In just over a week, we’ll be joining delegates from across North America for City Nation Place Americas 2025. Hosted in Ottawa, our attendees will have the exclusive opportunity to get a behind the scenes tour of Area X.O – but what makes the research and development complex so unique? Sonya Shorey, President & CEO of Invest Ottawa, Area X.O and Bayview Yards, joined us to outline why they launched Area X.O to support startups, scaleups, and multinationals to develop new technologies, and what they learned along the way.

What’s so unique about Area X.O?

Area X.O is the only integrated, all-weather, multi-sector R&D complex of its kind in North America. Established by Invest Ottawa and powered by a unique public-private partnership—including the Government of Canada, Province of Ontario, City of Ottawa, global tech leaders such as BlackBerry QNX, Nokia, Ericsson, Accenture, Microsoft, and all four of Ottawa’s post-secondary institutions—Area X.O was purpose-built to accelerate innovation where it matters most.

With more than $51 million in advanced technology infrastructure and three specialised test sites, Area X.O is more than a facility—it’s a living innovation ecosystem. It enables startups, scaleups, multinationals, researchers, and regulators to develop, test, validate, and safely deploy next-generation technologies in real-world, real-time conditions.

What makes Area X.O truly unique is our ability to harness innovation at the intersection of disciplines, sectors, and technologies. From connected and autonomous vehicles to drones, robotics, cybersecurity, cleantech, agtech, public safety, and smart cities—this is where bold ideas are transformed into world-changing solutions.

We are home to:

• Canada’s only drone and advanced robotic testing and training facility of its kind
• A 1,850-acre secure private site with 16 km of test track
• A 100-acre smart farm for agricultural innovation
• One of four NATO Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) Test Centres in Ottawa, making the city Canada’s largest DIANA hub and providing a direct on-ramp to global defence and security markets

We provide secure access to resources typically out of reach for early-stage firms, including Band 14 public safety spectrum and authentic pre-commercial 5G from Ericsson and Nokia. We’re also a certified Public Research Institution under Canada’s ITB Policy, enabling global defence primes to reinvest directly into Canada’s innovation economy.

In short, Area X.O is a global model of collaborative innovation—where governments, academia, industry, and startups come together to solve grand challenges, unlock new markets, and shape the future. It helps Canadian innovators bring their technologies to the world—and brings the world to Canada’s Capital.

Can you give us an example of an interesting project that’s been enabled through this space?

One of the many exciting projects we’ve enabled at Area X.O with partners is a multi-year national initiative to enhance safety at Canada’s level rail crossings. Backed by Transport Canada’s Rail Safety Improvement Program, this project leverages our Area X.O to simulate and rigorously test various rail safety technologies—year-round and across all weather conditions.

We created a highly instrumented, real-world rail crossing environment—complete with sensors, V2X communications, cameras, lidar, radar, thermal imaging, and mock crossing gates. The goal: to identify which combinations of advanced technologies can most effectively reduce collisions at level crossings, which currently account for one-third of all railway fatalities in Canada.

This project brought together a diverse group of collaborators including global firms like BlackBerry QNX, Microsoft, and Siemens, and homegrown innovators such as Sensor Cortek, Cheetah Networks, and Four DRobotics. The collaboration spans autonomous vehicle systems, smart infrastructure, machine vision, and secure IoT communications—creating a shared learning environment to test not only technology but also interoperability and real-time data exchange across stakeholder systems.

More broadly, this initiative goes beyond R&D. It creates pathways for policy and regulatory insight, guides technology adoption, and informs future investment by Transport Canada and other stakeholders. It also allows the public to better understand the role of smart mobility in enhancing everyday safety and mitigating accidents—especially at intersections where roads and rail lines meet.

This is a vivid example of Area X.O’s role as an innovation bridge—connecting startups, multinationals, regulators, and city infrastructure to solve real-world problems that impact our citizens and their safety.

What support do you provide to private sector partners to accelerate their journey?

We offer facilitated access to integrated technical capabilities, business expertise and engineering support within a collaborative and connected ecosystem. We help innovators, founders and companies leverage $51 million in infrastructure—well beyond the typical reach of startups and scaleups—including 5G networks, robotics, cybersecurity tools, smart city intersections, drones, and more. Our onsite engineering team works directly with founders and firms to reduce risk, optimise performance, enhance productivity and accelerate market, customer and investor readiness.

