It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities and talents.
Eric Hoffer

Earlier this summer as I was touring Canada looking at the state of early stage technology startups, when David Crow introduced me to the concept of an innovation commons space.

The concept that David and Boris Mann were discussing was an open office space that meshed together the community aspects of Barcamp and Democamp, with the shared office space concept of business centers (such as Business HQ - which I’ve used with my other companies and though they have their place - they don’t fit into a creative center of innovations category).

Last week Mark Dowds and Bobby John, along with some help from the Toronto Mesh crew have launched Indoor Playground.

This is a great project, and I’m going to be meeting with the Toronto team to see how I can help or get involved. I see these innovation centers as being a key part of changing some of the problems I see in the Canadian early stage technology market. The other changes need to occur in the angel and early stage VC communities (more on that later).

I’ve been talking with my friend Patrick Tanguay about putting together the financing support for a similar concept here in Montreal. There are a number of early stage angel investors who’ve expressed interest in helping nurture these type of concepts to help build out deal flow and foster environments of startup innovation in Canada.

Patrick and I are beginning to look for office space around the plateau area in Montreal (hopefully close to Laika which has become the unofficial playground spot in Montreal).

We are going to be contacting the other groups in various cities who have been working on similar concepts to try and help cobble together a shared - open business plan that we can get in front of as many eyes as possible. (I’ve got someone with experience with business plans & projections - who I’m going to fund to write the the Montreal version of a business plan - this might be a good start for an open one that we can share with the community. Contact me if you think you can help or know of similar teams that we might be able to collaborate with.)

My friends and fellow StartupCamp organizers David Crow, Rob Hyndman have some more information on the launch. This was also picked up by my friends & the Mesh conference co-founders Mathew Ingram and Mark Evans. Check out the community page on Ning that the Indoor Playground team have setup.

I’m really excited by a number of things such as this that I’m seeing in the Canadian early stage scene. There are some great quality teams that I’m encountering who are flying under the radar of VCs and reporters, but are delivering real value to customers.

While there are still major problems with the Canadian early stage financing market, if we make it easy for creative talent to launch great projects, money and other networks of talent pools will begin to follow.

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On Mon 27 Nov 2006.