In our fast-paced world, we often don’t get an opportunity to pause and reflect on where we’ve been. There’s little time to celebrate milestones, as we call ourselves to quickly refocus and soldier on to meet the next challenge. While the start of 2018 has been no different, we want to pause and take a moment to celebrate how far entrepreneurship has progressed at the University under the leadership of Pierre Morrissette.
Over the last decade, entrepreneurship at Ivey has been supported and guided by the leadership of Pierre, who’s played a hands-on role in our direction and strategy. During this time, we’ve grown in every capacity, with our teaching, research and outreach activities. I still recall being Ivey’s first ever full-time entrepreneurship faculty member in 2002, and today, we boast one of the top entrepreneurship groups in the world with excellence in both research and education.
It was Pierre’s gift that enabled us expand our offerings across degree programs, and provide students with resources, and extracurricular entrepreneurship experiences. With that support, we’ve been able to create numerous long-standing success stories. Together with IBK Capital Corp, we have hosted Canada’s premier graduate business plan competition for over 20 years, seeing teams from across Canada, the United States, Thailand and India. Later this spring, we will be hosting the 15th edition of the QuantumShiftTM program, which has more than 600 of Canada’s top entrepreneurs amongst its graduates.
None of what we have accomplished at Ivey Entrepreneurship would have been possible without our passionate alums, who’ve given of their time and resources provide our students with the opportunities they lacked. Many of you have served as Entrepreneurs-in-Residence or members of our dedicated Advisory Board, and we can’t thank you enough for your efforts in making Entrepreneurship at Ivey, what it is today.