Are you thinking about entrepreneurship but are a little nervous about the industry? Have you been wondering what it’s like to pitch an idea to investors? Do you want to see young entrepreneurs in action? If so, get inspiration from skilled entrepreneurs by watching them present innovative ideas and solutions at a pitch off event. Use entrepreneur competitions and events as an opportunity to get to know yourself as an aspiring entrepreneur and grow in the community. Here are some benefits you can gain just from attending networking events, pitch-off competitions, and more!
Learn from Leading Experts
The best advantage you can have as an aspiring entrepreneur is learning from those that are in the same journey as you. See for yourself what it's like to be in a higher level stage of the entrepreneurial journey. Take note of how these experts present themselves, their business, and their innovative solutions to key stakeholders such as investors, funding partners, and potential customers.
Get Inspiration from Like-Minded Entrepreneurs
If you are starting your entrepreneurial journey, inspiration and creativity is key to help you get started. If you are struggling with brainstorming, take inspiration from upcoming and rising trends within the industry and community to help kickstart your idea generation process. The best ideas are the ideas that people know and care about. So be curious and dive into areas that will inspire and motivate you!
Connect With Your Community
Attending networking events is the best way to connect with the entrepreneurial community. One of the most important benefits of networking is being able to meet influencers in your industry along with people in similar positions as you. This will give you valuable insight on your industry and community by having connections with people that may be able to share their knowledge and provide you with unique opportunities.
Motivation to Get Started!
The best way to get started with something you are passionate about is putting yourself in the perfect environment! Why not throw yourself right into it! Being exposed to people and situations that can help you grow to the entrepreneur you want to be can be extremely motivating!
If you want to take advantage of networking opportunities, check out The Impact Innovation Challenge Pitch Off Event happening August 24 and watch teams pitch their impactful ideas to create change in the world! Use this as your opportunity to grow as an entrepreneur and begin your journey. Check it out here to register and attend the free live event!
Our Annual Impact Innovation Challenge for young entrepreneurs across Canada has been mindblowing. Youth innovation is alive and rising! This year, the Impact Innovation Challenge consists of 3 categories of different kinds of ventures: Aspiring, Growth, and Non-Profit Entrepreneurs. The challenge focuses on entrepreneurs building a social impact venture and will pitch their startup and startup ideas for a chance to win cash, mentorship, legal support and coaching prizes to boost their startup. Thank you to our partners for supporting youth in Canada. These prizes are made possible by our cash prize partner SAP, RBC, Hootsuite, Osler, AO, Scale Collaborative and more! A special thank you to our submission review committee, our judging panel and Volition for offering pitch training for our finalists!
Here are the finalists that you’ll be seeing at our Impact Innovation Challenge 2021!
Aspiring Ventures:
The Aspiring Category represents aspiring entrepreneurs with brand new ideas that focuses on their idea and solution to their problem. This category is suited for youth exploring entrepreneurship for the first time and have been working on their problem and solution for less than a year! Here are your aspiring entrepreneurs!
Transition Space
Meet the Transition Space Team, Will, Charlotte, Caleb, Lindsay, and Sarah! Transition Space is an online hub dedicated to helping Ontario youth navigate the adult disability system. This team takes a collaborative approach to provide information on components of the disability system, share personalized community resources to connect youth to the adult disability system, and facilitate conversations between youth, families, and care providers.
Cequest
Meet Devinder, Founder of Cequest! Cequest has a vision to create a place where children can walk outside and breathe in clean air where biodiversity thrives both on land and sea. Cequest brings a solution with the potential to sequester over 10 Gt of carbon dioxide per year by 2050. Cequest sequesters carbon to produce clean hydrogen fuel as well as a bicarbonate that can be released into the ocean to combat ocean acidification.
Orwell
Meet the Orwell Team, Veer, Pranav, and Jai! Orwell is the world’s first anti-social media platform! Their goal is to mitigate social media addiction in an accessible manner allowing for the improvement of both mental health and productivity in youths and adults alike. They are a non-profit technology company committed to transforming mental health for everyone.
PALcares
Meet the PALCares team, Dylan, Darby, Sasha, and Luke! PALcares provides social good impact for community members who struggle to obtain relevant and applicable support and for government and non-profit stakeholders who lack the infrastructure to address service gaps, service duplication and sector inefficiencies. PALcares guides the community with an online interface that connects them to a personalized list of relevant social supports.
ClinicalVR
Meet the ClinicalVR team, Andrew, Kalter, Sanchi, Tyvaughn! ClinicalVR utilizes virtual reality (VR) technology. They are an early-stage start-up trying to change the lack of VR in clinical practice by providing hospitals and outpatient clinics with VR headsets, VR software which includes VR experiences developed based on patient and healthcare provider feedback, and VR support/training.
