Welcome to the Frontier Entrepreneurship Podcast

With more than a decade of experience in Canada’s technology commercialization industry, Braden Kemp has held senior roles in both the public and private sectors. As an entrepreneur, Braden founded and currently operates a manufacturing and e-commerce company along with a consulting practice. Braden is a leader with growth companies and the organizations that support them—most recently as Director of Operations at National Prostaff Inc. and previously as Director of Client Services at Spark Centre, Durham and Northumberland’s Regional Innovation Centre.

Braden has been an advisor to a variety of technology companies in food and agricultural technology, military technology and training, engineering and design, influencer marketing, e-commerce, wearables and more. He holds a Bachelor of Commerce in Economics from the University of Guelph and is a graduate of Toronto Metropolitan University’s DMZ accelerator. Braden currently serves as Strategic Advisor for entrepreneurs participating in NCFDC’s thriveFORWARD initiative.

Robert Washburn is a journalist with 40 years of experience in newspapers, magazines, and radio and currently the host of Consider This Northumberland, a current affairs radio show on Northumberland 89.7 FM. Washburn instructs in the Journalism program at Loyalist College, where he teaches the uses of new and emerging technologies and journalism. He also teaches social media marketing, digital marketing strategy in the Business program and delivers a technology in society course in the General Arts and Science program. He is the first post-secondary educator in Canada to teach in Second Life, has trained journalists across Canada in data-assisted reporting and Internet research skills and served for four years on the board of directors for the Canadian Association of Journalists, with one year as Chairman. In 2007, Robert Washburn received the Educational Technology Committee award for Innovative Teaching With Technology, and the Canadian New Media Award for Educator of the Year. He holds a Master’s degree on the future of online journalism from the York-Toronto Metropolitan University joint program in Communications and Culture.

Italian sociologist Franco Cassano once wrote, “the most restless frontiers are those that are not recognized.” This could be said of technology as much as of geography. Technological development is an endeavour of exploration and in its most extreme form, an often difficult and perilous journey to the new: to the novel and non-obvious (as notoriously required by the patent office), but in any event, to recognition.

This is not simply a matter of discovery (invention) but of development (the creation of value)–or, in the present political economy, to the commercialization of knowledge. In a dialectical mode, it is not surprising that Cassano describes frontiers equally as places of division and of opposition. Bringing a new technology product to market implies extreme confrontation: between startup and incumbent, between new and depreciating capital, between established methods and radical change, between owners and workers, between regulators, jurisdictions, markets and competitors, and between stakeholders, customers, founders, shareholders and communities at large. As terrain, these are hardly peaceful and quiescent landscapes. One could say that the charged and open frontier is where inventors, innovators and entrepreneurs are (again, following Cassano) “roaming restlessly…” continuously “watched” (Cassano’s action word) by corporations, governments, institutions and states.

Frontier Entrepreneurship is naturally an exhilarating ‘place’ to be (this is what gives entrepreneurship its heroic and expeditionary valence). But the frontier is also a dangerous place: full of risk, barriers and mountains to climb… of cycles, technics, troughs of disillusionment, valleys of death and even force majeure. Through all of this, Frontier Entrepreneurs are “watched” from places of safety and security with a curious mixture of doubt, resentment and admiration. The discovery and disruption they generate (at least until such time as the frontier is once again subsumed and a new frontier is created) will be characterized by vigorous opposition to the way things are and presage the way things may be in the future.

So then, what pushes an individual from the safe confines of the known world of business administration to the outer reaches of innovation and entrepreneurship? What drives them forward?

The etymology of the word “frontier” comes from the Latin, the feminine noun, frons, frontis, the forehead or brow. The root implies the fore of anything, the ‘forefront’, the ‘van’ (perhaps the ‘vanguard’, or the ‘avant-garde’). This includes the borderlands, the marches of a country, as in the old French, la frontière. While the nineteenth century American myth of the frontier and of frontierism is treated critically by historians today, one may nevertheless concede that a certain natural and positive human instinct appears to exist (trans-historically?) to “take that extra step” in pursuit of adventure, to search for and experience challenges posed by the unknown. In short, this hypothesis forms the basis of our conceptualization of ‘Frontier Entrepreneurship.’ A hypothesis (not an assumption) because no sharply defined terms are required. Our hope, with the Frontier Entrepreneurship podcast, is not only to explore extreme and innovative technologies and ventures at the very cutting edge, but also to encounter and better understand the Frontier Entrepreneurs themselves: to hear their stories and reflect on their experiences.

Cassano, Thinking the Frontier (2012) https://academic.oup.com/fordham-scholarship-online/book/20869/chapter-abstract/180354720

Mood, Notes on the History of the Word Frontier (1948), https://www.jstor.org/stable/3739265