Experience Ventures
A nation-wide collaboration between students, ventures, and post-secondary schools
Students
Grow beyond the classroom, become a changemaker, and make an impact alongside real-world innovators.
Ventures
Find early-stage talent, recruit students to your local innovation network, and benefit from their multi-disciplinary ideas and perspectives.
Schools
Cultivate multi-dimensional innovation networks and foster entrepreneurial thinking within your community.
Become a Changemaker
Experience Ventures, powered by the Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurial Thinking at the University of Calgary, enables college and university students to make an impact alongside real-world innovators through entrepreneurial thinking placements.
Entrepreneurial thinking serves as our north star — the Experience Ventures program strives to advance entrepreneurial thinking and help students across the country build career ready skills as they enter the innovation economy.
Funded in part by the Government of Canada’s Innovative Work-Integrated Learning Initiative.
We offer five different types of placements
An entrepreneurial thinking placement is a structured, short-term opportunity (with honorarium) with a startup or social venture that has partnered with a student’s school. Placements are flexible, part-time, and mostly remote. They are for up to 80 hours of work over 12 weeks and students are compensated $825.
-
Hackathons
A one- to two-day event in which ventures present students with real world challenges and ask them to provide innovative solutions.
-
Challenges
Taking place over several weeks, these require students to build out more complete solutions to social, business, design or community challenges.
-
Projects
Ventures present students with a specific project, and the school matches it to talent from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds.
-
Student-in-Residence
Students selected by the incubator receive unique opportunities to work with several ventures over the course of a term.
-
Interdisciplinary Team Projects
Incubators create teams of students from more than one discipline and provide them with a project for a venture or group of ventures.
What is Solutions Lab?
The Experience Ventures Solutions Lab, powered by the Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurial Thinking, is a unique future-skills building program that invites UCalgary students to participate in developing innovative solutions to a local or regional challenge.
After being sorted into groups, participants will attend 5 weekly workshops designed to build the entrepreneurial thinking and work ready skills needed to tackle the challenge question effectively.
Fall 2024 Solutions Lab
Experience Ventures Solutions Lab Finale is coming up!
Teams will be focusing on environmental disasters and pitching their ideas they've developed over the past 7 weeks to a panel of judges.
Important dates
Recruitment: September 9th to October 2nd
Kickoff: October 8th
Workshops: October 15th, 22nd, November 5th
Mentor "Office Hours": October 29th, 31st
Finale: November 26th
Previous Solutions Labs
Hunter Hub Solutions Lab: Sustainable Campus challenges students to create impactful sustainability solutions for their campus, culminating in a finale where winning teams are recognized.
Hunter Hub Solutions Lab: Addressing social isolation in the Calgary area challenges students to create impactful solutions, with winning teams recognized at the finale.
Hunter Hub Solutions Lab: Climate change solutions for Southern Alberta challenges students to develop and present impactful projects addressing climate change.
Hunter Hub Solutions Lab: Resilient Food Systems Challenge invites UCalgary students to develop innovative, sustainability-focused solutions for a community challenge unveiled at the start of the event.
Students were invited to propose feasible and impactful solutions, connecting with fellow students to aid UCalgary in achieving its ambitious goal of becoming a zero waste campus by 2030.
