The Toronto innovation community is one of the fastest globally - having added more jobs than Silicon Valley, New York City and Washington D.C. combined in 2017. However, helping the world understand the size, scale and diversity of Toronto’s innovation community has always been a challenge.
To help raise the global profile of Toronto’s innovation community, Chris and his team worked with Tourism Toronto, the Toronto Region Board of Trade, MaRS and Techstars Toronto, to attract North America’s fastest growing technology festival, Collision, to Toronto in late 2017 and early 2018.
At the time, Collision was hosted in New Orleans and attracted 25,000+ international attendees, 700+ speakers, 500+ investors and 500+ international media. The Toronto bid team was interested in moving Collision to Toronto not only to bring international tech leaders to Canada, but also to attract global tech media to the city in order to help tell Toronto’s story.
Ultimately, the Toronto bid was successful and in May 2018 Collision announced its move to Toronto for May 2019.