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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.

  1. Hackathons

    A one- to two-day event in which ventures present students with real world challenges and ask them to provide innovative solutions.

  2. Challenges

    Taking place over several weeks, these require students to build out more complete solutions to social, business, design or community challenges.

  3. Projects

    Ventures present students with a specific project, and the school matches it to talent from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds.

  4. Student-in-Residence

    Students selected by the incubator receive unique opportunities to work with several ventures over the course of a term.

  5. 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.

Entry Requirements

Eligible students include those from any discipline and faculty registered in a Canadian college and meets the following requirements.

A Canadian citizen, permanent resident, or person on whom refugee protection has been conferred under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.

Legally entitled to work in Canada in accordance with relevant provincial or territorial legislation and regulations. International students are ineligible at this time

Enrolled in any full- or part-time program of post-secondary study.

Solutions Lab 2024 – Stay tuned for registration