Malcom Fraser has been running Innovacorp—the Nova Scotia organization that helps youthful tech companies in the province enter the global marketplace—for about five years, but he talks as if he just moved into the C-suite yesterday.

“This is my first job,” he said.

It’s the sort of thing entrepreneurs sometimes say about themselves after they’ve traded their bootstraps for a regular paycheck and benefits. But Fraser is about as far from the gun-for-hire executive type as it gets. Born in New Glasgow 55 years ago, raised in Halifax and educated in marketing and economics at Mount Allison University, he founded ISL Internet Solutions Ltd. in 1995 before selling it a decade later to a Vancouver digital marketing company. All he has ever known is entrepreneurship.

“My dad was an accountant, a senior guy at Grant Thornton who worked for all of the big entrepreneurs in the region,” he said. “He was always very clear to me that I could make my own destiny, that this was a better way to be.”

So, when Fraser said the Innovacorp gig he landed in 2017 was his first job, what he means is that it was his first job doing for others what he has always done for himself—turning emerging ideas and innovations into solid business opportunities.

 

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