The southeast will once again play host to the ICED Conference, but this year it's looking to be bigger than ever before. The conference attracts guests and speakers from across Canada and the US, talking about technology and industry.
Gordon More, the Executive Director at the Southeast Techhub, says they've seen a lot of growth over the past couple of conferences.
"We finally grew to the stage that we knew we could grow to, given the innovativeness of our region. What I mean by that is last fall and then this spring we hosted the conference at the college, both times sold out. So we needed a bigger venue, and in Estevan, the next biggest venue is the Affinity Place. So we rented the Affinity Place for two days."
The fees were covered by GE Verona Hitachi, one of the presenters and the company likely to help build a prospective small modular reactor near Estevan.
There'll also be a pitch competition, which More hopes will inspire people to be
The other thing that we're doing is that in the past, the tech hub has held a pitch competition. We had so much in the works trying to make ourselves sustainable, and we succeeded in that, so we thought we would celebrate the evening of September 23, the evening of the first day before the second, by holding a $15,000 Pitch competition for all of rural Saskatchewan."
"Any innovator entrepreneur who doesn't live and work in Regina or Saskatoon, any other rural community can pitch in to win seed money. The $15,000 comes out of our title sponsorship that we received from SaskPower."
With one-quarter used up by the techub and the other 3-quareters open, More is hoping to see plenty of entries from those who want to show off at the conference.
"We're doing a rural innovation exhibit where we're having people from Ontario, BC, Saskatchewan, and hopefully some other Provinces. We're still signing people up who'll show off their rural innovative idea."
More says they hope to provide plenty of information on their main topics for the new ICED Conference.
"The focus is on two things: energy and education. Energy, because when you think about every electron or every molecule of energy, if you trace it back and find out where that came from, that came from a rural community. So what has Estevan experienced for the last 10 years with the threat of the coal mine being shut down?
"The other piece is education. So, in Canada, especially, we have a thing that has been labelled the digital divide. A good example of what the digital divide is up until about a year ago, if you took the TransCanada highway as the northern border from Alberta to Manitoba, there was absolutely no place an adult could take computer science, and in 2025, that's ridiculous."
More says he wants to see education grow, which is why it's a main theme for the conference.
"That passion that I have towards that is why I came out of retirement to do this job because there are so many Innovative youth and adults who are not being given this opportunity to learn the skills that they need to turn their idea in their community. So we successfully, with the Southeast College, brought in the computer science and training program, which now solves that gap, but that's right across Canada."
While the conference will bring in plenty of people interested in energy, More says he also wants to see Estevan residents in attendance so they can learn, make connections, and grow.