MTL Green: Driving Collaboration for Sustainable Creative Innovation
by Kristi L. Heiman, Publishing Advisor & Coordinator at MTL Green
On May 14th, many aspiring entrepreneurs, technical professionals, journalists, programmers, and researchers, will converge at Desjardins Lab for the initial Creative Collisions Demo Night to participate in demonstrations by several startups. We aim to bring researchers from both fields, GreenTech and Fintech. Indeed with this event, we aim to bring the focus, audience, startups, and talent drawn from two different although complementary industries in an effort to explore collaborations, expose the challenges of digital transformation, highlight available resources and talent, and to promote experimentation between different players.
MtlGreen serves as a co-organizer with Fintech Cadence — FormFintech and MTL NewTech for this collaboration of ideas networking exchange in digital technology, resources and experimentation. Right now, you may be asking yourself, “I am not familiar with MtlGreen, yet I am drawn by their ingenuity, innovation, and drive.” Well, here is our story and why we joined in this partnership to co-create this original event.
Our organization traces back to the Montréal’s public consultation on “How to reduce the city’s dependence on fossil fuels” in 2015–2016. The discussions enticed young passionate environmentalists to organize activities throughout the city about climate change. After the consultation report was released, members decided to continue their mission to increase awareness of the impacts of climate change and formalized into MtlGreen to further promote sustainable initiatives in Montreal and allow other fellow citizens like yourself to“decide your level of involvement.” We know and understand your personal and professional commitments. Any time you get involved with us, either by joining an initiative or starting a new project, we build upon our commitment to sustainability in the city.
MtlGreen continues to grow its capacity to develop hands-on ventures to tackle the three largest contributors of greenhouse gases emissions in Montréal: transportation, consumption habits, and inefficient energy use in buildings. Our activities center on two key principles: be opportunistic and interactive. MtlGreen’s passion and enthusiastic volunteers generated diverse and engaging events such as a Start-up Weekend on eco-social impact for individuals wanting to create green startups in January 2016 and again in January 2018. Over the past couple years we invited green entrepreneurs to identify challenges and opportunities to jump-start their enterprises. Most recently we’ve hosted our first Datathon,in collaboration with Data4GoodMtl data scientists, where three different organizations from various industries presented a sustainable problem they were facing, and teams formed to data mine and analyze results to create solutions, followed by a live presentation for evaluation and Q&A with the community.
To further bridge support for eco-startups, technical enthusiasts, researchers, and the finance community we look forward to this collaboration with Fintech Cadence — FormFintech and MTL NewTech which we hope to inform, exchange ideas, and enable more startups to succeed with potential investors who look for green enterprises to fund and get to know more our distinct complementary communities.
If you’re interested in learning how Green-tech and Fin-tech can combine to create novel innovative solutions, then join us on May 14th! Four exceptional start-up’s from both industries will be showcasing their technologies and presenting how they hope to build bridges between these 2 very different, yet complimentary fields. Don’t miss out! Get your tickets here.
