Kevin Laliberte
Editor, Smoky River Express

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. It’s a cliché which fittingly describes our response to last week’s botched 2007 babies centre spread in the Express. Anyone and everyone who snatched up our newspaper to catch the news highlights last week no doubt felt like they were coming down with symptoms of double vision upon viewing the unrecognizable blurred centre spread of last year’s batch of babies. It was an eye-soar to say the least, which led to a number of calls from a justifiably disappointed mob of oh, about 25 angry mothers, all of whom took advantage of the annual promotion and were seeking answers last week. So, what happened? Well, initially, we felt the problem was attributed to a printing glitch, which does tend to rear its ugly head every now and again in the print media business. But upon closer review we realized that the problem was related to a combination of things that went wrong at our end in preparing the page for publication. Accepting full responsibility for this oopsie, our staff diligently went back to the drawing board this past week by putting out all the internal promotional fires and righting a wrong in the process by re-printing the centre spread in this week’s issue. We apologize to all parents and grandparents for the confusion while extending our heartfelt thanks for your patience and understanding. There’s certainly no disputing the fact that hindsight is after all 20-20! It is a little known fact that according to the National Research Council, the Peace Country has more patents per capita than any other region in Canada. Now a new initiative may make this the best place in the world to be an inventor. The Centre for Research & Innovation, the product of a partnership between the Peace Region Economic Development Alliance (www.peacecountrycanada.com) and the Grande Prairie Regional College (www.gprc.ab.ca) has undertaken its first major initiative in support of Peace Country inventors. The initiative, which will assess capacity and demand for innovation services in the Region, is funded by the National Research Council-Industrial Research Assistance program and the Centre. This project is the first phase of a two phase initiative directed at innovation services system development to build on regional experience and enhance assistance to rural innovators. The CRI team will be spending the next few months seeking out innovative companies and individuals to determine what assistance they may require in order to move from the idea state to commercialization of that idea or product. The team will also be sponsoring regional workshops involving technology advisors who will outline how they can be of assistance to inventors and the resources they have at their disposal to solve inventor issues. So, if you are an inventor with an idea, if you have been working on an idea and are unsure of what to do next, or if you have a working prototype and need assistance in taking it to market, please call the Centre for Research & Innovation at (780) 539-2054, or e-mail Leann at lkleininger@gprc.ab.ca. Who knows, your invention may just put you on a pedestal with the likes of Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison!

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