BCBUSINESS.CA JULY/AUGUST 2017 BCBUSINESS 29
and you need people who are
willing to wade in and learn
about them and break o
manageable pieces. It's impor-
tant to us to make sure that
we are making a dierence
in our community, not just
making tech.
When you look at an early-
stage venture, how do you
know it's going to work?
With an early-stage venture,
I care less that the venture's
going to work and more about
building that entrepreneur.
Because any venture is one
part about the team and
whatever they're doing, and it's
also about the timing and the
opportunity.
So it might be a fantas-
tic idea, but the timing isn't
right. Or they'll do all the due
diligence, and then they say,
"This isn't where my passion
lies." But then they'll come back
a second or a third time and
nd that thing that gets their
passion. And by then they've
built up all the skills that they
need. Or they go to work for a
company, and that company is
lucky to have them.
Last year Navdeep Bains, the
federal Innovation minister,
appointed you an Innova-
tion Leader. When you led
roundtable discussions with
business leaders, academics
and students on the topic
of how to create an entre-
preneurial society, how did
people respond?
One of the things that came out
of these consultations is there
is a culture shift that needs to
happen around creating that
entrepreneurial mindset. And
you can do that a lot easier by
intervening in schools than
you can by hoping that when
people self-identify as entre-
preneurs later on, then you
pile resources on them. That's
one of the reasons that SFU
is working with
YELL [Young
Entrepreneurship Leadership
Launchpad] in high schools, so
that you don't kill that mindset,
that you actually encourage and
nurture it.
You have said that
SFU is in its
growth phase. What are you
scaling up to?
My ideal vision would be that we
gure out how to get entrepre-
neurship education more widely
in the early stage, through our
entrepreneurship partners.
That we have triple the amount
of people in entrepreneur-
ship programs as we do now,
or more. We've made it that
every student can get access to
entrepreneurship. So now the
question will be, should they be
able to opt in, or should they not
be able to opt out? That would
be a very signi cant shift—
everyone a change maker,
everyone an entrepreneur.
Number of
people who
work in small
businesses
in B.C.
1 million+
Share of pri-
vate sector
employment
represented by
these jobs
Share of total
wages paid to
B.C. workers by
small business
Almost 32%
SOURCE: BC STATS, SMALL
BUSINESS PROFILE 2016
55%
