Kidovate draws 230 young entrepreneurs to Victoria’s Bay Centre
Published 6:14 pm Saturday, April 11, 2026
Victoria was alive with excitement on Saturday as hundreds of kids gathered in the Bay Centre to pilot nascent businesses.
The buzz was all part of Kidovate, Canada’s largest youth entrepreneurship market, which every year encourages kids aged 12 to 18 to develop micro-businesses and test them out alongside other young businesspeople.
“The idea is to learn some business acumen and some entrepreneurial acumen by actually being an entrepreneur,” said UVic business professor Brock Smith, who co-founded the event six years ago with his wife Claudia Smith. “They have to figure out what to make, who their customer is going to be, how to price it, how they’re going to communicate it. Then they get reinforced by customers.”
Over 230 kids participated in the April 11 gathering, including 14-year-old Henry Jess, who sold lamps he’d designed and made at home with his 3D printer.
“I’ve always been someone who wanted to sell their stuff and just have the opportunity to give it to people,” he said.
That wish came true this weekend after spending the last few months developing his business with a mentor who boasts plenty of real-world experience.
“My mom’s an entrepreneur, and I’ve just gone under her and had her help me,” he said.
Others opted to get help from folks a little closer in age. In the leadup to the market, Kidovate pairs kids looking for advice with UVic business students.
“They’ve got some business courses under their belt,” said Smith. “They’re able to answer some basic business questions.”
Another young businessperson, 11-year-old Anders Yee, proudly sat behind his booth selling 3D-printed fidgets, toys and keychains. For him, the event was about “making money and just having fun selling things.”
This was the second time he’s done just that, having attended Kidovate last year, and it was where he was inspired to start his current business.
“I was walking up and seeing all the booths,” he said. “I saw this one with a 3D printer and it inspired me to get my own.”
Yee’s mom, Susanna Yee, said the opportunity to develop a product has lent her son plenty of business skills.
“One of the learning experiences for him was last year we … found that traffic was fairly low because we had a price too high,” she said. “It’s actually great in the sense of learning responsibility of finances and things like that.”
Learning those skills, and ultimately encouraging Island kids to one day pursue a business for real, is what Kidovate is all about.
“The rate of entrepreneurship has fallen 50 per cent in Canada in the last 20 years,” said Smith. “We want to help try and fix that a little bit, and our research demonstrates that if you want people to become entrepreneurs when they’re adults, they need to have an early positive entrepreneurial experience. And so that’s why we put this event on for high school and middle school students, to give them kind of that chance to get a feel for entrepreneurship and learn as they’re doing it.”