Kaptis
Meet the Kaptis Team, Anupra, Taira, and Riya! Since the beginning of the climate crisis, carbon dioxide has been viewed as a pollutant we need to remove. Kaptis views it as a resource. The Kaptis team is aiming to build a reactor that can convert captured carbon dioxide to valuable solid carbon products, with a focus on graphene.
MODASTY
Meet Roaa, founder of MODASTY. MODASTY will be the only online marketplace for modest fashion. Inspired by the shopping challenges of all women who shop for modest fashion, MODASTY will aggregate modest and islamic inventory from brands and boutiques all over the world and bring it into one online space for one seamless checkout. MODASTY is the Amazon of modest fashion.
Growth Ventures
The Growth category represents entrepreneurs at an early stage for profit impact business that have been operating for less than two years and have validated their model through early traction! Meet your Growth entrepreneurs!
FlutterCare
Meet Dolma, CEO and Founder of Flutter Care Inc., a digital health company based in Vancouver, B.C. whose technology promotes positive pregnancy experiences and outcomes. Flutter Care, a new technology designed to predict and prevent pregnancy complications, has received recognition from 8+ institutions. This includes the Canadian Medical Association, British Columbia’s Medical Device Development Center, and Innovation UBC. In 2020, Flutter Care was announced as a winner of Startup Canada’s SDG Impact Pitch Competition for their work to advance gender equality.
Apricotton
Meet Chloe Beaudoin and Jessica Miao, Co-Founders of Apricotton! Apricotton is a Toronto-based teen bra brand that helps girls across Canada and the U.S find bras that fit and make them feel confident. They eliminate the awkwardness of going to the store to buy a girl’s first bra. Most importantly, they design bras tailored to every girl’s body type, so that they can grow as she grows.
Typha Co.
Meet Alec and Julien, Co-Founders of Typha Co. Typha Co. vision is to ultimately bring production in-house by deploying the first of its kind Typha bio-refinery, which will integrate a spectrum of bio-based products (chemicals, materials, feed) and bioenergy (heat, electrical power, biofuels). They are empowering the collective good to solve Lake WInnipeg’s environmental crisis!
PEKO Produce
Meet the PEKO Produce Team, Arielle and Sang Le! Peko Produce delivers "peculiar" products to your doorstep for up to 40% off retail prices. Peko Produce purchases otherwise unsold “imperfect” produce from farmers and brokers at wholesale, providing them revenue that would have otherwise been unrecognized and discarded. They then compile all the varieties of produce into a box, sold at a fixed cost to the consumer at a heavily discounted price (in contrast to other retail grocery stores). Their mission is to empower access to affordable, healthy diets and rescue local food waste, one delivery at a time.
Reusables.com
Meet the Reusables Team, Anastasia and Jason! Reusables was founded to help eliminate single-use plastics from our daily routines. Despite the convenience of single-use plastics, they present a threat to our planet and we would prefer to live in a world without them.They decided to break down the barriers between private, public and academic institutions and design a robust solution that is reshaping the way we consume.
Hydronos Financial Technologies
Meet the Hydronos Financial Technologies Team, Jeremy and Philip! Hydronos establishes and offers an investable tokenized product for small-scale, sustainable infrastructure. The digital security, which uses blockchain technology to represent a tradable asset, enables private retail investors to invest in an asset class that had been previously difficult to invest in due to lack of liquidity, high transaction costs and limited transparency.
ROVR
Meet the ROVR Team, Anthony and Kyle! ROVR is a VR Social Network that connects people based on common interests, mutual friends, and groups. ROVR enables the coolest thing about Social VR (and the Metaverse): that you can meet really interesting people easily, for free across any distance, and naturally befriend them. As VR hits the mainstream, ROVR will bring niche communities together, starting with the power VR users of today. When people make friends in VR, or bring their IRL friends to VR, they become power-users and realize the potential of Social VR. ROVR will be the social glue of the Metaverse.
Non-Profit Ventures
Meet your Non-Profit Entrepreneurs! This category represents early stage impact driven nonprofits that have validated their model through early traction.
Free Periods Canada Foundation
Meet the Free Periods Canada Foundation Team, Zeba and Niki! Free Periods Canada Foundation is a grassroots, youth-run, registered non-profit organization. They are focused on fighting menstrual inequity and period stigma in Canada. Their solution is a unique integration of technology and community engagement in the field of menstrual equity advocacy, which does not currently exist in Canada. This tool can also be used as a networking opportunity for those interested in menstrual activism to connect with each other and other sexual and reproductive health experts.
Threading Change Foundation
Meet Sophia, Founder of Threading Change Foundation! Threading Change is a youth-led not-for-profit organization envisioning a future where fashion is ethical and circular, rooted in justice with climate, gender, and racial equity at the forefront. They work at the intersections of consumer education and industry transformation through our tri-impact model of education, innovative storytelling, and policy research.
