The City of Calgary is hoping its new Wave Tech Centre in downtown Calgary will spur the type of innovations that make the city more efficient and effective.

The Wave Tech Centre, which first got grant money in the summer of 2023, officially opened for experimentation Monday at the Andrew Davison building in downtown Calgary.

The facility was designed as a space where different City of Calgary teams can explore new and emerging technology. According to the City, this will help them understand how technology can improve service delivery.

Jan Bradley, Chief Information Officer for the City of Calgary, said that she’s excited to see what kinds of innovations city employees can discover.

“Our colleagues across the corporation have some really great ideas about how they can make their services better, but they need to know a little bit more before they actually come forward with a potential budget ask or a service change,” she said.

“This space allows them to do that and be really well informed about how the technology might make their service better.”

The main floor of the Andrew Davison building has been transformed into a full-service incubator, one that houses a robotic arm, advanced computing infrastructure, 3D fabrication, and a virtual immersion room where both augmented reality and virtual reality innovations can be used and discovered.

Bradley said it’s a great opportunity to get City of Calgary employees out of their desks and into a space that encourages new discovery.

“We’ve been accessing this space since last Wednesday, and we’ve had some meetings and various other things, and there’s a certain amount of energy and buzz that just having people in this space happens,” she said.

The project was funded in part through the Prairies Economic Development Canada through the Regional Innovation Ecosystems program.

Innovation already taking place

Mayor Jyoti Gondek said that already the City of Calgary is taking steps to put the Wave Tech Centre to use. She said a project being done in partnership with Humber College will look at combining traditional over-the-air broadcast signals with internet communications. They want to apply that to potential emergency messaging in Calgary.

Another is using AI to detect and classify multiple types of pavement distress conditions so that pre-emptive maintenance can be done on them. These are the types of solutions that will provide better service for Calgarians, but also help the city run more efficiently.

“The time and cost that the city currently uses on road maintenance is quite high, and we expect that deploying this kind of technology would allow us to be more proactive, rather than reactive, which will promise significant savings as well as efficiency and repairs,” she said.

“This means that we can be smarter and better at allocating our resources. We can respond to things much quicker, and we can have much more resilient infrastructure.”

The mayor hopes that all city departments participate in what’s available at the Wave Tech Centre to ensure it’s a cross-corporate effort to find improvements and innovations.

“What is going to be most significant to council is to understand how various departments and business units have been able to use this space for innovation and the results that they have achieved,” she said.

There’s also a component that continues to spur the local innovation ecosystem. Mayor Gondek said they don’t know all the great technology that’s out there.

“What this space allows us to do is work with the innovators and figure out how their technology can actually help us improve our service,” she said.

Bradley said she hopes the space will be used by local companies as well.

“We also hope that it’s going to really help with economic development, because the more you’re experimenting in your community, the more likely you are to use local innovators,” she said.

Terry Rock, CEO of Platform Calgary said the Wave Tech Centre is another piece in the puzzle of making the city an attractive place to innovate. He said when you scan global cities leading the way in tech, they have components like this centre already in place.

“Colleagues from across Canada are looking at the assets that Calgary is building, and they’re just envious, because it’s clear that this city is committed to doing this, and we’re doing things like this, is just another example of that commitment in action,” he said.

Rock said that innovators thrive on putting their minds to big, hard-to-solve problems – and the City of Calgary serves a vast population looking for better solutions in mobility, housing, energy transition and having an access point like this takes innovation to the next level.

“It should be both inspiring, but also give people practical ways to get working on those problems directly,” he said.