The University of Waterloo has a policy that any IP developed by profs or grad students is owned by them rather than the university. In addition Waterloo was the first school to do co-op in engineering when it was founded in 1957 (and still has the largest co-op program in the world.) This adds up to an ungodly number of startups coming outof Waterloo. Something like 10-15% of all startups in Canada.
The UW computer science school is actually named after David Cheriton, the Waterloo grad who introduced Sergey and Larry to investors, and made a few billion out of his stake in Google. More damningly perhaps, Microsoft hires more engineers from Waterloo than anywhere else :)
Perhaps Ottawa HAD more (in the telecommunications boom), but Waterloo is really bustling with startups.
Some examples:
Open Text, Rim, Maple, Descartes and the list goes on and on.
Also, a lot of companies are putting offices into Waterloo's research park, including Google.
I wouldn't consider OpenText, RIM, Maple or Descartes as start-ups (they were once start-ups yes, but not any more)... but yes.. there are a lot of start-ups in Waterloo.
The University of Waterloo has a policy that any IP developed by profs or grad students is owned by them rather than the university. In addition Waterloo was the first school to do co-op in engineering when it was founded in 1957 (and still has the largest co-op program in the world.) This adds up to an ungodly number of startups coming outof Waterloo. Something like 10-15% of all startups in Canada.
The UW computer science school is actually named after David Cheriton, the Waterloo grad who introduced Sergey and Larry to investors, and made a few billion out of his stake in Google. More damningly perhaps, Microsoft hires more engineers from Waterloo than anywhere else :)