Warrior Yoga Network
Meet the Warrior Yoga Network Team, Casse and Jesse! Warrior Yoga Network is a worldwide network of yoga and meditation teachers taking action to create a more inclusive and accessible yoga community. They are solving for the barriers that prevent people from accessing yoga and meditation as wellness practices. These are financial, social, cultural, geographic, physical barriers that prevent people from accessing wellness practices. These problems exist largely because the commodification of the wellness industry prioritizes profit - because of this, various systems of oppression are replicated and many people are left behind.
Youth Helping Youth Non-Profit
Meet Anjali, Founder of Youth Helping Youth Non-Profit! Youth Helping Youth (YHY) is an international organization that promotes youth development. YHY aims to bridge the accessibility gap of resources and opportunities (scholarships, jobs, volunteer positions, tutoring resources) available to youth in low-income communities through easily accessible digital marketing platforms such as Instagram or Facebook.
Break the Divide Foundation
Meet the Break The Divide Team, Sukhmeet and Abhayjeet! Break The Divide solves the challenges of apathy, denial, and polarization about issues through connection. They provide a space for young people to come together and connect with one another through genuine and intentional conversations. They help tackle the problem of the difficulty of tackling global issues by helping students focus on the challenges from local perspectives.
Accesso Canada
Meet the Accesso Canada team, Kath, Katie, Abigail, Tejas, Cecilia, Jim, and Gloria! Accesso Canada is a student-run collective of over 40 members from various backgrounds and interests. Based in Toronto, Accesso is focused on making the city more accessible through in depth reviews on how accessible malls and stores are across the GTA. Accesso Canada is not only an organization to promote the awareness for accessibility needs but also one to promote the youth voice and perspective regarding various issues.
Viability (Rebranding to Neurodivergent Futures)
Meet the Viability Team, Eliana, Vale, and Annanya! Viability is a youth-led organization dedicated to empowering neurodivergent youth in work, school, and life and supporting businesses in becoming more neuro-inclusive. Having operated in a disability space for 3.5 years, Viability has grown to offer a range of services including employment coaching, leadership programming, recreational programming, educational workshops, process consulting and community events. Unlike most other organizations in this space, they are disability-led and peer-to-peer, with 70% of our core team members identifying as neurodivergent.
Wow! We are blown away by the sheer number of ideas and innovation there are in this group of astounding finalists! Along with the diversity of applicant ideas and applicants residing from coast to coast of Canada. Now that you have met all the finalists, get ready to watch their amazing pitches at our Live Free Pitch Off event! This is a Pitch Off you don’t want to miss!
The finalists will present their impactful and innovative ideas for prizes on August 24, 2021. Come listen to the top teams pitch to a panel of judges for amazing prizes (including up to $5000 per category) and mentorship opportunities! Each category will be in its own breakout room and audience members can choose which room they’d like to attend! Click here to register and get access to the event! Support your community and favourite finalists!
As entrepreneurs, we often tend to focus so deeply on the product or service and leave the company values as a checklist item to complete later.
Values are the heart of your organization. They guide what you stand for. They support your mission and vision. They shape your culture and how your team shows up.
At League of Innovators, we believe that our values are what keeps us grounded as we serve our community of young entrepreneurs and encourage the same in our startups. After 3 years of dreaming, building, and executing we decided to revisit our values and evaluate whether they were still feeling authentic, relevant, and aligned to our core work.
As with any values process that has meaning, redefining our values was a full team effort-- a process that can be applied to your startup whether you’re just starting to build out your values or wanting to renew them!
Step 1: Checking in and finding alignment
In order to make this process a full team effort right from the start, begin by gathering your entire team (or leadership team depending on the organization size) and take time to identify what makes working there so great. Having an open and honest conversation about your company's purpose and everyone’s personal values first will allow everyone to feel more connected and inspired.
To get started at LOI, we checked in with the team as part of a culture survey to understand how connected each team member felt to the mission, vision and values with an opportunity to provide open feedback. We already sensed that our values needed to be reworked and the survey acted as an opportunity to validate this, get the team onboard and be part of the process right from the start. Some of the questions we asked in the survey included:
I feel connected to LOI’s mission, vision and values (1-10 scale)
I know LOI’s values (not verbatim but I could name at least some of them) (1-10 scale)
I’m proud to work for LOI (1-10 scale)
My day to day work inspires me (1-10 scale)
My personal values feel aligned with the work I’m doing at LOI (1-10 scale)
The survey results showed us clearly that while the team felt connected to LOI, most of us were unable to communicate what our values were - and so, began the work! While finding alignment came in the form of a survey followed by a discussion for us, this can show up in different ways for you. This step was crucial for us and will allow you to start the process with more clarity and alignment on what needs to be achieved.
