Big ideas rarely appear out of nowhere. Most come from someone's everyday life: a job, a hobby, a winter that is hard to travel in, or a culture they grew up in. In this lesson you will meet five Canadian ventures and look for a pattern. To innovate means to improve something that already exists or find a new use for it. An invention is something brand new. Most entrepreneurs are innovators, not inventors, and that is good news: you do not need a brand-new idea, you need a better one.
Solving problems from everyday life
Joseph-Armand Bombardier was a mechanic from Quebec. In rural Quebec, deep winter snow made travel very hard. Bombardier spent years building and improving vehicles that could travel over snow. His work led to the Ski-Doo, a small snowmobile for one or two riders that came out in 1959. His company, Bombardier, grew into a large Canadian manufacturer. The problem was local and personal: getting around in winter. The skill was mechanical: he knew how engines and machines worked.
Ron Foxcroft of Hamilton, Ontario, was a basketball referee. Most whistles of the time had a small ball, called a pea, inside. A pea whistle can stick or fail to make a sound, which is a real problem when a referee has to stop play right away. Foxcroft developed the Fox 40, a whistle with no pea at all. The problem came straight from his job on the court. His experience as a referee told him exactly what a whistle needed to do.
Building on culture and community
Sean McCormick, a Métis entrepreneur, founded Manitobah Mukluks in Winnipeg. Mukluks are soft winter boots, and moccasins are soft leather shoes; both have long histories in Indigenous cultures. The company makes mukluks and moccasins rooted in those traditions and runs the Storyboot Project, which sells handmade mukluks and moccasins made by Indigenous artisans and returns the profits to them. An artisan is a skilled person who makes things by hand. McCormick's experience and heritage shaped what the business makes and whom it works with. His venture shows that culture and community can be the starting point for an innovation.
Guy Laliberté and Gilles Ste-Croix were street performers in Quebec. In 1984 they co-founded Cirque du Soleil, a circus with no animal acts that blends acrobatics, music, costumes and theatre. Their experience as performers gave them the skills and the contacts. Their innovation was to change what people expected a circus to be.
Turning a side project into a platform
Tobi Lütke and his co-founders wanted to sell snowboards online from Ottawa in the mid-2000s. The online store software they tried did not do what they wanted. Lütke was a computer programmer, so he built his own. They soon realized the software was more valuable than the snowboards. They turned it into Shopify, a platform that lets other people build their own online stores. A platform is a service that other businesses build on. This is a classic innovation story: a tool built to solve your own problem turns out to solve the same problem for many other people.
Patterns across the stories
| Venture | Problem they noticed | Skill or experience they had | Risk they took |
|---|---|---|---|
| Snow vehicles and the Ski-Doo | Winter travel in rural Quebec was very hard | Mechanic who understood engines | Years of time and money on vehicles that might not work |
| Fox 40 whistle | Pea whistles can stick or fail during a game | Basketball referee | Paying to develop a new product in a market full of old whistles |
| Manitobah Mukluks | A chance to share Indigenous footwear traditions through a business | Métis heritage and connection to Indigenous artisans | Starting a new footwear company |
| Shopify | Online store software did not do what they needed | Computer programming | Switching from selling snowboards to selling software |
| Cirque du Soleil | A circus could be something new and different | Street performing | Launching a new kind of show with no guarantee people would come |