Rising Number of Startup Launches
One of the changes that have taken place in the East Coast startup ecosystem in the past four or five years is the region has ratcheted up its capacity for launching new companies.
As part of our mission to chart and analyze data on the startup community, we track the new companies that appear each year. It wasn’t an overnight change, but in three of the last four years, the region has launched more than 100 startups a year.
There is no single reason for the improvement – rather it is a lot of little changes that have taken place over the past seven years. Several universities now have dedicated entrepreneurship programs, including Memorial University, Dalhousie University, St. Mary’s University, and the University of New Brunswick.
In Nova Scotia, there are nine “sandboxes”, which encourage student entrepreneurship. Most important, the startup culture has spread throughout the region, enough that anyone who aspires to launch a company can be directed to a group that can help.
In the examination of where the companies formed in 2018 reveals an interesting development: St. John’s has become a hotbed of company formation. The Newfoundland and Labrador capital has almost doubled its number of new innovation companies — up to 24 in 2018 from 13 in 2017. What’s more startling is that nine of these St. John’s-based companies – more than one-third of the total – area in the life sciences sector. That’s about 40 percent of the rookie life sciences companies in the region.
The reason for the explosion of healthcare startups in the city is the launch of the Bounce Health Initiative and the support of Memorial Centre of Entrepreneurship Director Florian Villaumé for healthcare innovation. Bounce is a collaborative effort between MCE, Eastern Health, the MUN Faculty of Medicine, and the Newfoundland and Labrador Association of Technical Industries, or NATI.
Aside from healthcare, MCE has been crucial in generating new companies, and its Woodward Cup has become a vehicle for giving funding to young ventures.
The fact that Halifax and Fredericton are Nos. 1 and 3 in company formation should surprise no one – they have been the strongest centers in the region for startup development in the past few years.
As we look ahead to the next few years, we believe the driving force for new startups will be growing entrepreneurship among researchers at the region’s universities and community colleges
There is one other thing that’s interesting about new companies – more and more of them are ocean tech companies. We now track 47 companies whose products have marine applications, and 23 of them started in the last two years.
For more information follow the link below:
http://entrevestor.com/ac/blog/rising-number-of-startup-launches