Terry Rock

Chief Operating Officer - Alberta Innovates

"Calgary is a Yes, Let's city. If you're an outsider and you want to come and try something, you pitch your idea. The first thing is you can actually get in front of someone. And the second thing is they're going to find a way to help you."

Terry Rock is Chief Operating Officer and Senior Vice President of Operations at Alberta Innovates, the provincial crown corporation that funds, builds, and supports Alberta's innovation ecosystem. As former CEO of Platform Calgary, he shepherded the organization through its transformation from a university research park tenant into a downtown innovation hub which has since grown to nearly 1,000 members and over 1,000 companies served annually. Terry is widely credited as a foundational architect of Calgary's startup ecosystem, helping take the city from largely absent on global startup benchmarks to a top-50 emerging ecosystem in under five years. At Alberta Innovates, he now works at a provincial scale, deploying co-investment capital, building commercialization pathways, funding regional innovation networks, and supporting scaling programs like Scale Alberta. His north star across every chapter has remained the same: turning fragmented groups into cohesive communities, and helping people go from job takers to job makers.