Busy weekend on the Montreal business scene. The second edition of Startup Weekend Montréal mobilized dozens of young entrepreneurs, developers and designers in search of the most creative ideas, with the hope of finding the next great business, product, business model. For the occasion, Fasken Martineau, TP1, Frank & Oak, SAJE, Anges Québec, realventures, founderfuel and f. & co connected right into entrepreneurial creativity and dispatched coaches, speakers and jury members on site, at HEC Montréal.
The trend, across all sectors, is clearly to platforms – mostly mobile – and to massive social connections and networking. Many projects openly and readily identified with recent P2P success stories: airbnb, passbook, tumblr, vine… We are the product of our times, but still, we must look beyond it. That’s where mentors, organizers and other dragons came in to propel, question, advise. If the future is about collaboration, the teams of the Startup Weekend – some of which counted on up to ten members who didn’t even know each other before, working together through the 54 hours to design, prototype, crunch market numbers – aptly demonstrated that they got the memo.
Some projects did not make it on the jury’s shortlist, like LiftCo, an online booking platform that would structure the corporate air taxi market, SmartCook, a service for home-delivery of recipe-based baskets of fresh produce aimed at reducing waste and enhancing the cooking experience, La Cavalt and its democratization of the private importation of wine, or KnowKontrol with is crowdsourced reliability checks for online news and science articles… but certainly would have deserved honourable mentions.
Tomorrow is always another day and this “time out of time” that was the Startup Weekend will yield to the harsh reality of business as usual, where every day requires more ideas, people, partners, investors, clients and even more clients… Some have had lots of fun; others learned a lot. A few projects, whether they won or not, may well come to fruition. They will embody, with so many others, the economy of tomorrow: creative, collaborative, innovative. A mirror image of this event and of its 200 participants, organizers and mentors, who, for a short 54 hours, will have filled the brisk Montréal air (and the Twittersphere), with burning entrepreneurial passion.
The future is in good hands.