The recent networking event for the Homegrown Innovation Challenge brought together grantees, growers, and investors in the agricultural technology sector to create an opportunity for idea exchange, resource sharing, and partnership building.  

The event elicited insights from investors and growers to support grantees in taking their innovations from early-stage ideas to real world implementation. Across two discussion panels, both groups shared feedback around how they make investment decisions relating to agricultural technologies, their investment and prioritization criteria, what they see as the key bottlenecks and problems to be solved, and their view on the most exciting opportunities on the horizon. Homegrown Innovation Challenge grantees presented updates on their work over the past year, which sparked questions, discussions, and ideas for collaboration from around the room. 

The event was rounded out by a “speed networking” session that paired individual grantee teams with growers and investors in a series of brief and focused conversations about their Homegrown technologies. 

Similar to our networking event last year, the interactions underscored the importance and value of collaboration: partners from across the sector must work together to ensure that technologies and innovations are solving practical problems, and that there is ample support across the ecosystem to see them through from idea to adoption. 

Participants uniformly expressed optimism in the potential of technology and innovation in ensuring a more sustainable and resilient future for food production in Canada. The Homegrown Innovation Challenge is now looking ahead to the Scaling Phase of the program in 2025, where four teams will be awarded up to $5 million each to continue developing and demonstrating their technologies at a commercial scale.  

All photos credited to: Kathryn Hollinrake