Ray DePaul

Executive Director, Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurshup, Mount Royal University

“What is the tech industry? And I think the answer there is ‘it's everywhere.’ You can't be in business now and ignore tech, otherwise your competitor is going to adopt tech or build tech, or they're going to do something that you're not doing and you're going to be slowly dying.”

Ray DePaul is Executive Director of the Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Mount Royal University, where he has spent 14 years building one of Calgary's most distinctive pipelines for entrepreneurial talent. Ray came to Calgary after a career in Waterloo, Ontario where he was part of the original BlackBerry team that created the world's first smartphone before leaving to found his own software company, which he ultimately sold to Intel. He joined the Platform board at the beginning and has been one of its longest-serving members. At MRU, Ray runs the Launchpad program entirely as an extracurricular offering on the belief that entrepreneurship education is talent development first and startup development second. His model centers on learning by doing. He does this by pairing students with real company problems, builds multidisciplinary teams, and celebrates failure as a necessary part of the journey. Ray actively recruits students from across all faculties, arguing that the most important entrepreneurial skills are universally needed and best learned outside the lecture hall. Deeply embedded in Calgary's ecosystem and a candid voice on the tensions between AI, job creation, and the future of education, Ray brings a unique view from someone who has watched both Waterloo and Calgary build their tech identities from the ground up.