This Thursday, September 12, the Creative Destruction Lab at the Rotman School of Management is hosting a free Demo Camp for students interested in technology and entrepreneurship. Students attending the camp will have the opportunity to present their own innovative ideas and to network with university alumni and members of the Toronto venture community.
“Demo Camp is an event designed to bring the community together… to show off what they’ve been working on.” says Jesse Rodgers, director of the Creative Destruction Lab. “It’s not necessarily for the highly polished start-up — or the highly polished company. It’s for really interesting ideas, to get the conversation going.”
Students interested in registering for the event can register online until September 12. The event is scheduled to last from 3 pm until 6 pm, and is designed to appeal to a broad audience.
The presenters of the event represent a diverse range of interests and approaches to entrepreneurship. University-based presenters are drawn from many faculties, including the faculties of Engineering, Optical Science, Computer Science, and Chemistry. Presenters at the Demo Camp will also include representatives from the Next 36 and The Hatchery — two Toronto programs that work extensively to develop undergraduate start-ups. The Next 36 website boasts that “no [other] program in the world provides the same mix of ceo mentorship, investment, academic instruction, networking opportunities and exclusive events.” The Hatchery, which is affiliated with the University of Toronto Faculty of Engineering, describes itself as a “hothouse for the best ideas of entrepreneurial undergraduate engineers.”
Companies represented will include U of T-based oti Lumionics, which focuses on organic light-emitting diodes (leds), and UnConference, whose conferencing app was constructed at a Toronto based hackathon. Also represented is Seamless Medical Technologies, a Next 36 venture which attempts to prevent hospital readmissions through a mobile platform which allows patients and doctors to better manage outpatient recovery.
Christina Mueller, a PhD student in the Chemistry department at U of T and co-founder and vice president of Insight Nanofluidics, will also be attending the Demo Camp. Rodgers says that she will be presenting an electron microscope that can analyze a specimen at the nano-level in real time, without prior sample preparation, and described her innovation as “change-the-world technology”.
The Creative Destruction Lab is hosting the event as part of its focus on the development of the U of T entrepreneurship community. As a cornerstone of this focus, the Lab also runs an eight month intensive and competitive program for promising entrepreneurs in the U of T community. The program guides its ventures through important milestones and offers mentorship and access to the Toronto venture capital network. Applications for the Creative Destruction Lab program close September 17. Interested students can apply online through the Creative Destruction Lab website.
The Destruction Lab takes its name from the “creative destruction” concept by economist Joseph Schumpeter. According to Rodgers, creative destruction is entrepreneurship. “It’s the piece of entrepreneurship in capitalism in how it plays a role to replace creatively the old industry, which essentially results in a ‘tearing down of the old — replacing with the new’ — and it takes creativity to do that, and innovation… We’re seeing more entrepreneurship in building massively scalable companies that are replacing industries, not just doing an app that sells a million on the app store. We want to see real change, and real growth.”
The Creative Destruction Lab can be found here. Register online for the Demo Camp here.
