Today I’m thrilled and honoured to announce a new partnership between Fruition Interactive and the University of Waterloo Stratford Campus.
Growing out of our successful work with University of Waterloo Stratford Campus on the CommerceLab project last year, the partnership gives Fruition early access to bleeding edge digital media research, the opportunity to be inspired by brilliant young student minds, and the opportunity to sit among the founders and senior managers of some of this country’s most innovative and accomplished companies on the University of Waterloo Stratford Campus Advisory Board.
Global leaders in digital media research
Although it launched only 2 short years ago, The University of Waterloo Stratford Campus has quickly become a global leader in research in all facets of digital media practice. Their research explores and motivates changes in the ways we use existing technologies, finds solutions for companies’ digital challenges, and identifies unique uses for emerging technologies, among other fascinating lines of inquiry.
Their Engage: User Experience and Gamification Lab is a digital media sandbox equipped with technology for exploration in UX and gamification — a space created to inspire new ways to enrich audience or user engagement. This interactive digital media lab shares the latest equipment and technology designed to encourage research, experimentation and prototype development and commercialization.
And Fruition gets to Be. Right. There. when it happens.
That’s really a thrilling idea.
Canada’s brightest business minds
University of Waterloo Stratford Campus is truly committed to engaging stakeholders from the broader community. To that end, they’ve assembled an Advisory Board that includes some of Canada’s brightest business minds. People like Venture Communications CEO and CBC Dragon Arlene Dickinson, Desire2Learn founder John Baker, PostRank founder and Axonify CEO Carol Leaman, as well as senior reps from companies like Corus Entertainment, RBC Royal Bank, and PriceWaterhouseCoopers to name only a few.
They say that if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room. I’m very much prepared to be in the right room among this distinguished company.
But the relationships I’m most excited about forging are with the students at Stratford. University of Waterloo Stratford Campus draws some of this country’s finest young minds with an abiding curiosity about digital media. They’re drawn to an environment where creativity, business and technology blend seamlessly. They’re inspiring.
Engaging the next generation of leaders
My colleague here at Fruition Interactive, Mitch Fanning, and I will have the opportunity to collaborate with and counsel a group of about 100 of these students as they design and produce a Web site highlighting the research they engage with every day. To say we’re excited doesn’t half cover it.
Although everyone here at Fruition is feeling 10 feet tall about this today, that’s not really the important part. The important part is that this partnership gives us access to knowledge and relationships that will position us to create turbo-charged growth for our clients now and into the future.
