communities. 

Prior to MedEssist, she worked in both startups (at a payments company), and corporate organizations (a large non-commercial bank) primarily in e-commerce and payments, before pivoting to healthcare. Joella is passionate about inspiring more women entrepreneurs to get started in tech and loves mentoring new grads and students who want to get into tech for the first time.

Nathan Dyck, Chief Product Officer, Nanoleaf

Nathan is the Chief Product Officer at Nanoleaf, bringing product experiences to life using his engineering knowledge and background. Based in Toronto, he oversees Nanoleaf’s product direction and execution. He previously studied Engineering at McGill and Waterloo.

(Watch the recording of our conversation with Nathan here)

Jedidiah Weller, CEO & Software Guru, founder of StartupWars and co-founder of OpenForge (not in that order)

Jedidiah W Jedidiah Weller (Jedi) is an accomplished entrepreneur who focuses on empowering the intersection between business and technology. He is currently the CEO of OpenForge and the founder of Startup Wars, as well as the organizer of the Startup Junto Meetup in Philadelphia.

Jedi has been a speaker and mentor at Startup events across the world, including the Thailand Startup Summit, San Francisco’s Developer Week, Austin’s SXSW, The Web Summit and more.

(Watch the recording of our conversation with Jedi here)

Nisha Sehn, Founder, Aurita Coaching & Consulting

Nisha Sehn is an executive coach and climate business consultant, with 15+ years of professional experience spanning government, nonprofits, and tech. She is focused on enabling compassionate and inclusive leadership, especially in important solution spaces.

Nisha has spent the better part of the last decade building and leading technical program management teams at various stage tech companies in Silicon Valley and most recently served as a Chief of Staff. Now as a Climate Business Consultant, she partners with organizations moving to net zero and also enabling innovations in the circular economy. She is a certified Executive Coach, a Climatebase Founding Fellow, and a Faculty Coach at the Berkeley Coaching Executive Institute. She also holds an undergraduate degree in Physics and a Master of Laws in Environmental Law and Policy and was recently accepted into OnePointFive’s first sustainability consulting accelerator program. 

(Watch the recording of the conversation with Nisha here)