During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Chris worked with his teams at the City of Toronto and Digital Main Street to design and launch ShopHERE, a program focused on quickly building e-commerce stores at no cost for independently owned main street businesses.
The program quickly grew from just serving businesses in the City of Toronto to supporting small businesses and artists across Canada, helping to launch over 50,000 online stores in less than a year.
The Toronto innovation community is one of the fastest globally - having added more jobs than Silicon Valley, New York City and Washington D.C. combined in 2017. However, helping the world understand the size, scale and diversity of Toronto’s innovation community has always been a challenge.
To help raise the global profile of Toronto’s innovation community, Chris and his team worked with Tourism Toronto, the Toronto Region Board of Trade, MaRS and Techstars Toronto, to attract North America’s fastest growing technology festival, Collision, to Toronto in late 2017 and early 2018.
At the time, Collision was hosted in New Orleans and attracted 25,000+ international attendees, 700+ speakers, 500+ investors and 500+ international media. The Toronto bid team was interested in moving Collision to Toronto not only to bring international tech leaders to Canada, but also to attract global tech media to the city in order to help tell Toronto’s story.
Ultimately, the Toronto bid was successful and in May 2018 Collision announced its move to Toronto for May 2019.
Looking to support the next generation of Toronto manufacturers, Chris worked to establish a light manufacturing incubator to assist early-stage manufacturers in the commercialization of their products.
Due to open in 2020, the planned manufacturing incubator will be hosted in the first mixed-use residential and manufacturing building in North America. With the first five floors of the residential building being set aside for manufacturing, with the remaining floors will feature residential rentals. Overall, the development represents an innovation in creating and maintaining space for manufacturing in an urban area.
The planned manufacturing incubator will take up the first two floors of the building, while the remaining three floors will be available to manufacturers who have graduated from the incubator or are interested in utilizing its resources.
In order to help Toronto technology companies access global markets, Chris worked with a number of local incubators and post-secondary partners, including MaRS, DMZ at Ryerson, the University of Toronto and York University, to create the WeWork Toronto Startup Pass.
The program allowed Toronto technology companies to access a WeWork monthly pass at no-cost for one-year. The pass provided participating companies the ability to use WeWork’s global coworking network to access new markets.
Over 500 companies used the program in its first year of operation and the program is being expanded to support companies in Montreal, Ottawa and Waterloo.
Working partners at Code for Canada and the Centre for Social Innovation, Chris helped create Civic Hall Toronto, an organization dedicated to working with government innovators to solve community challenges.
Launched in May 2018, Civic Hall Toronto works with government teams on technology and policy related challenges, facilitating meaningful engagement with the broader community to collaboratively create solutions issues facing local, provincial and federal governments.
Looking to support the transformation of main street, Chris led a project to develop a wifi toolkit for Business Improvement Areas aimed at helping them understand and streamline the implementation of wireless networks in their neighbourhoods.
Chris was part of the founding team that launched Elevate Tech Festival, Canada’s leading tech and innovation festival.
Hosted annually in September, Elevate is founded on the belief that diversity is our strength, that we’re stronger when we disrupt together, and that it is Canada’s time.
Attracting a worldwide audience, Elevate invites a global audience to collaborate with Canada’s thriving innovation ecosystem.
Working with the Mayor’s Office and Bloomberg Philanthropies, Chris helped lead the creation of the City of Toronto’s Civic Innovation Office. Focused on disrupting City Hall from the inside out, the Civic Innovation Office is a bridge between outside innovators and the City. The goal of the office is creating a more responsive government, one that acts quickly and meaningfully on behalf of the people it serves.
Launched by the Province of Ontario in 2014 to support young people aged 18 to 29 to start their own businesses, the Starter Company Program provided training, mentorship and a grant of up to $5,000 to launch and run their business.
The development and delivery of the program in Toronto was led by Chris and his team at the City's Small Business Centres. Through Chris' leadership, the team at the City of Toronto exceeded its targets and assisted 275 young people to start businesses.
Chris' management of the program involved developing the programming, overseeing its delivery, administering a grant fund of over $1 million, and developing a back-end technology platform on Salesforce to manage the program.
Working with his team, Chris worked to develop the Digital Main Street Lab - an testing ground for new retail technologies in Toronto.
Leveraging Toronto's diverse and vibrant main streets, the Digital Main Street Lab connects retail technology companies with local business improvement areas allowing them to pilot new technologies.
The purpose of the Lab is to assist Toronto's main street businesses in adopting new technologies, while also encouraging the growth of Toronto's retail technology sector.
