This is Kitchener
Our city is growing up. But it isn’t our buildings, streetscaping, or LRT that define us – though we are proud of these things. These assets only matter in that they bring us together; it is our people that make Kitchener great.
YOU CAN MAKE IT IN KITCHENER.
We have incredibly talented and resourceful communities working together to build industries and animate our city.
What made Kitchener distinct right from the beginning was our barn-raising spirit – our early settlers brought their hardworking ‘get-it-done and do-it-together’ mentality.
Since then we’ve loosened up a bit and we do know how to have fun, but you can still see our barn-raising spirit in basements, garages, factories and offices.
With our incubators, accelerators, research institutes, and maker-mentality, we are a global maker hub. Kitchener is your go-to location to source whatever you need for a wearable device, an automotive part, or a digital installation.
These are the people making it happen.
We have a community of ambitious and highly-trained people. We’ve always welcomed technological change, from the earliest signs of industrialization to the digital age. While new industries were hatching, we still retained our values and we are still building together.
You can see this spirit in our region’s purpose-driven post-secondary education system, serving nearly 100,000 students in the region.
The University of Waterloo was conceived as an educational institute to train for the electronic age. It pioneered a world-leading co-op program with over 19,000 students getting on-the-job experience every year.
Add to that two more universities (Wilfrid Laurier and McMaster School of Medicine) and a top-performing polytechnic college (Conestoga College), and we have a comprehensive post-secondary education system, preparing grads in math, engineering, business, science, music and medicine.
It’s no wonder that Kitchener anchors Canada’s Innovation Corridor.
This is where we’re going.
Stretching from Waterloo Region to Downtown Toronto, Canada’s Innovation Corridor has a population of 5 million people, over 5,000 startups, and 200,000 tech workers. This is Canada’s best economic growth opportunity, comparable to Silicon Valley is size, geography, and capacity to invent.
We will work with our partner cities, because we are more competitive together. But it doesn’t change who we are, or what makes Kitchener work.
Kitchener has always managed to thrive, while our city and our economy are changing.
But while technologies change and our city changes, our reaction to them does not. We will always fearlessly grasp the next big idea, and make it happen.
This is Kitchener. You can make it here.
Now we’re a mid-sized city in the Waterloo Region, home to over half a million people. But in impact, we are outperforming our peers, consistently placing in the top five Canadian cities for economic performance.
This is what we’re making.
Our history is rooted in manufacturing, and we are still a manufacturing city, with over 50,000 people making products in the region. But we have become a more complete and competitive city.
We are now one of the top 25 startup ecosystems in the world. Our startup density is second only to Silicon Valley, and we’re growing faster than the other Canadian ecosystems. In less than 20 years we’ve created over 30,000 new tech jobs.
The world's largest free startup incubator – Velocity – is in the heart of Downtown Kitchener and co-located with the Communitech Hub, where startups work in software, hardware/mechatronics and life sciences. We have some of the hottest startups in North America, including Thalmic Labs, Vidyard and Bridgit. Communitech is an innovation centre that helps nearly 1,000 tech companies start, grow and succeed with incubators Communitech Edge, Communitech Rev and Fierce Founders.
We’re home to world-beating enterprises, made-in-Kitchener businesses like D2L, Christie Digital, KEI (Kuntz Electroplating Inc.), Clearpath Robotics, Unitron, Mappedin, and Miovision; and multi-nationals like Google, Square, and Electronic Arts.
