ShopHERE Program

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Chris led the design and launch of ShopHERE—an emergency digital support program created in partnership with the City of Toronto and Digital Main Street. The initiative helped independently owned main street businesses establish e-commerce stores at no cost, enabling them to maintain operations and reach customers during lockdowns.

What began as a local response quickly scaled nationwide. In under a year, ShopHERE supported the launch of over 50,000 online stores for small businesses and artists across Canada, accelerating digital adoption during a time of unprecedented disruption.

Collision Technology Conference

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.

Light Manufacturing Incubator @ Dufferin and Queen

To strengthen Toronto’s urban manufacturing ecosystem and support the next generation of product-based entrepreneurs, Chris spearheaded the creation of a light manufacturing incubator designed to accelerate commercialization and growth for early-stage makers and producers.

Planned to open in 2020, the incubator was envisioned as the anchor tenant in a groundbreaking development—the first mixed-use building in North America to integrate residential rental housing above dedicated manufacturing space. The lower five floors were reserved for production uses, with the incubator occupying the first two floors and the remaining three dedicated to manufacturers scaling out of the program or seeking access to shared resources.

The project represented a novel approach to preserving and evolving industrial space in dense urban environments, offering a scalable, sustainable model for embedding manufacturing within the fabric of the modern city.

WeWork Toronto Startup Pass

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.

Civic Hall Toronto

In partnership with Code for Canada and the Centre for Social Innovation, Chris helped launch Civic Hall Toronto—a first-of-its-kind initiative designed to support public servants tackling complex community challenges through technology, policy, and civic engagement.

The platform brought together government innovators and community partners to co-create solutions to pressing issues at the local, provincial, and federal levels. By fostering collaboration and building digital capacity within the public sector, Civic Hall Toronto helped accelerate more responsive, citizen-focused approaches to government service delivery.