A year ago, Invest Ottawa launched the first Ottawa Innovation Week. Last year introduced the ecosystem. This year we go inside it.
The world has shifted dramatically over the last 365 days. Geopolitical instability, AI-driven transformation, defence acceleration, semiconductor competition and a global race for sovereign capability have moved from headlines to operating realities. The cities that will define the next decade aren’t watching this unfold. They’re making deliberate choices about which industries to build, which partnerships to forge and which long-term bets to place.
Ottawa is making those choices.
Born out of Ottawa Unlimited, a vision to bring together main street business, tourism and the technology ecosystem as one unified story, Ottawa Innovation Week is now in its second year and more ambitious than ever. From June 8–12, the city becomes a platform: a week of events, demos and experiences that don’t just celebrate innovation but showcase how we’re building it, deploying it and sending it into orbit.
Quality over quantity. Depth over spectacle.
Ottawa Innovation Week isn’t trying to be the biggest innovation festival in the world. It’s trying to be the most meaningful one for the people who matter most: founders, investors, policymakers, researchers, engineers, entrepreneurs, creatives and ecosystem builders who are shaping real outcomes in the sectors that define our era.
What sets this week apart isn’t the number of events. It’s the diversity, the breadth and the quality of what’s inside them. Boardrooms and breweries. Labs and living rooms. Test tracks, studios, classrooms, Parliament Hill. You’ll move between a policy round-table and a product demo in the same afternoon and realize those conversations belong together, because in Ottawa, they always have.
This is a city that built pieces of the internet. That designs chips, secures networks and launches satellites. Where policy and product collide productively and constantly, because the people shaping regulation and the people building technology have always shared the same postal codes, the same coffee shops, the same ambitions.
For one week, that dynamic goes city-wide.
Built for orbit: How Ottawa is thinking about the future
The opening event captures exactly what this week is about. Built for Orbit: Mission-Ready Innovation, generously sponsored by Amazon and MDA Space, brings together leaders from across the space and sovereignty ecosystem to explore how Ottawa is driving mission-critical innovation on a global stage.
Five remarkable women leaders. One conversation about exploration, security, autonomy and national strength, sectors that are increasingly interconnected and where Ottawa sits at the intersection of opportunity.
It matters who leads. When the Artemis astronaut crew was recently asked whether it matters if we lead or follow in the space race, their answer was clear: leaders set the pace, define the vision, establish the standards and shape the values that guide progress. Ottawa’s opportunity isn’t simply to participate in that future. It’s to help shape it, what gets built, how it gets built and who benefits.
That spirit runs through every event this week.
A city mid-build
Come to Ottawa Innovation Week expecting to see things that aren’t finished yet. Prototypes getting stress-tested. Ideas moving from “we should” to “we just did.” Some of it looks like startups. Some of it looks like research. Some of it looks like nothing you can quite categorize yet, which is usually the sign that something genuinely new is happening.
The founders running into policymakers in the hallway isn’t a networking gimmick. It’s how this city actually works. The difference during Innovation Week is that it happens everywhere, all at once, compressed into five days that move faster than seems possible.
You might meet the person who unlocks your next partnership. Or realize they’ve been working three blocks away the whole time.
This is what Ottawa Unlimited set out to celebrate and what Ottawa Innovation Week exists to prove: that our innovation economy isn’t a tech sector story or a government story or a small business story. It’s all of those stories, told together, in a city that sustained the early internet and is now building the infrastructure of what comes next.
The moment is now
Innovative cities don’t become leading cities on potential alone. They lead because they act, with focus, with partnership and with conviction. They lead with ambition.
Ottawa is acting.
We are scaling what works, backing our innovators and opening pathways to global markets. Our ambition has grown beyond supporting growth. We are accelerating it. And Ottawa Innovation Week is both a reflection of that momentum and a signal of where we’re going next.
Things don’t stay ideas for long here.
Give it a week. You’ll see.
About the Author
Lindsey Fair, MBA, PhD, CFRE is Vice President, Marketing and Bayview Impact with Invest Ottawa — and in some ways, the CMO for the city. With Invest Ottawa, Lindsey leads brand strategy, defence innovation positioning, place branding, partnerships, major events like Ottawa Innovation Week and GCXpo, and the Bayview Yards activations and experience. A self-described coast-to-coast Canadian, Lindsey has lived and led from London to Kingston to Calgary to Victoria before landing in Ottawa just over a year ago — and discovering a city that genuinely never sleeps. For someone whose PhD explored how cities build identity and distinctiveness, Ottawa turned out to be exactly the right place to put that research and decades of experience to work. With over two decades of marketing and communications leadership across higher education, economic development, and innovation, Lindsey brings both the strategic rigour and the storytelling instinct to make organizations, and cities, impossible to ignore.
