Joel Adams is a senior innovation advisor with Innovation Canada’s Accelerated Growth Service (AGS) at the Government of Canada, where he and his colleagues provide a whole-of-government approach to supporting Canada’s fastest-growing and highest potential businesses.

Adams has more than two decades of experience in entrepreneurship, engineering, education and executive leadership. Over his career, he’s supported more than $1 billion in economic development activities. His efforts were recognized with the 2014 Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Builder of the Year award (Ontario) from Startup Canada.

Adams is a founding partner of Hacker Studios, a privately funded startup incubator and community hub, and is the former executive director of Western University’s Research Parks, where he established the Convergence Science Centre and Fraunhofer Project Centre in London, ON, and the Bioindustrial Innovation Centre in Sarnia-Lambton.

He’s also worked as an entrepreneur and executive in technology and manufacturing, including the automotive industry, where he led a team of engineers who built and tested the world’s first autonomous motorhome and introduced solar-powered lithium battery technology to the recreational vehicle (RV) industry.

Over the past 20 years, he’s also taught entrepreneurship to hundreds of engineering students as a lecturer, program director and assistant professor at Western University, where he’s also a former member of the Board of Governors and the first dual-degree graduate from Western Engineering and the Richard Ivey School of Business.