By Cory Sellar

Startup Weekend lands in Prince George

Nov 6, 2017 | 8:18 PM

The Innovation Central Society and Startup Prince George hosted Startup Weekend this past week. It took place at The Hubspace where people who have an idea, can turn it into a business. Executive Director of Innovation Central, Matt Hutcheon says the participants are “usually a mix, who have never been an entrepreneur. They want to explore it or they’ve got a business idea, but they’re not sure if it’s valid.” Hutcheon adds that they also, “have people who have established businesses, but they thrive off that energy of working with new people and working on a new idea in a short, compressed period of time.”

“Startup Weekend is a blast!” That’s the response, Luke Hutchison, Owner of XP Entertainment had to say about the three-day event. His virtual reality entertainment company was formed from one of the teams last year. Hutchison added, “working together with like-minded entrepreneurs really pushed our creative limits and sparked a simple idea into something greater.”

The ambition that Hutchison had is in many of us. You’ve probably come across a problem that needed to be solved and no one else seemed to know how to solve it. So, you came up with an idea and it turned out that the solution could transform into a business. Your ambition to piece together those steps is that entrepreneurial spirit that drove you to that conclusion.

On Friday, the opening session consisted of participants pitching an idea that they wanted to work on. After that, a consensus was met on which ideas would be pursued. Teams were then formed with a specific project to work on. The new collaboration this year with Hacking Health allowed participants to choose from a health/medical-focused project, or a traditional startup idea.

On Saturday, teams worked on developing their ideas, along with meeting mentors.

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Sunday was the third and final day for teams to reach the completion of their prototype. Once completed, each team had a few minutes to present to a panel of judges, followed by a Q&A. After that, the results were in and Colpo-Connect was declared the winner. The other two teams were Naloxone Now and Good To Go.

The idea behind Colpo-Connect, according to team member, Sheona Mitchell-Foster, “was to decrease the impact of cervical cancer to people who are most at risk for cervical cancer. Being a gynecologist, Mitchell-Foster brought the knowledge of cervical cancer. Claudia Hopkins – teammate – worked on the design, some branding and user flow. Abdullah Ahmad – teammate – created the web portion of the app, along with the business plan and how they could make the product feasible. All in all, the value of a variety of professional backgrounds proved that solutions can be found when different points of view fuse together. 

More than 23,000 teams from over 150 countries have formed through Startup Weekend.

These medical and health ideas were inspired from the participation of the Prince George chapter of Hacking Health. To hear about Hacking Health’s involvement during the three-day event, check out Cheryl Jahn’s story.