Matt, You know of more examples than I but the same behaviour you describe continues. 1 year ago Cape Breton Partnership commissioned the 'Cape Breton Island and Mulgrave Strategic Entrepreneurship Action Plan' (ACOA funded); this was completed in May but still not made public - no good reason why not except the usual secrecy. It recommended an Entrepreneurship Centre; too big for the local ACOA staffers to approve. Bid lost. The Innovation Hub was a deliverable version. I hope someone asks about it at the StartUpCB event on Monday. The Charlotte St Mafia is the (geographically imprecise) term I use at moments of frustration to describe collectively the many business support & economic development agencies to be found in a line between the Dorchester St crossing and the Crescent Street / Kings Road site in Sydney. Count'em!

I guess the fleet footedness of Innovacorp's Spark Cape Breton program must be an amazing accomplishment. Though the funding is in lower amounts, they assembled a team that is able to make the decision quickly. Vet a short biz plan followed by a 15 minute presentation. Then see what happens. The amount of funding awarded is probably less than the reports and consulting process invested by other agencies/programs before deciding. A feasibility study conducted by doing. I realize where the source of that funding is coming from. But these seem like the characteristics that need to be considered when reengineering other processes to start making stuff #happen.

Do the people making these big decisions inside of these agencies actually have the credentials to do so? Have they been proven to pick winning projects before? What is their win/loss ratio?

This might well be naive but is it a given that all roads run through ACOA? Or any of the local business support and development agencies? Are there private sector-led innovation hubs elsewhere? I'm wondering if this is just a hangover from CB's days of looking to government for everything.

I was thinking about this recently as well, Dave. Maybe there is a role simply for these agencies assisting with getting startups ready to pitch to outside private venture capital or related programs. In a way, becoming a client (funding) from any of them gives us a credential to work with (pre-vetted), but perhaps that could be a formalized process. I wonder if (in the tech startup area), any of our agencies have ever tried actually pitching our potentials to some of the saavy US venture capital firms or bigger Canadian markets? Just think of all the syndicates on AngelList. It would be much more challenging (though not impossible) for a bootstrapper like myself to get their attention, whereas a major provincial agency would presumably have some significant clout. In one sense, there is probably a great fear that our best prospects could get poached away. However, we would have to be prepared with a biz case for that not happening, such as the square footage argument. For digital products, it can be much most cost effective to house them in this region versus Silicon Valley (e.g.). Slyce, operating out of the metropolis of New Waterford, has to be a decent case study to work from.