ONSIDE and the business value of belonging

Dalene Allen already knew how to make an introduction. Her Halifax business, Networking Naturally, helps people build relationships through warm referrals. Yet in fall 2025, she attended an ONSIDE pricing workshop, took the advice back to her website and changed it. Then came a program on arranging offers into “good, better, best.” Again, she put the lesson to work. An experienced entrepreneur had found something worth learning in a room designed to make asking easier.

ONSIDE’s proposition begins there: useful knowledge needs a route to the person who can use it. A workshop, an introduction or a business plan can be a small intervention with a practical consequence. Allen’s experience offers a pleasingly unglamorous example. Nobody needed to invent a new market. Somebody needed to price an existing offer more clearly.

Before the incubator, a map

The Organization for Nova Scotia Innovation Driven Entrepreneurship launched in fall 2019. Its origins were in a two-year engagement with MIT’s Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program, championed by Dalhousie University and funded by private-sector support. Nova Scotia’s participants studied what makes an entrepreneurial region work and identified its comparative advantages, including the ocean economy.

That inheritance matters. ONSIDE began with a regional question: how do institutions, money, skills and relationships help businesses emerge? Its expertise lies in convening those players, translating research into action and coordinating efforts that would otherwise remain scattered. The organization describes its mission in three verbs: convene, connect, catalyze.

In 2021, five regional teams began an 18-month MIT REAP Focus Nova Scotia pilot sponsored by ONSIDE. They represented the Strait/Cape Breton, Pictou, Valley, Western and South Shore regions. Entrepreneurs, corporations, risk capital, government and post-secondary institutions contributed perspectives. The resulting strategies included agricultural technology acceleration and efforts to unlock value in fisheries. Local economic development acquired a shared working method.

The gap became the brief

ONSIDE also commissioned the Nova Scotia Inclusive Innovation Monitor, drawing on the Brookfield Institute’s national work. Its three pillars are opportunities, activity and outcomes. That means asking who has access to financing and education, who participates in entrepreneurship, and who benefits through wages, income and wealth. An innovation economy can look busy while leaving people outside its benefits.

The organization’s account of its next move is explicit: research revealed gaps facing women entrepreneurs, including less funding and exclusion from influential spaces. Those observations led to Start Now Incubator. The change was a move from diagnosing unequal participation to creating a service people could enter. Research had supplied a brief with actual people in it.

Launched in 2023 with rural entrepreneurship partner Mashup Lab, the initial six-week virtual incubator covered ideation, business planning, market research, customer discovery and pitching. Today, Start Now combines virtual incubation with technical training, advisory services, peer mentoring, workshops and connector events. It serves women and non-binary entrepreneurs across Canada, with particular attention to rural, Indigenous, diverse and underserved women.

Free at the point of use

The price of Start Now programming is straightforward: free, supported by the federal Women Entrepreneurship Strategy. ONSIDE’s model is nonprofit program delivery and ecosystem coordination, with institutional and government support paying for access. Participants receive services; funders support the broader aim of increasing participation in entrepreneurship.

Canada’s 2023–24 public accounts record C$855,397 in Women Entrepreneurship Strategy payments to the organization. That figure describes one fiscal year’s payments, not its total operating budget. Separately, first executive director Alexandra McCann reported deploying C$500,000 through the IDE Community Acceleration Fund. The two numbers belong to different activities and should stay separate.

Within the entrepreneurship-support market, ONSIDE occupies the space between individual assistance and regional coordination. Its distinctive combination is MIT-informed ecosystem work, inclusion research and direct programming. An eligible founder can seek help with a business decision; a regional stakeholder can use the research and collaborative framework to examine the conditions behind many such decisions.

“The two programs I invested time in have already paid off.”

Dalene Allen, Networking Naturally

Count the connections, too

ONSIDE’s 2022–2026 report records more than 2,500 women accessing support, more than 1,200 building networks, mentorships and partnerships, and more than 1,000 gaining skills, tools and confidence. It also reports more than 190 starting businesses and more than 320 sustaining or scaling them. These are organizationally reported counts, with categories that may overlap. They should not be read as a funnel or a controlled measure of causation.

Individual accounts give those categories texture. Chrystal Toop, founder of Blackbird Medicines in Pembroke, Ontario, says Mashup Lab helped her clarify planning when similar programs had not connected. She credits its guidance with helping her reach her first six-figure earnings year. Meghan Doucette of Mahone Bay’s Lemonade Co. describes relief from entrepreneurial isolation and opportunities to meet potential clients. These are participant experiences, rather than promises to the next applicant.

An engineer leaves the meeting room

ONSIDE’s work even reaches the street. With partners including Volta and the Downtown Halifax Business Commission, it helped turn community ideas about innovation into Rising Tides, a mural by John McPartland, known as ABSEN. The image features an engineer in thought. Economic development, which usually arrives wearing a lanyard, briefly acquired paint.

The reusable lesson is practical: examine who cannot reach an opportunity, recruit partners around that gap, offer something specific and ask what participants actually used. Free delivery requires funding. Online participation still requires time and access. Coordinated action depends on partners continuing to show up. For founders, the next step can be smaller: choose a relevant workshop, bring a real decision and leave with a change worth testing.