General Business Updates and News

[panamaniac]

The article could have stood for more vigorous fact-checking.  For instance, I do believe that the Perimeter Institute is home to the "Stephen Hawking Centre" and not the "Stephen Hawkins Institute".

That aside, I would be interested to know more about how the movers and shakers in the high-tech/start-up/entrepreneurial economy contribute to the social fabric of the Region beyond starting a company and creating jobs.  Carl Zehr, quoted in the article above, claimed that downtown Kitchener circa 1997 "was devoid of spirit, it was devoid of people. It was devoid of good ideas".  The Region was built on a strong ethic of community-building beyond becoming the next big millionaire.  Does the current generation of entrepreneurs (following the steps of the Kaufmans, the Breithaupts, the Schneiders and hundreds of others) stepping into the gaps left as the previous generation moves on?

Your post goes back a ways, nms, but this article from today's Record should give you hope:

Waterloo Region Record

By Jeff Hicks  
KITCHENER — A giant chicken pot pie baked in the oven.
Lunchtime loomed and an OpenText work crew of about 40 — part of 125 staffers from Waterloo helping build a Habitat for Humanity townhouse project in Kitchener this week — needed feeding.
In the old kitchen on Kehl Street, two employees from the biggest software company in Canada worked a few feet apart, chopping red peppers and mushrooms.
Kim Jorgensen and Becky Rempel worked side-by-side, chatting and cutting, like they were polka partners just across Ottawa Street in the Concordia Club fest hall.
A week away from a tech-firm office environment, where employees always have their heads in the virtual clouds, introduced them to each other.
In a crowded kitchen on a cloudless Wednesday, they could see each other clearly.
"She works 20 feet from me and we've never talked," Jorgensen laughed.
And thanks to this charity home-building, team-building project, they won't stop talking.
Their corporate titles, with a company that pulls in billions a year and has 900 workers in Waterloo, seem like so much impersonal business-card bluster now.
Jorgansen is supervisor of global services support. That's nice.
Rempel is sales support specialist for cloud services. That's swell.
Now, they know each other exist. They actually know each other.
"I knew about you but we never really talked," Rempel told Jorgansen over a veggie-platter-in-progress.
"Now, we're kitchen buddies."
And that was the main corporate point of this joint OpenText venture with Habitat for Humanity's Waterloo Region wing. It's Habitat's biggest collaboration with a tech firm locally and one the charity pitched to the company and its employees.
"We try to attract companies with big numbers to use it as an employee engagement opportunity," said Jerry Lawlor, Habitat's local director of development.
So it's about more than putting 11 local families in new townhomes by the end of August, once the families' own sweat equity is poured into the foundations.
Eventually, 45 Habitat units will rise on a patch of donated land where old homes once stood, and the total project value will be in the millions, Lawlor said.
OpenText employees are donating $15,000 to the project, with the company promising to match the amount.
Along the way, OpenText aims to boost its standing in the community and the cohesiveness of its growing number of Waterloo staffers before this work week on Kehl Street is done.
"It's an opportunity to do something different," OpenText vice-president Nicolas Heldmann said. "Get away from the computers and keyboards and swing some hammers and dig some holes."
And, for the kitchen buddies, to chop carrots and make chicken pot pie together.
"Because we've grown so much, people don't recognize each other in the hallways," Heldmann said. "They really wanted the opportunity to get to know each other."