We also broker strategic relationships—with Transport Canada, the City of Ottawa, and industry regulators—enabling earlier-stage engagement on regulatory and commercialisation pathways. And we connect companies with prospective investors, clients, and talent through curated demos, events, and trade missions, including global NATO and smart mobility networks. This includes GCXpo, our national technology demonstration day in the heart of Canada’s Capital.

How do you collaborate with local industry and academia to bring this together?

At Area X.O, collaboration is not a feature—it’s a foundational principle. This R&D complex was created through a visionary public-private partnership led by Invest Ottawa and powered by founding partners including the Government of Canada, Province of Ontario, City of Ottawa, Accenture, BlackBerry QNX, Ericsson, Microsoft, Nokia, and all four of Ottawa’s post-secondary institutions. That spirit of collaboration continues to underpin everything we do.

We work with and for a diverse range of stakeholders—researchers, startups, scale-ups, SMEs, multinationals, researchers, regulators, and municipal partners—bringing them together to fulfil a shared vision and innovation goals. Our collaborative R&D projects are intentionally designed to ensure that each partner plays a distinct role in shaping the vision, delivery, and impact of the initiative, and achieves their desired impact.

Researchers gain valuable real world, hands-on experience and engage potential future employers and partners. Startups and scale-ups gain their first customers, valuable product feedback, and faster paths to market. Multinationals validate advanced use cases and test interoperability. Regulators such as Transport Canada work side-by-side with innovators to explore real-world compliance, adoption, and safety. The City of Ottawa plays a critical role, offering live infrastructure and engagement, helping us scale from the lab to the street. And often, the public participates as well—whether through live experiences with connected and autonomous shuttles or engagement in community learning activities.

These collaborations often yield outcomes far beyond the initial project goals—from data-driven policy insights that shape future legislation to product refinements that help firms scale nationally or globally. We’re creating a model of multi-stakeholder innovation that is inclusive, purposeful, and deeply rooted in real-world impact.

At its core, Area X.O is about aligning diverse expertise and energy to unlock solutions no one sector can achieve alone. It’s collaboration in action—with tangible benefits for innovators, citizens, and society at large.

Are there any lessons other places could learn from your experience?

We are on an endless and exciting learning journey—one enriched by the innovators, companies, regulators, and communities we’re privileged to collaborate with. We learn from them every day, and we’re committed to sharing those insights openly to help others grow alongside us.

Some key takeaways:

• Design for integration. Area X.O was built as a continuum—from prototyping to commercialisation—within one secure, tech-rich environment. This reduces friction, accelerates time to market, and helps innovators move forward with confidence.
• Embed collaboration early. Strong partnerships across government, industry, and academia are vital. But just as critical is the early engagement of regulators. Our work with Transport Canada, for instance, enables companies to navigate compliance and adoption pathways in real time.
• Invest in people as much as place. Ottawa’s strength lies not only in our infrastructure, but in our brilliant and collaborative people. With access to 28,000 STEM students, 65 government labs, and the highest tech talent concentration in North America at 12.6% of our workforce, we’ve learned that innovation ecosystems thrive when talent is nurtured as intentionally and thoughtfully as technology.
• Leverage your ecosystem’s unique and differentiated strengths. Every region has distinct assets—whether it’s a critical mass of R&D facilities, expertise, regulatory proximity, sector clusters, or climate conditions. We’ve learned that identifying and aligning those differentiators around your innovation goals can create disproportionate competitive advantage. For Ottawa, that includes our global tech hub status, public safety spectrum, and four-season test environment—all of which help attract investment, talent, and opportunity.

We’ll continue to learn, listen, and share—helping communities everywhere build stronger innovation ecosystems that bring world-changing ideas to life.

Thank you, Sonya – I’m sure our delegates will have a wonderful time on the tour!

There’s still time to add the Area X.O tour on Wednesday 21^st May to your CNP Americas conference booking – just email martin@citynationplace.com

Don’t have a ticket yet? Grab one of the last places to the conference here.