Dal Innovates provides opportunities for students and faculty at Dalhousie University to explore and experience innovation and entrepreneurship and develop knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to translate new ideas into innovations. We empower our students & faculty to be the best innovators, creators and entrepreneurs and make an impact on local and global challenges.
The flow of the Dal Innovates programming will follow a logical sequence which can lead students and researchers through a path to innovation and entrepreneurship, recognizing that the actual path of students and researchers will often not follow this sequence precisely each time.
Dalhousie provides opportunities for students to discover and experience innovation and entrepreneurship through multi-disciplinary and team-based curricular, co-curricular and extra-curricular learning, and engaging students in hands-on co-op and experiential opportunities. We prepare students with the knowledge, skills, capabilities and experience in creativity, problem-solving and innovation so that they can implement solutions that scale rapidly and achieve broad impact. We work with the next-generation of leaders who aim to contribute significantly to important global challenges at all stages of the idea-to-impact process—from pure research and invention, to projects within large organizations, to launching their own start-ups, social enterprises or not-for-profits. Dalhousie cultivates a pipeline of creators, innovators and entrepreneurs and empowers students and faculty to create local and global impact. Our approach to innovation is broad, and includes the creativity needed to generate new ideas and the entrepreneurial mindset needed to take a risk and apply those new ideas.
As a leading innovative, research-intensive university, Dalhousie is both supporting and playing a leadership role in the Halifax innovation district ecosystem, including through partnerships with incubators, accelerators, science parks, venture capitalists and other organizations. Dalhousie supports the translation of important new ideas into innovations effectively, efficiently and expediently through its commercialization services to maximize the quality and volume of potentially important innovations for society. This approach takes a much broader view of returns to the university, by not focusing on short-term revenue from licensing, but the long-term social and economic impact, and the resulting virtuous cycle of reputational rewards that will create much greater value for the university and our local, national and global communities.