Canadian innovation leaders celebrated through 2022 TECHNATION Ingenious Awards

Canada’s success on the global stage depends on the accelerated adoption oftechnology across all sectors. As a nation, Canada has a history of award-winning thought leaders, innovators and founders of some of the most globally disruptive technologies. TECHNATION’s Ingenious Award program sets out to find both public and private organizations that have delivered real impact.

The 2022 winners ranged from delivering fast and effective point of care and digital diagnosis, to bringing next-level 3D ART and tech to the metaverse and on chain experiences leveraging WEB3 technology. Another winner moved an extensive multi-tiered IT environment from on-premises to the cloud while another winner leveraged smart home devices to enhance access to regional government amenities and better delivered programs and services to customers. The final winner utilized advanced data analytics, machine learning and text mining techniques to “mine” the past.

TECHNATION celebrated six private and public sector leaders in Blockchain technology, AI, Cloud, and IoT along with honouring Canada’s Public Sector Disruptor of the Year and the first Canadian Tech Hall of Fame Award winner.

The AI award recognized Alethea Medical  for their eConsult and AI diagnostic platform helping family physicians better diagnose and treat patient conditions. The proprietary AI software makes otherwise complicated diagnosis simple by cutting out the need to see a specialist for a diagnosis. By adding eConsult to the platform, family physicians can more effectively collaborate with specialists. This is even more important in rural and remote communities where specialist care is non-existent and travel for this type of care can be expensive and burdensome. The Alethea Medical platform could be utilized in developing nations, war zones, prisons, and other niche areas in the future.

Tafi took home the Blockchain award for overcoming the challenge of creating and executing a blockchain project that would work properly, get attention and set the track for success with innovation in Web3 projects. The challenge of getting Tafi’s first NFT on the blockchain and leading a cryptocurrency auction for charity, was an opportunity to use their 3D knowledge to enter the quickly growing NFT market.

The Ontario Ministry of Transportation  transitioned from a mid-tier server environment, encompassing over 180 servers, 65 databases and 32 business software applications successfully to the cloud to win the Ingenious Award for Cloud this year. The mid-tier environment provided online services and hosting for both internal and public facing solutions that supports approximately $1.98 billion CAD in government revenue annually. It provided the main data exchange interfaces between Ontario Ministry of Transportation and other provincial ministries, as well as 100 external organizations like police services, the Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC), the Canadian Border Security Agency and the government’s front-line service delivery organization, Service Ontario.

The Regional Municipality of Durham located in the province of Ontario was the winner of the IoT technology category for their myDurham 311 Smart Home Device Voice Service. One of myDurham 311’s goals was to ensure residents had many ways of interacting with regional services by using an omnichannel approach – a coordinated system that ensures regional services are accessible through a variety of channels. Durham Region successfully leveraged Smart Home devices like Google or Alexa to enable customers to access regional services like when the next garbage pickup date is or how to reach their local government representative while having a conversational experience. This tool helps customers easily access information and frequently asked questions, through their smart home devices.

The Ingenious Award winner for the 2022 Public Sector Disruptor of the Year was Ryan Hum, Vice President, Chief Data & Information Officer, Canada Energy Regulator. Over the last two years, the Canada Energy Regulator (CER) embarked on a strategic priority to drive data and digital innovation in the organization using advanced data analytics, machine learning, and text mining techniques to “mine” the past. The CER has been in existence for over 60 years, and has become an important historical repository of environmental, social, and Indigenous knowledge and data for Canada. Liberating this knowledge will help scientists understand changes in the Canadian environment, reduce the burden on industry to duplicate costly scientific studies, and enrich Indigenous communities who may be losing their cultural history and language.

The newly launched Canadian Tech Hall of Award for 2022 went to Tobias Lütke, Co-Founder and CEO of Shopify who was selected by the Ingenious Awards voting committee. This new annual award recognizes and celebrates the accomplishments of Canada’s most distinguished technology leaders who represent founders of truly disruptive technology, who have elevated Canada’s reputation as a technology leader on the global stage. For the Canadian tech industry, this award honoured the remarkable achievements throughout Mr Lütke’s career that have contributed to Canada’s economic development and legacy, as well as providing inspiration for future technology founders.

To learn more about the TECHNATION Ingenious Awards, visit us here.