Since its inception, Queen’s Partnerships and Innovation’s Wings program has helped a diverse, eclectic range of entrepreneurs and innovators successfully launch their businesses. Run by a team experienced in helping startups take flight and drawing on experts in a range of fields, the program has taught participants how to recognize their strengths, focus on what it is they are really selling, and identifying their customers. The program welcomed its final cohort of fledgling startups this January 2023. These are their stories.
Wings helped Eric Hansen understand how much he didn’t know about business -- and set him on track. He’s not there yet, but thanks to Wings he knows what he needs to do.
It’s an exaggeration, perhaps, to say that the eyes are a window to the soul, but they can tell us a lot. In fact, many diseases can be detected through the examination of the iris – diabetes and a raft of hazards for premature babies among them.
That’s the idea behind Hansen’s company HealthSmart. There’s plenty of available data on the human iris in publicly available data retinal libraries. Take that data, digitize it, and feed that into a learning model for neural network artificial intelligence, and you could begin to connect certain retinal images with certain diseases. This tool could be used to diagnose people living in remote areas, where they couldn’t get to see an ophthalmologist, but might be able to reach a hospital or clinic equipped to record their retinas and transmit the data.
A Kingston native with strong Queen’s connections, Hansen’s ideas are the culmination of pretty much his entire working life, from his time at the Queen’s chemistry department, where he was the network administrator, to doing data analysis for call centres, to providing economics-based data models at a startup for health care systems. He and a co-founder created HealthSmart, but little came of it until his employer was bought out during COVID. Hansen then decided to revive HealthSmart on his own.
Hansen had experience across a range of sectors, but, when he got serious about HealthSmart, he realized there were still many things he didn’t know. “Especially starting a business.”
The Wings program seemed a good way to start, although initially he was uncertain as to what expect.
“After the first session,” he says, “I thought, ‘We’re on to something here.’”
What he was being given was a “step-by-step” guide. “It was a basic course in business relations,” he says. It focused not just on trying to sell your idea, but on selling yourself.
“You’re introducing yourself to people and trying to make yourself interesting to them as opposed to just your idea.” It’s also about listening, about finding out what he terms their “pain points.”
“The Wings team, with their different focus areas and expertise, were really good at presenting information. They were quick, to the point, and really great at answering questions.” Hansen was impressed as well by his fellow participants. “I found some of the business owners pretty insightful,” he says.
In terms of what Wings taught him, Hansen says, “The number one thing was just how much legwork I have to do to get to the starting point where I can turn this into a successful business. It takes more than having an idea.“
In the meantime, he has stayed in close contact with Queen’s Partnerships and Innovation (QPI). “I have a desk at the Seaway Coworking space [provided by QPI] and I go in there almost every day,” he says. “I have also had a couple of introductions they set up for me, but I haven’t really felt that I was ready for that yet.”
His current goal is to find a clinical partner to bring on board, “for credibility and viability.” He hasn’t found one yet, but says, “QPI will help do that.“
Queen’s Partnerships and Innovation (QPI) offered the Wings Accelerator program, along with many other programs and services, with support from the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario, through the ScaleUp Platform, an initiative led by Invest Ottawa in Eastern Ontario and in which QPI is a regional partner.