IDEA Mississauga Website
Purpose
As a major contributor to Canada’s Innovation Centre, and its location within the Toronto-Waterloo Innovation Corridor, it was important for Mississauga to create a brand for its Innovation District that would be locally and globally recognized as a critical asset that provides resources to support and nurture entrepreneurs and help scale-ups. In February 2022, Mississauga launched a brand for its innovation district, IDEA Mississauga. To help build a digital community for entrepreneurs and scale-up businesses, we created the IDEA Virtual Innovation Hub – IdeaMississauga.ca, a central resource that gives access to 80 programs and services, and 135+ innovation assets spread across the city that offer support to growing and innovative companies. The site also includes: the latest innovation news, events, and business success stories.
The overarching goal for IdeaMississauga.ca is to be the digital platform that brings together all innovative connections and assets – from government to entrepreneurs to industry, to allow for greater access to the essential building blocks to support business growth and sustainability.
Effectiveness
We built the website with the user in mind, understanding that finding the right support can be overwhelming for an entrepreneur and hard to access. To help businesses navigate through programs on our site, we created a Programs & Resources self-selection tool that filters programs and resources most relevant to their specific needs. Through a series of prompted questions, the tool will generate a customized list of resources.
To encourage B2B connections,, we created an interactive Innovation Asset Map that allows users to search and locate innovation assets found across Mississauga that offer innovative and entrepreneurial products, services and solutions.
Since IDeaMississauga.ca launched in February 2022, we have seen: 11,000 IDEAmississauga.ca with 4,028 coming through organic search: 3,404 views and 1,152 users of Program & Research Tool: and 386 views and 255 users of Innovation Asset Map
Challenges
One particular challenge was the task of strategically extracting entrepreneur content from our Economic Development website to the new IDEAmississauga.ca. Since IDEA Mississauga is managed through the City’s Economic Development Office, we needed to create a logical bridge between the two sites that shows differentiation of service offerings while maintaining affiliation between the two. In order to accomplish this, we used static tabs on the top left corner of both sites to toggle back and forth and used similar design structure and navigation paths to ease transition between the two sites.
It was also important for us to keep our content and data updated to ensure that our visitors are receiving the most up to date and complete information. In order to do this, we use a backend integration system for the Program and Resource Tool that allows our contributing partners exclusive access to update their service offerings on our site in real time. This solution not only ensures that information on our site is current, but creates efficiencies in time and internal resources.
Primary Target – Start-up and scale-up Entrepreneurs
Secondary Target – Public sector partners, business leaders & educators, internal City partners, established local business investors and foreign investors.
Sustainability
As part of IDEA Mississauga’s value proposition, it offers programs that focus on sustainability, and inclusivity and support growing businesses that contribute to social and environmental change.
As mentioned earlier, our site has the capability to filter programs that are created to support underrepresented groups within our community to build awareness and accessibility to programs. This includes IDEA’s Step Up Program that gives priority access given to businesses owned or led by individuals from underrepresented communities.