Step 2: Brainstorming and letting all the ideas flow
Once there’s alignment among the team, your next step is to create dialogue focused on everyone’s experiences and how it's connected to potential core values you embody. We recommend setting up a workshop where your team can start collaborating and co-designing values. These core values are traits that guide everything your company does, therefore it is critical you facilitate an engaging and open conversation that allows everyone’s ideas to be heard.
At LOI, we set up a 60 minute workshop with the team that provided space for us to talk about spoken and unspoken values, how we show up everything we do whether that’s hiring or programming, what opportunities we see and more. Here is a rundown of the questions we used. Depending on how large your team is and how you want to set them up, you can also use these questions as a pre-session worksheet to get your team members in the right mindset.
The first session was focused on making sure everyone’s voice was heard and putting everything down on paper AKA our virtual whiteboard which looked intense by the end! During this session, we also recommend deciding how you ideally want your values to feel and support your work. For us that included having core values that are inspiring, pushing us to excellence, unified across the organization and keeping our team culture in mind. Most company values feel predictable, but with enough reflection, you can create something that is unique and powerful in your own way.
Step 3: Filtering and narrowing down
You’ll likely end the brainstorming session with many ideas, so remember to recognize with the team that creating or renewing your values is going to be a process that can’t be rushed! We recommend giving everyone some time to settle after the initial brainstorm and reconvening after 1-2 weeks for your next workshop where you focus on categorizing everything that showed up in the previous session and filtering it to display your top values.
For our workshop, we were doing everything virtually and leveraged breakout rooms to make sure each voice was heard and then returned to the main room to share what showed up. Depending on the size of your team and how different each group's top values are, we recommend creating space for each group to share their why, challenge each other and even debate ideas. During this process, you may begin to organically form your collective values.
Through all the discussion amongst our team, we had around 10 values in total and began sorting through those. We further categorized them and agreed on our top 6 by asking the following questions:
What does this value mean to us?
What does it look like in action at LOI?
How will it change our everyday behaviour, relationships or our interactions?
Because many company values feel formulaic, spending more time in this workshop to discuss how the brainstormed values are currently embodied within the company and whether they came naturally to you will allow you to create values that are more genuine and thoughtful. At the end of this workshop, we nominated two of us (our culture champions!) to take the top 6 values we listed and start creating descriptions based on all the discussion we had as a team. This may be top 3 or 5 values for you and is an opportunity to really understand and self-reflect on whether you embody all the values listed and how they are upheld within your team.
Step 4: Defining your values
As you start to gain more clarity and energy on what your values are, get ready for a deeper dialogue to discuss how they show up in action. For this step, work through different ways to express your values in words and make them intriguing and memorable. Allow this process to be lively, go through several iterations and don’t be afraid of some friendly debate!
For our team discussion, we began by reading out each value we had brainstormed and the drafted definitions to make sure it still felt aligned and gave the team space to recommend changes. We co-created the descriptions for each value and went through each word to make sure it felt aligned and engaging to read. We also spent some more time during this session discussing how we felt these values were already showing up in our work, where they can be put into practice more and how we can make decisions with our values in mind.
After this three month process and countless drafts, we felt ready to reveal our values, which you can view here or check out our whiteboard version below after our final meeting! Taking all our ideas and finalizing our values definitely felt like a big win, so be sure to celebrate once you get to this point!
Step 5: Putting your values into practice
As you can guess, the work doesn’t end here! Given these values guide everything you do, how will you come together to make sure they are being put into practice and reinforce them? This means making space for more frequent dialogue to discuss how you are putting them into practice whether that’s making sure you’re sharing them with your external community or facilitating team conversations on how they are helping you move forward in your work.
To make sure the work didn’t end after refreshing our values at LOI, we had a discussion as part of our weekly team meeting to discuss how these values will show up for us, which consisted of the following to start:
Creating a values based matrix to help make decisions when we discuss new opportunities, programs, partnerships, etc.
Including values as part of the recruitment and onboarding process for staff members and volunteers through the application, interview, and orientation.
Showcasing our values on our partnership packages, event decks, program orientations to make sure our community is familiar with what we stand for.
Incorporating value-based conversations in our team check-ins where a team member every month has an opportunity to share what value showed up for them and how.
Starting a values-focused campaign on our digital channels to showcase what LOI stands for, how our community is living our values and how you can build your own values too (cue this blog ;))
Our values guide everything we do, and are key to how we attract and retain amazing entrepreneurs, partners, employees, advisors… the list goes on. Lastly, keep in mind that your values are a living and evolving document. Continue to check in with your team and community to make sure they feel aligned, create more ideas on how you can bring them to life and keep them top of mind as you drive impact. If you find this five-step process useful, be sure to share your experience and values with us and how they are elevating your culture!
