Newsletter

The City of Summerside Prince Edward Island is an atypical municipality in North America that is steeped in a rich and robust Municipally owned traditional infrastructure, core service delivery provisions and amenities found in all jurisdictions across North America.  Summerside, being a small but accessible small city, understands the challenges business, entrepreneurs and inventors face when looking to launch that next product or service and for that perfect investment location that balances economic advantages with quality of life amenities.

Summerside is home to over 700 businesses in a number of key sectors including Aerospace, Information Technology, Renewable Infrastructure, Marine Manufacturing and Training and traditional industries including farming and fishing. Over the past decade, Summerside has become a leader in the Clean/Green Tech sector pushing the limits of what’s possible to drive efficiencies in our business communities and providing future opportunities for our next generation of aspiring business and labour cohorts.

While our journey began with the installation of four windmills we did not stop there. The windmills were the catalyst for building a future industry that not only respects innovation and the environment but established Summerside on a path towards achieving net-zero, or as close to it as possible, through our collective vision and determination to build the best “Smart City” in North America.

While we have achieved some significant milestones be it our fibre network communications system, our Energy Storage Heat for Less program, our Living Lab Program advancing technologies and services to our Solar/Energy storage CUP Project Pilot to our most recent innovations in utility-scale Solar and Battery to our new Business Commons Eco Park, Summerside has taken a leadership role in advancing this critical sector and we are not stopping there, our journey is still continuing. 

Through our collaborative research and partnerships to our Innovation Strategy, Summerside has embraced a philosophy to continue to seed, invest and pursue opportunities in the transportation, industrial buildings and energy industries to further advance innovation on the path towards a net-zero economy.  It has been built on three foundational pillars: Adaptation, Commercial Scale-up, and Technology Venturing.

Adaptation:
Adaptation encompasses efforts to introduce existing commercial technologies into new markets or localities. Operating in this mode entails a focus primarily on activities related to marketing innovative business models, customer engagement and social acceptance, and novel financing structures. Within this mode, policy efforts support entrepreneurial and financial efforts to bring existing renewable innovations to new markets.

Commercial Scale-up:
Commercial scale-up encompasses efforts to achieve broad commercial activity across the value chain of technology – from manufacturing to retail deployment. Often, this involves moving technology from the demonstration phase to commercial diffusion. Scale-up activities typically occur after successful demonstration projects are completed. Scale-up activities can also focus on building industrial capacity around proven technologies. This innovation mode focuses on incremental innovation activities as opposed to the spending of large amounts of resources on R&D to compete at the technology frontier.

Technology Venturing:
Technology venturing encompasses efforts to move a particular technology or system from the R&D stage to the demonstration stage. This is often achieved by establishing a firm and securing financing or by licensing the technology to an existing firm. This innovation mode occurs at the technology frontier and often involves efforts to commercialize a breakthrough technology. Renewable innovation in this mode involves the manufacture of novel systems and products and is typically highly research- and capital-intensive. [1]