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Just as a troop of soldiers needs precise information about the winding streets and towering structures it will patrol, a start-up company needs to know how to navigate its way through the streets of the marketplace.

Dr. Philippe Simard, president of the Montreal start-up firm SimActive Inc., knows very well the difference between having a great idea and having a great product. Fortunately for him, he has both.

"When you are a researcher you tend to think that because it's the first time something has been done or because what you're working on is cool, people will be willing to buy it," says the 29-year-old geomatics entrepreneur. "But people only buy something if it means they are going to save time or money or if it's going to allow them to do something that they couldn't do before."

Therein lies the difference between pure research and harsh reality: "You can't afford to spend years developing something if you're not sure who will buy it," says Dr. Simard.

SimActive, which Dr. Simard founded in 2003 with his brother Louis, recently signed a $1-million, 18-month agreement with Defence Research and Development Canada at Valcartier, Quebec to further develop software to give troops operating in sometimes hostile urban environments total "situation awareness" – precise knowledge and complete clarity about the state of the world in which they will be working.

"Situation awareness is the buzzword," says Dr. Simard. "If you want to be efficient on a mission, you want your troops to have the exact knowledge of the state of the world, of what's out there, what's happening and what's happened since the last time they were there."

It's a fitting metaphor for the help GEOIDE has provided SimActive in establishing itself as an up-and-coming geomatics contender. Through the network's help the company has total situation awareness about what it takes to survive and succeed.

A former network researcher when he completed his PhD at McGill University, Dr. Simard credits GEOIDE with helping him get his highly specialized business off the ground.

"GEOIDE provided funding for me to do research at McGill on one of the projects I was working on. I told them I wanted to start a company and they had a program called the Market Development Fund. They helped us, through this fund, to prepare the business plan and secure the intellectual property that we had developed by filing a patent. The Market Development Fund is really good because it's hard at the early stage, at the start-up of a company, to get seed money to get this done."

GEOIDE helped Dr. Simard maintain ownership and control of the company. He says that wealthy investors willing to take risks on new and unproven technologies often will come in and "for $20,000 or $40,000 basically take half of your company." The GEOIDE Market Development Fund "gives you the money to pass beyond that point," says Dr. Simard.

It also put him into contact with the right people for his software product. "GEOIDE is all about being a huge Canadian network of companies, so they helped us approach members of the network. This facilitated contact with potential customers or partners."

The defence sector is very promising but it has a long sales cycle. "We're trying to generate revenues in the short term and GEOIDE is helping us approach companies," adds Dr. Simard.

The work SimActive is doing with the military will position them to sell software licences throughout the defence sector and to Canadian allies and partners. And it will enable SimActive to develop non-military applications for civil authorities and corporations.

SimActive might well be up and running without GEOIDE's help. But it would have been a much tougher road to travel. "It's hard to measure the power of the network," says Dr. Simard. "It's really there. It would have been really difficult without GEOIDE. It helped with our defence work – they knew GEOIDE would help us and that gave us credibility."

Dr. Simard expects his company to grow to a staff of 10 to 15 over the next two to three years and then "if we do hit the defence market as we are hoping to, selling hundreds and hundreds of licences to that market will allow us to grow exponentially from there."

SimActive is expected to sign a substantial contract with a very well-known world class organization, says said Pierre Nelis, former chief operating officer at Softimage who is advising Philippe and Louis Simard get their company further established. "This will be the trigger, the stepping stone. From there they will be dealing with the top 500 companies in the world. That will be their playing field, international, world-class top 500 companies."

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