The last three months of 2021 found me, as always, following CBRM happenings — particularly around waterfront development and cruise news — but also looking further afield at stories with local angles or implications. In particular, I got interested in how some Saint Lucians were responding to the arrival ofRead More

Hey, ladies In this week’s Innovacorp article, I referenced an event sponsored by the corporation in 2013 — an evening with a character by the name of Geoff Lewis. Here’s the breathless description of the festivities from the Innovacorp website: On May 30, 2013, Geoff Lewis commandeered the atrium atRead More

I’m going to keep picking away at the list of companies in which Innovacorp has invested to find out what happened to each of them, but I thought this week I’d show you how unnecessarily difficult this can be in some cases. My example is the first company in theRead...

Toll Road Hypocrisy alert: I literally just read an email from Amazon telling me I can expect delivery of my order on December 17. I try really hard to avoid using Amazon — I just checked my order history and this is the first time I’ve placed one since 2019Read More

Here’s an item from last week’s CBRM council session on affordable housing that I really wanted to follow up on:  Deputy Mayor (and District 2 Councilor) Earlene MacMullin proposed the municipality look into the possibility of turning the Northside General Hospital, scheduled for closure and demolition, into affordable housing —Read More

This week, I thought I’d give myself a bit of a break, research-wise, by focusing on Innovacorp’s exits between 2011-2012 and 2020-2021. If you’re wondering why I keep choosing that timeframe, it’s basically, as I should have explained earlier, because Innovacorp did. The agency, which was founded in 1995, changedRead...

Last week, as I was entering data on Innovacorp’s investments from 2011 to the present into a table, I was struck by the imbalance between men and women in the “people” section. This is a tricky subject for me. I’m no fan of the government gambling public money on ventureRead...

Looking into Innovacorp’s “unicorn” investment earlier this year got me to wondering how many successful exits our provincial venture capital fund has managed over the years compared to the number and value of its investments, so I submitted an access-to-information request asking for a list of its investments since 2011.Read...

Munger Games Everywhere I look these days I see vanity projects — from billionaires propelling themselves into almost-space to local businesswomen producing 13-episode podcasts — but the story of Warren Buffet’s partner designing a dorm for the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) takes the proverbial vanity cake. AccordingRead More

Tim Bousquet of the Halifax Examiner has been making the point that the $104 million Innovacorp made on its META exit could be used to fund affordable housing in Nova Scotia. He even did the math: For the record, $104 million would pay for 80 apartments at $1,000/month rent forRead More