Kidovate draws 230 young entrepreneurs to Victoria\u2019s Bay Centre<\/p>\n
Published 6:14 pm Saturday, April 11, 2026<\/p>\n
Victoria was alive with excitement on Saturday as hundreds of kids gathered in the Bay Centre to pilot nascent businesses.<\/p>\n
The buzz was all part of Kidovate, Canada\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe idea is to learn some business acumen and some entrepreneurial acumen by actually being an entrepreneur,\u201d said UVic business professor Brock Smith, who co-founded the event six years ago with his wife Claudia Smith. \u201cThey have to figure out what to make, who their customer is going to be, how to price it, how they\u2019re going to communicate it. Then they get reinforced by customers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Over 230 kids participated in the April 11 gathering, including 14-year-old Henry Jess, who sold lamps he\u2019d designed and made at home with his 3D printer.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve always been someone who wanted to sell their stuff and just have the opportunity to give it to people,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy mom\u2019s an entrepreneur, and I\u2019ve just gone under her and had her help me,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019ve got some business courses under their belt,\u201d said Smith. \u201cThey\u2019re able to answer some basic business questions.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u201cmaking money and just having fun selling things.\u201d<\/p>\n
This was the second time he\u2019s done just that, having attended Kidovate last year, and it was where he was inspired to start his current business.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was walking up and seeing all the booths,\u201d he said. \u201cI saw this one with a 3D printer and it inspired me to get my own.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yee\u2019s mom, Susanna Yee, said the opportunity to develop a product has lent her son plenty of business skills.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the learning experiences for him was last year we \u2026 found that traffic was fairly low because we had a price too high,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s actually great in the sense of learning responsibility of finances and things like that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Learning those skills, and ultimately encouraging Island kids to one day pursue a business for real, is what Kidovate is all about.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe rate of entrepreneurship has fallen 50 per cent in Canada in the last 20 years,\u201d said Smith. \u201cWe want to help try and fix that a little bit, and our research demonstrates that if you want people to become entrepreneurs when they\u2019re adults, they need to have an early positive entrepreneurial experience. And so that\u2019s 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\u2019re doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kidovate draws 230 young entrepreneurs to Victoria\u2019s Bay Centre Published 6:14 pm Saturday, April 11, 2026 Victoria was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":381359,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[138,336,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-381358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entrepreneurship","tag-business","tag-entrepreneurship","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381358\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/381359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=381358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=381358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}