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Start-up Canada looks to boost business

The launch of Startup Canada Communities shines a spotlight on a Prince George entrepreneur. Shauna Harper of LiveWorkPG is one of the featured business personalities for the unveiling of the national do-it-yourself business service.

The launch of Startup Canada Communities shines a spotlight on a Prince George entrepreneur.

Shauna Harper of LiveWorkPG is one of the featured business personalities for the unveiling of the national do-it-yourself business service. She will be on a four-person Twitter panel discussing "the trends and challenges facing communities and entrepreneurs in small and medium sized communities and how they are using Startup Canada Communities to address these factors," said a Startup Canada statement.

Harper will be joined by Rivers Corbett of Startup Fredericton, Kelly McGregor of Startup London, and Chris Johnson of Ramp Up Manitoba - all proprietors of their own ventures but donating their time to foster their upstart fellow entrepreneurs.

"What Startup Canada Communities is is an online networking place," Harper said. "You can go to a lot of agencies and organizations that focus on developing your business - and I need the Northern Development Initiatives Trust and I need Initiatives Prince George and the Chamber of Commerce and the Innovation Central Society and Community Futures, those are all very important - but they all have certain mandates. They are all different in what they do. This (Startup Canada) is the one place that entrepreneurs can go to find their whole community. It will all be there, all the silos that don't usually cross-pollinate."

It was an idea that emerged loudly from the cross-Canada conversations that were held by Startup Canada last year on their national tour. Harper was involved in that volunteer enterprise and noticed that many communities in Canada were talking about business startups being a potential antidote to depressed local economies, whereas Prince George entrepreneurs were uniquely discussing how business startups might fit into their soaring economic fortunes.

"P.G. is getting national attention," Harper said. "We are still at that seed stage, in this community, not as advanced as many other places in terms of entrepreneurial know-how. We don't even know how entrepreneurs can actually serve industry and our local economy. We are asking the questions right now, but there is a clear sense that there is opportunity here, there is money here, there is momentum here, so we have to put our minds into that together."

The Twitter panel convenes on Thursday (#startupchats) at 10 a.m. The title is Re-Inventing Canada: The Case for Startup Communities. It is the opening act in a series of events that day, all of them accessible from anywhere in Canada.

The feature event goes at 3 p.m. Thursday, an online discussion (www.startupcan.ca) with an all-star business panel discussing how the "entrepreneurship and startup movement is transforming the lives of individuals and the economic prospects of entire regions."

The event is chaired by Rick Spence, a business columnist with the National Post, and features Brad Feld (author of Startup Communities and founder of the Foundry Group and Tech Stars),

Jonathan Ortmans (president of Global Entrepreneurship Week), Bjoern Herrman (founder of Startup Genome) and Victoria Lennox (founder and CEO of Startup Canada).

Harper said she would be watching the "online hangout" alongside other local business interests at the Community Futures office, as a way of showing that the online and Twitter activities of Startup Canada have a real-life interpersonal impact in local communities.

For more information on all the Thursday events with Startup Canada, go to their website (www.startupcan.ca) or click into the Startup PG page on Facebook.