Visit Justin Trudeau's website and, nestled among the standard Facebook and Twitter plugins, is a section devoted to encouraging visitors to engage in a meaningful conversation with the Liberal leader. The plugin is called SoapBox and it's designed to capture and implement the wealth of ideas a community of people might have. The entrepreneur behind the plugin is Brennan McEachran. He is 22-years-old, his company is called HitSend, and besides Justin Trudeau, he counts the Royal Bank of Canada and Indigo Chapters among his customers.  

 

The idea for SoapBox came to McEachran during his second year at Ryerson University. During a break between his classes, he and his friends found themselves brainstorming ideas that they thought would improve their university experience. 

 

"As students, there were little issues that we faced that the president of the school wasn't necessarily aware of," says McEachran. Rather than sit on them, he decided to email Sheldon Levy, the president of Ryerson University, to ask him to consider implementing his group's best ideas. Within a day, Levy responded to the email and invited McEachran to a personal meeting. 

 

Partway through their discussion, McEachran took out a scrap piece that detailed his initial idea for SoapBox. He showed it to Levy and asked him, "Wouldn't it be great if we could give every student in Ryerson the opportunity you're giving me right now to take their ideas and make this school the most innovative one in the world?" Before Levy could answer the question, McEachran added, "We could build an application that would allow us to do that."

 

According to the McEachran, the president's eyes lit up at the suggestion and he said to him, "You have to go to the Digital Media Zone and make this vision a reality."

 

Spread across five levels of the AMC building on the corner of Yonge Dundas Square, The Digital Media Zone (DMZ) is Ryerson's end-to-end startup incubation and acceleration solution. It currently hosts 253 so-called innovators across 51 startups, and since its official opening in 2010, the DMZ has incubated and accelerated 84 startups and helped create 822 jobs. According to its own forecasts, the number of individuals and startups involved in the project is expected to grow to 400 and 70 respectively by the end of the year. 

 

In other words, the DMZ has helped create meaningful employment for almost 1,000 individuals. No small feat, especially considering the circumstances the incubator was born under. After all, it was only one year prior to the DMZ's creation that the global recession of 2009 started. And even Ryerson, with its reputation as an applied, career-focused school, saw its students struggle to find work upon graduating. Understandably so, many graduates started to question why they had gone to university in the first place.  

 

"Things were brewing at Ryerson. Sheldon is very astute person; he saw the changes that digital and social media were having on the landscape, and, more importantly, he saw it within the students. There was a dissatisfaction there," says Valerie Fox, the DMZ's executive director, as she describes to me the situation that led to the formation of the DMZ. 

 

"You have all these undergrad students, graduate students and alumni coming into his office over a period of two years, asking him for help with their companies." It was that constant flow of students asking Levy to help them with their businesses that prompted him to pursue the formation of the school's own startup incubator. 

 

When it came time to hire someone to spearhead the development of that incubator, Levy couldn't think of anyone better suited to fill the role than Fox. Prior to joining the university in 2006 and becoming the Executive Director of the DMZ in 2010, she had been the creative director for the Sydney Olympics' official website, and before that she had worked at IBM Canada as one of its design lead. After hiring her on as the Zone's executive director, he apparently told her, "This is an experiment and it's okay if we fail: we're going to act like a startup." 

 

Of course, rather than fail, the Zone has gone on to become one of the school's most successful initiatives. According to its own statistics, the DMZ has a 50 per cent success rate at incubating its own startups. That number might not seem impressive, but in a world where the most common outcome for startups is failure, a 50 per cent success rate is cause for celebration.  

 

Asked about why she thinks the DMZ has been so successful in that regard, Fox answers, "I think it's the community... If you're at the DMZ, you're part of a community in which everyone tries to help one another." She then goes on to add, "Second, there are a thousand successes within each failure, and with each failure the individuals building a startup here get a better sense of what their good at and what they might have missed, so that the next time they try something, they have that experience to inform their attempt." 

 

Fox's sentiment is echoed by Daniel Warner, a DMZ alumni who has gone on to find success with his first post-DMZ startup, SnapSaves. "The Ryerson DMZ feels like a big family. You know you can talk to anyone there," says Warner.  "I'd feel comfortable calling Sheldon [Levy] or Valerie [Fox] and asking for their time and feedback: that's how open and welcoming the Ryerson startup program is. That said, they also definitely hold you accountable to your business objectives. They want to focus on your goals without being concerned about getting voted off the island."

 

An important byproduct of the DMZ's community driven approach to startup creation and the success that approach has brought with it is that the university has used the DMZ as a model to develop what it calls "zone education."

Across the campus, the university has adapted the DMZ's methodology and launched other so-called zones, including ones that focus on the areas of fashion, urban energy, health and wellness, fabrication and aerospace. Ryerson is also planning to launch an incubator that is exclusively devoted to helping humanities students launch their own businesses.

As someone who studied art history during her university tenure, Fox is particularly excited by this development. "I studied the humanities, and what's interesting about entrepreneurship and the humanities is that they go hand-in-hand," says Fox. "As a student of the humanities, you understand how to look at the people aspect, at cause and effect, and you also understand how to look at things in a way that someone from a business perspective might not." 

The penultimate expression of the school's zone education is starting this coming fall with the launch of the university's Masters in Digital Media program.  

 

Ultimately for Fox, Ryerson's shift towards teaching its students to be entrepreneurial is less about creating multi-million dollar companies and instead doing what universities have always strived to do: "Entrepreneurship is a mindset. It's not about what we thought business was: it's applying who you are as a person and having an impact upon the world."

Igor Bonifacic is a Toronto-based writer interested in exploring the intersection of technology, entrepreneurship and life. His last piece for Yonge Street looked at how immigrants are driving Toronto's startup renaissance.