The Innovation Expedition (IE) has been in existence for 16 years, having been launched initially in 1991 as part of the Triple i  (International Institute for Innovation), out of a base in the Banff Centre where Don Simpson was then functioning as Vice-President.

The strategic intentions and operating values developed in the original five-day design workshop have stood the test of time and remain our focus today.

An initial dramatic test lab for our ideas was provided when the Alberta Cabinet challenged us to create and operate a public dialogue process to help leaders from all sectors determine what it would take to make Alberta an innovation driven society in order to avoid provincial bankruptcy (it is hard now to believe that this was indeed a major challenge facing the province in 1991).

Every second weekend for several months we brought together from forty to sixty senior leaders from business, academia, municipal governments, unions, research groups and a variety of social action nonprofits. The government committed to having a minister and a deputy minister attend each session and anything presented at the sessions was made publicly available (the documents are available).

The Roundtable events tested the values and principles that had emerged from our founding session at the Banff Centre. They also shaped our terminology and the language we used to shape our intentions.
We created our dialogue process “on the fly” as we ran the different roundtables and we invited participants to help co-create an appropriate approach. The development work began in those Alberta roundtables laid the foundation for the later Challenge Dialogue System (CDS)™ which has become the flagship of the Innovation Expedition.

The process (which we referred to as the Alberta Roundtables) later was woven into a public-private initiative known as “Towards 2000 Together” and eventually involved close to 25,000 Albertans directly or indirectly. For over a year the government entrusted major elements of economic planning to a joint government/public sector team, co-chaired by a Calgary banker and Don Simpson. This initiative was an unprecedented example of collaboration between a government and community leaders in order to unleash innovation to drive improved performance aimed at building sustainable prosperity (more jobs, increased wealth creation and expanded quality of life).

This experience in shaping innovation in Alberta was a defining one for the new Innovation Expedition. The major principles, actions and recommendations that emerged from this Dialogue provided the initial action framework for the new Klein government and it positioned our fledgling Innovation Expedition was thus positioned to play a mentoring role in many of the activities undertaken in Alberta since then to unleash innovation.

Since those early days, the organizational structure of IE has undergone a number of transformations, including a period in the late 90s when the Expedition operated as a Mentoring Unit for the pioneering effort to create AXIA NetMedia as an innovative online knowledge management company.

Our team played a strong supporting role in helping AXIA grow from an original team of just nine people into a thriving organization of 700 employees. When AXIA became a public company on the Toronto Stock Exchange Don Simpson disengaged the Innovation Expedition in order to be free to operate in a highly flexible manner in exploring a variety of collaborative arrangements locally, nationally and internationally. Following the separation from AXIA the Innovation Expedition operated until late 2005 operated as an Ontario incorporated company with Simpson as sole owner.

In late 2005, three long-time supporters of IE (Steve Murgatroyd, Dawn Ralph and Keith Jones) joined Don in incorporating and investing in a renewed Innovation Expedition as an Alberta-based national and global business. Our separate incorporation in Ontario is retained as well and we are about to register the Innovation Expedition in other jurisdictions nationally and internationally..