LeVass Ventures Senior Advisor Dr. Jan Odegard will speak at the 2026 (second edition) Vancity Innovation House, hosted at J Lounge (475 Granville Street) in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Vancity Innovation House brings together the community around Web Summit to explore how big ideas attract the right backing to take flight, and is supported by forward-looking ecosystems such as The Frontier Collective. Vancity’s commitment to sustainability, equity, and innovation is woven into everything that happens inside these walls. The result is a curated space where global leaders and local innovators meet to hear what’s being built, meet the people building it, and have the conversations that actually move things forward. In 2025, its first year, the program drew more than 2,700 attendees and featured speakers from Google, Grammarly, Clio, and the United Nations, becoming one of the most attended and most talked-about events of Web Summit week. This year builds on that momentum.
Session details
Jan will join the panel “The Foundation: Building the Infrastructure of Innovation the Future Actually Needs” on May 12 from 4:30 to 5:05 PM PDT, alongside fellow panelists Devin Campbell (Founding Partner, New Industrial Corporation) and Rika Nakazawa (Chief Commercial Innovation Officer, NTT), moderated by Brett Macfarlane (Special Advisor, Innovation Psychodynamics). The conversation tackles what it actually takes to build the invisible architecture of innovation: the hubs, capital corridors, public-private partnerships, and physical spaces that turn individual breakthroughs into self-sustaining ecosystems, along with what it takes to keep the flywheel spinning long after the ribbon cutting.
What Jan Will Be Discussing
Place is a force multiplier. What running the Ion taught me is that physical density and curated “collision space” produce ecosystem outcomes that distributed and remote programming cannot match. The place has to be designed for the specific mix of people you actually want bumping into each other.
The flywheel is built 18 months before the ribbon cutting. The anchor-tenant decisions, programming partnerships (corporate, university, civic), and tenant-curation discipline locked in long before doors open are what determine whether a hub generates real pipeline or whether it coasts on its launch press.
Capital-stack design is part of the infrastructure. Hubs that try to behave like self-sustaining real estate ventures from day one usually starve their programming. The ones that work mix philanthropy, civic capital, corporate sponsorship, and tenant rent as a deliberately layered stack with different time horizons and different jobs.
University partnerships are operational work. A logo on the wall does not generate startups. The unglamorous infrastructure beneath it does that work: faculty IP pathways, industry-academic partnership programs, and student talent flow built into the hub’s day-to-day operations.
Year two through five is where most hubs lose the plot. The launch press fades, the founding team starts rotating, and the pressure to chase real-estate profitability on a developer’s timeline crowds out the original ecosystem mission. Governance, programming cadence, and partnership renewal are what actually keep the flywheel spinning, and they are the first things hubs underinvest in once the financial-performance lens takes over.
Event Details & Registration
Vancity Innovation House 2026 is by application via The Frontier Collective.
For full agenda details and to apply to attend: thefrontiercollective.com/vancity-innovation-house-2026