Fast Track Program

The Cause

The IoT Fast Track is a technology ecosystem program to help established businesses (in Calgary and surrounding areas) in IoT (running IoT as a business or leveraging IoT for their growth) to scale up, gain access to resources, increase collaboration between tech sector businesses, with the goal of creating new jobs, expand operations, and increasing revenue in Canada and abroad.
Our goal is to run a 8 week Fast Track program to address high growth potential businesses to assess gaps in their business systems, create an actionable expansion framework plan, align companies to key resource partners in our ecosystem, and provide one on one support (coaching) to drive results. This includes data gathering and reporting on these outcomes to our stakeholders to measure the program's success targeting economic growth. We will collect data at intake, during the program and upon completion.
We will run 3 training groups annually with 15 business participants /cohorts (serving 90 high growth potential businesses over the course of the program). Our key focus is: job creation (estimated 300 new jobs, increased revenue by 20%, increased export sales by 20%. This means 300 new jobs in Calgary and revenue growth between 180 million to 450 million over 2 years.

Who Will it Benefit?

We did a review in Calgary of programs available for second stage growth and none existed. In addition, we did a survey of our members at AB IoT about their expansion needs. We have also worked directly with many businesses that have potential to expand but need support and training to get to the next level growth.
The IoT industry is a trillion-dollar industry globally and we wish to dynamically support the growth of Calgary based firms to capture 1-2 % of this market. Aligned with the federal innovation initiative, our focused market is second stage businesses who are in operation 2+ years, plan to hire, generating over 1 million in revenues, and a desire to expand globally. These businesses all find it difficult to grow past the 1- 10 million mark once they begin to expand and need support to get to the next level of success.
With the right support systems and education in place, these businesses could generate an additional 180-450 million to the Canadian economy. Similar to the government funded Self Employment program model (the support and education provides a high success rate for business sustainability after 5 years) we want to increase revenue, increase hiring, and position or prepare these businesses to successfully expand globally. The risk investment is low as these businesses are already generating revenues and want to expand. We will walk with them through their growth not just for 8 weeks but for a year following the training program to remove barriers to achieve success.