A one-stop innovation hub to support training and networking for ocean-related businesses has officially made downtown Victoria its home.
The grand opening for the Centre for Ocean Applied Sustainable Technologies, dubbed COAST, took place Wednesday at 517 Herald St., in a leased and updated 7,000-square-foot space.
The ocean innovation hub is targeting everyone from individuals to start-ups to established businesses participating in the so-called blue economy.
So far, four businesses have moved in and there’s room for more.
COAST is offering space at a rate that’s about 40 per cent lower than market rate, said Jason Goldsworthy, executive director.
The building features spaces with large and small meeting rooms, board rooms, “hot desks,” offices and event space. New equipment is on its way, including a 3-D printer and large format printer expected by the end of the year. Hot desks are desks where different people work at different times.
COAST is an initiative of the South Island Prosperity Partnership, an economic development agency that is also in the Herald Street building.
Goldsworthy said COAST’s annual operating budget will be about $1.5 million, funded by the private and public sectors. There are six COAST staff at the facility now, with a total of about 25 people working there.
Micro-credential courses are available through COAST’s “blue pathways” program.
Goldsworthy said there is a shift toward augmenting traditional learning with “rapid upskilling, reskilling and co-skilling,” saying the pathways program will connect workers and businesses to the training they need for a rapidly transforming, technologically driven industry.
Victoria Mayor Marianne Alto said COAST is “exactly the paradigm of what we see for the future of blue economy initiatives and all of the things that go with them.”
Scott Beatty, founder and majority owner of MarineLabs, uses the Herald Street space for meetings. His company, which collaborates with the Canadian and U.S. coast guards, installs solar-powered, self-contained measurement instruments that can be attached to buoys.
The company sells subscription access to real-time data on weather and waves that’s used for marine safety and climate resilience, he said. It also uses machine learning — a type of AI or artificial intelligence — for forecasting.
Beatty, who is originally from Qualicum Beach and earned a PhD at the University of Victoria, now has 25 staffers. The company’s instruments are largely manufactured in the capital region and the company also has space at the Vancouver Island Technology Park in Saanich, he said.
He said he likes the events that COAST puts on and has offered to help others that are starting up. He noted that Wednesday’s event was attended by grant funders, private-sector investors, companies that could become customers and professors who may be interested in collaborating.
They talk about ideas and “all of a sudden you can come up with exciting projects.”
Another firm in the building is working on a small autonomous passenger ferry, while another specializes in data visualization mainly for military applications, and one carries out assessments of the ocean floor, Goldsworthy said.
