“At times like that you can either put yourself on hold waiting for things to (fingers crossed) get back to normal, or you can make a detour. Those detours can take you on the adventure of a lifetime.”

 

Six years before the oldest of this year’s 30 Under 30 Innovators was born, I stood on top of a CANDU nuclear reactor at a facility outside Ottawa. There I was, 17 years old, looking through a window in the floor, watching scattered unknown ‘things’ floating through the heavy water—scientists were testing various elements for their response to the neutron moderator.

That same day, I tried out an early prototype of the Canadarm. You might not know it, but the Canadarm was initially developed in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s to load fuel into CANDU reactors. It’s adaptation for NASA didn’t start until 1975. The version I encountered required you to put your arm inside a mechanical sleeve; the gangly robotic assembly looked like an unwieldy extension of your own appendage. And it was—unwieldy, I mean. It took a lot of strength to move the mechanism enough on your end to open and close the ‘fingers’ on the other. The best I could manage was a slight twitch.

A few days before that, I watched a basketball go from bouncing one minute, to being dunked in liquid nitrogen the next, to shattering across the floor seconds later. That was my orientation to science week at the Terry Fox Youth Centre in Ottawa. I had no idea what the rest of the stay held in store and my mind was already blown.

That week was one of the most magical learning experiences of my life. Hard to believe I was complaining about it on the flight from St. John’s.

I don’t know if the program is still operational, but back then, high school high achievers from across Canada—yes, I was a nerd—could apply for an all-expenses-paid, week-long trip to the nation’s capital. The form asked applicants to select a specific theme that aligned with your personal interests… science, history, literature, etc. English was my favorite subject in school. I was (am) a bookworm. I was (does this count?) an aspiring author. Naturally, I wanted to attend literature week. Instead, they gave me science week—and sparked a lifelong fascination with innovation.

Preparing this, our annual innovation issue, we repeatedly encountered individuals who—like 17-year-old me—thought they were headed down a one-way street. Then life threw a pothole in the way. At times like that you can either put yourself on hold waiting for things to (fingers crossed) get back to normal, or you can make a detour. Those detours can take you on the adventure of a lifetime.

Consider Amy Andrews, the subject of Let’s do Launch (page 15). She founded her company to manufacture GPS-enabled lifejackets for the commercial fishery, but the market wasn’t ready for them. Faced with a choice between folding the company or taking it in a new direction, she and co-founder David Itoafa chose to explore the space where personal safety merges with GPS technology and artificial intelligence. The rest is history in the making.

Then there’s the high-powered trio at the heart of our Verafin cover story (page 74). Memorial University students Jamie King, Brendan Brothers and Raymond Pretty got their start developing pattern-recognition software for the mining sector. And that was the path they fully planned to follow to its destination… until the day they were persuaded to change lanes from underground tunnels to underground financial transactions. Over the course of 18 years, they built Verafin into one of the most innovative technology companies in the country—and the subject of the largest venture deal in Canadian history.

Those two examples aren’t the only ones you’ll find this issue. Nigerian ex-pats Tosin Ajibola and Jide Sosan turned their newcomer experiences into a business helping other immigrants adjust to life in Canada. Jessica Ghaney was a nurse before launching her Fintech platform. And Zach Laberge founded a cryptocurrency startup, dog food business and frenter—“Shopify for rentals”—before his 16th birthday.

Whether you’re a disappointed teenager who didn’t get the thing you thought you wanted, or an entrepreneur whose business hits a snag, life rarely goes according to plan. Change is inevitable; how you respond makes all the difference.