In 2013, Foresight embarked on a mission to accelerate the growth and impact of cleantech innovation in British Columbia.
With a small and nimble team of cleantech champions, we worked to bring together key stakeholders across the Province to build our ambitious vision, and have helped mentor and support a new generation of cleantech businesses, who we are proud to see growing and scaling.
After a few years we found ourselves pulled in a number of new and exciting directions: supporting calls from industry to help them decarbonize and meet urgent climate targets, building out new programs and peer groups to support entrepreneurs at every innovation stage, mapping out a network of engaged investors and supporting them with curated matchmaking with cleantech innovators, connecting academia to industry and new graduates to cleantech jobs, and of course working with government to meet urgent climate goals and to position cleantech innovation domestically on a global scale.
We continued to build our network with the global cleantech community, and we expanded our support across Canada through partnerships in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and across eastern Canada. We piloted and expanded virtual programs to support entrepreneurs across Canada, and expanded our role in ecosystem building. To date we are proud to have supported over 550 companies through our Kickstart, Launch, Deliver, and Grow programs who have raised $423M in capital, and earned $230+M in revenue. We’ve supported the creation of over 6,100 high paying cleantech jobs, and have personally grown our team to 25 people across 3 provinces, and nearly 80 mentors and Executives in Residence in 5 provinces. We’re proud to support the Canadian cleantech ecosystem, and are excited to continue our mission of advancing clean technologies to meet urgent climate needs.
New Look
Notice anything different? In May 2021 Foresight launched a new look. We love it, and we’re getting great feedback from our community. But our brand is more than just a pretty face. It’s the product of a collaboration and engagement process of innovation. We thought we’d share the story of how we developed our new look, in case it inspires or energizes innovation for you.
Since 2013, Foresight has grown from British Columbia's cleantech accelerator to a Canada-wide cleantech ecosystem accelerator with over 25 employees and 60 mentors and EIRs across 5 provinces. We’re proud of where we are now and of our roots, but in 2021 we recognized that our logo and brand weren’t representative of our partners, our team, and our work. We approached this opportunity the same way we approach everything we do - collaboratively.
Our team convened a focus group of our key stakeholders across Canada representing industry, entrepreneurs, our Board of Directors, members of government, academic partners, and investors. Through a series of engagement workshops, we asked our ecosystem what keywords best represented Foresight. They told us: Bold, Collaborative, Connectors, Partners, Dynamic, Entrepreneurial, Builders, Champions. Our audacious goal was to capture this feedback into a logo that represented not only our stakeholders, but our strengths.
Our new logo, developed in-house by our talented Brand Manager, Michelle Zazulak, contains 5 turquoise circles, representing our 5 key stakeholders (the Helix-5): entrepreneurs, industry, government, academia, and investors:
- The orange circle represents Foresight, and our role connecting the ecosystem.
- The colour palette is bold, bright, optimistic, and dynamic; our hope for a bright future and positive action towards climate change.
- The icon is meant to feel hand drawn, entrepreneurial. Think, closing the loop on innovation; laser focus on cleantech; identifying the path forward; cleantech innovation starts here.
- We are Foresight Canada, representing the cleantech ecosystem from coast-to-coast.
We hope you like our new brand as much as we do, and we are excited to continue our fresh approach to supporting cleantech across Canada. Consider yourself in the loop!
