How do you juice your economy? You play to your strengths.
At least that’s the convincing case that serial entrepreneur and angel investor Bruce Alton makes. Alton’s latest venture, RoBIM Technologies Inc., is developing robotic solutions to fabricate construction components. He says Edmonton has “domain expertise” (superior specialized knowledge and practical expertise) over most other jurisdictions in three areas: engineering, construction and artificial intelligence.
“This, to me, is a no-brainer,” he says. “This city should focus on innovation related to construction and engineering. We can sell this around the world.”
He points out that Edmonton is home to two of North America’s engineering and construction behemoths, Stantec and PCL Construction (full disclosure: I work for PCL, but I write this column as an independent contractor), and a number of regional players such as Chandos Construction and Clark Builders. All of them enjoy symbiotic relationships with post-secondaries in the region, including the University of Alberta, which hosts both the Construction Innovation Centre and the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute.
Domain expertise alone is not enough. The other two things you need to successfully innovate are a big market with big challenges — engineering and construction tick both those boxes — and proprietary technology. It’s that last element that suffers from a classic chicken-and-egg problem, in which founders need money to scale up their idea but investors want to see evidence of sales before committing.
Alton says both sides must reach out to bridge the divide. The established companies need to identify the problems they want solved and support the development of solutions with field testing and feedback. At the same time, the tech startups must look for real-world problems to solve. “My complaint is that founders come up with a technology, but it’s a technology looking for a problem to solve,” he says. “Instead, entrepreneurs need to go out and understand the problem first, then develop the technology.”
Zack Storms is working to bridge that gap. He is leading Built World Tech Venture Pilots at the city’s innovation agency, Edmonton Unlimited. Built World gathers investors, industry leaders and startup founders to find new and better ways to design, fund and build our built environment.
“We’re trying to help founders do what they need to do, which is get their tech into the hands of customers, get feedback from customers to improve the product, build their sales and scale up,” says Storms, who co-founded one of the top angel investing firms in the country, Startup TNT, which has raised about $20 million for more than 100 small companies.
Ironically, Storms says many of those founders have had an easier time selling their tech to American companies than to Canadian ones. He says it’s partly cultural — Canadians aren’t the risk takers that Americans are — and partly because we have the luxury of exploiting natural resources that aren’t that difficult to monetize.
But developing new technologies will boost this country’s productivity, which consistently lags behind the U.S. and other G7 nations due to chronic underinvestment in equipment and intellectual property, low business competition and the slow adoption of technology
Alton says Built World is one key to bridging the gap. It provides founders with money, advice and access to large clients, helping them take some of the risk out of their aspirations.
“We could be the global centre for construction innovation,” he says. “We have all the pieces in place.”
This article appears in the June 2026 issue of Edify
