Last week the BC Tech team had the pleasure of attending BCIC’s #BCTECH Summit for the second year in a row. The two-day conference brought together the province’s leading companies, innovators, and entrepreneurs to showcase BC’s booming tech scene.

Here are just a few of the highlights from our team.

Rocky Ozaki, Vice-President, Community

“The BC Tech Summit is the gold standard for informative, inspirational, and collaborative conversations that are crucial for the long-term success of the BC tech ecosystem. Congratulations to BCIC for organizing yet another amazing event for the community!”

Barbara Baronova, Events Manager

“One of my highlights from this year’s summit was the The Unconscious Bias: Finding, Nurturing and Keeping the Best Talent panel. Fiona Macfarlane of Ernst & Young touched on the barriers women face in getting hired in leadership roles and what companies can do to help them using the analogy of freshwater fish in a salinated environment. This panel really hit home as women only make up 20% of the workforce in BC tech. These conversations are essential to moving the needle forward.”

Amber McLennan, Member Experience Specialist Lead

“The AR/VR floor showcased the exciting and growing possibilities in this sector. It was interesting to see all the different applications of this technology.”

Raseel Sehmi, Manager, Policy & Strategic Initiatives

I enjoyed seeing the collaboration and interaction between the government and the various tech companies at the conference. Government is a key customer for tech companies and increasing government procurement and adoption of technologies is critical to growing the tech ecosystem. The BC Housing data pitches by Ruby Industries and Foundry Spatial were especially interesting as they displayed their open data apps to measure the impact of the foreign buyers tax introduction on the housing market (i.e. property sales and transfer +property taxes + fair market value and transactions per property type +populations dynamics).

Kraig Docherty, Director, Talent Programs

“At over 5000 attendees, the #BCTECH Summit is clearly the largest technology conference in BC that encompasses the key components of our tech ecosystem—companies, government, academia, capital, associations, students and talent coming together collectively. BCIC did an amazing job in setting this stage for us with quality show production and well formatted week.

I echo what Barbara mentions, above. The Unconscious Bias: Finding, Nurturing and Keeping the Best Talent Panel was a great conversation that will inform how we approach our Inclusion & Belonging Program at BC Tech. Thanks for all your hard work BCIC team!”