Launch Lab’s Board of Directors is made up of a cross-section of Eastern Ontario business leaders from the fields of manufacturing, research, marketing, med-tech, IT, and more. Its mandate is to provide oversight, advice, ideas, feedback, mentorship, networking opportunities, and industry expertise, and to promote Launch Lab across Eastern Ontario.

Message from the Chair, Stephen Rosa

Wouldn’t it be great if our business climate in Eastern Ontario were to mirror the key traits that have made Silicon Valley such a successful hub of innovation over the past several decades? What is it about Southern California that has drawn some of the continent’s most creative and innovative brains (including many Canadian brains!) to pack up their stuff and move to the West Coast? There are many things that develop a business climate, but for these entrepreneurs, I think some of the key ones might be:

• A sense of excitement and action
• A rich peer network of driven people with similar ambitions
• A deep pool of active mentors who have walked the walk and are willing to help young businesses balance risk and to guide critical decisions
• A culture that accepts and embraces failure as a stepping stone and as an opportunity to learn
• A tie to sophisticated and syndicated investors, which is clean, streamlined, and well understood, and
• A customer pipeline which helps young business find those critical first invoices which can help enable success.

The dream of Launch Lab is to be a community leader who, along with our partners, helps our region look more and more like this vision—as quickly as possible.

Practically, we need to understand that organizations like Launch Lab cannot create, much less sustain, a vital, active entrepreneurial ecosystem. This is the job of entrepreneurs and investors in the private sector. With that said, entrepreneurs and investors are going to go where the business climate breeds success.

The ONE Network and Launch Lab brings an awesome array of talent and tools to our region. It is Launch Lab’s job and our passion to work with our partners to help create the climate—and to make this the place to be for innovators and entrepreneurs to ‘get their ideas off the ground’. There is a huge opportunity for our region facing us, and we are excited to be a part of it.

The Launch Lab Board members include Robert Cumming, Bruce Davis, David Dolphin, Daniel Holland, Theresa Macbeth, Bob Pritchard, Stephen Rosa, and Doug Somers. Learn more about the experience of our Board of Directors.

• Shawn Patriquin

• Doug Somers

• Stephen Rosa, Chairman

• Bob Pritchard

• Theresa MacBeth

• Daniel Holland

• David Dolphin

• Bruce Davis

• Robert Cumming