The Platform Innovation Centre, located in the heart of Calgary's East Village neighbourhood, is a hub dedicated to supporting startups and entrepreneurs at all stages of their journey.

The Innovation Centre provides a single point of access to resources, supports, programming and events to help startups successfully launch and grow their business. And, based on its location beside City Hall, the Central Library, and Studio Bell, home of the National Music Centre — the Platform Innovation Centre will help create connections for local innovators, driving new economic growth and job creation in Calgary.

As a programming partner, TEDxCalgary is pleased to be getting ready to help Platform generate new ideas and tell the stories of some of the emerging innovators from the space whose ideas are worth spreading.

As we plan for our 2021 events, we continue to find that we sit at the intersection of so many great ideas and too little time to pursue them all!

Of course, that's probably an enviable place to be. We'd all be in a much poorer place as a species if good ideas were highly scarce. At the same time, it also makes it more important for us to continually curate the ideas that are best suited to our current time and place in history. Especially as we start to emerge from the pent-up nature of the pandemic, we anticipate that people will be even hungrier for the types of ideas that help us make sense of the next step. We have lots to recover from, and a vast number of choices to make as we attempt to move forward as societies in a post-pandemic world.

As current news reports are constantly reminding us, our journey with COVID-19 is far from over.

Many of us are likely tired of living through a major historical event and continally unprecedented (modern) times. The urge to get back to "normal" is strong, even though we don't know what that will mean for us going forward, or when it will happen.

We're still forced to be physically distanced by COVID, but that doesn't stop us from being connected around great ideas!

Sharing ideas that matter is actually even more important now than ever, and our ENGAGE: Connected event gave us an opportunity to explore ways we can do that until we get a chance to get back together in larger groups.