BlackBerry is partnering with L-Spark, a Canadian software-as-a-service accelerator, to help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) grow their businesses.
Along with helping enterprises grow their businesses, the partnership seeks to bring new technology to market using BlackBerry’s QNX technology.
BlackBerry wants to help participating companies research and develop product prototypes in a variety of areas, including robotics, device security, sensor fusion, functional safety, analytics, medical devices and autonomous vehicles.
“Partnering with BlackBerry to accelerate the growth of high-potential Canadian SMEs is the most effective way to grow the next great, global, technology company,” said Leo Lax, executive managing director at L-Spark, in a September 20th, 2018 media release.
“But more importantly, it is a great way to elevate the entire Canadian technology community to reach and thrive within the global marketplace.”
L-Spark will utilize the National Research Council-Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC-IRAP), along with its industrial tech advisors, to contact companies that may benefit from working with QNX.
The accelerator plans to select six companies to join the program for six months of training. Companies will receive one-on-one coaching to help them grow and scale. Furthermore, the training will help bring new products to market.
BlackBerry’s QNX is a Unix-like real-time operating system. BlackBerry embedded QNX in several technologies, including power plants, surgical robots and autonomous vehicles.
A few months ago, QNX in vehicles surpassed 120 million embeds.
This partnership between BlackBerry and L-Spark will help make the powerful QNX tech more available to Canadian businesses. Hopefully, it will help encourage more use of QNX in new and fresh ideas.
Anyone interested in applying to the accelerator program can click here.
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