Introducing Kingston’s New Small Business Acceleration Centre

Promoting innovation and fostering entrepreneurship is one of the key elements of council’s vision to make Kingston a smart and livable 21^st century city. Today I’m excited to introduce one of the ways we are going to achieve this goal: by transforming the old Portsmouth Town Hall into a new small business acceleration centre.

The Portsmouth Town Hall building across from the Olympic Harbour is currently vacant and with a relatively small investment we are going to see the transformation of an unused building into rent-free space for local technology startup companies. The city is partnering with a group of local entrepreneurs called ‘Innovate Kingston’ who will oversee the space and support the various startup companies.

Imagine the potential for our local economy as we create an innovation pipeline: new entrepreneurs coming out of Queen’s, St. Lawrence and RMC can get their new business off the ground here in Kingston. As the start-ups grow they can move to a larger incubation space elsewhere in the city, and then eventually right into one of our city’s business parks. This is a smart investment. Growing businesses means more jobs and a larger economic impact for our community!

A beautiful historic building in our city that houses state-of-the-art technology innovation…a great illustration of Kingston’s motto: Where History and Innovation Thrive.