The provincial government is investing $1 million in downtown Barrie's Sandbox Centre to make it a regional innovation centre (RIC).
Barrie-Innisfil MPP Andrea Khanjin made the announcement Tuesday morning at the Maple Avenue facility in front of fellow politicians and local business leaders.
City council previously invested $25,000 in an effort to make the Sandbox Centre an RIC in Barrie, with hopes of hundreds of thousands of dollars in provincial money in return.
On Tuesday, that dream became a reality.
There are different stages to the funding and it will be an ongoing investment on an annual basis, according to Craig Busch, CEO of the Sandbox Centre.
RICs are designed to help Ontario entrepreneurs and innovators succeed in international markets by helping them develop their ideas to make them marketable and attract talent, capital and customers.
The centres are also catalysts for innovation in their home communities, with the goal of connecting the so-called "ecosystem" — academic, institutional and industry — and streamlining regional support for entrepreneurs.
The Sandbox Centre, located above the Barrie Transit Terminal, provides a single location for entrepreneurs to meet, learn and mentor.
There are 17 RICs in Ontario, which vary in size and focus. Prior to the announcement, the closest one to Barrie to the south was in Markham and the closest north was in North Bay.
Their core services are not delivered within the Simcoe County area, which resulted in different regional priorities that don’t align with central Ontario’s urban-rural focus, city staff said last year.
“It’s a huge deal," Busch told BarrieToday. "This will really accelerate what we do here — just having the ability and the resources now to really get behind the start-ups and scale-ups, particularly (those) with high potential.
"We’ve always done things strictly as a community effort,” he added.
“This is an exciting event for job creation and economic development in our region,” Khanjin told BarrieToday following the announcement.
The MPP also says this is an investment in the talent pool, businesses and entrepreneurship, which is “the spirit we have in the ecosystem that is Simcoe County and Barrie.”
To get to this point, on March 26 of last year, the Ontario budget included an investment of $1 million per year starting in 2024-25 in the Ontario RIC network, including the launch of a new RIC in Barrie.
On June 10, the province issued a call for proposals for establishing the Barrie RIC.
