Innovation Spotlight - Ingenium's Culture of Experimentation

Plenty of organizations write innovation into their strategic plan and leave it there. At Ingenium, it's out on the floor, literally in the shape of a robot with a spinning nose that doubles as a detector.

We sat down recently with Kimberlee Hemming, COO, and Erik Bisson, Chief Protection Officer at Ingenium, to talk about how the organization behind Canada's science and innovation museums approaches experimentation. What we found was a team integrating the discipline of innovation into how it operates, deliberately, patiently, and with a clear-eyed sense of what technology can and can't do.

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Innovation is a Journey, not a Destination

"Innovation is not a destination, it's a journey," Erik told us, and that line does a lot of work at Ingenium. It shapes how the organization staffs, funds, and measures its projects.

Ingenium's teams are built around real subject-matter experts in their respective domains, not generalists asked to stretch into innovation on the side. That expertise is what lets a new project move efficiently from idea to pilot instead of stalling in committees. Pair that with values the organization repeats often: innovation, collaboration, accountability, and you get a place where testing something new isn't an exception to the culture. It is the culture.

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Pilots Before Promises

That shows clearly in how Ingenium is currently piloting a fleet of security robots to patrol its sites. The pilot isn't being judged against a fixed ROI target on day one. It's being judged how the robots respond to real, unpredictable circumstances, and how well they perform the patrol work asked of them. Success, here, is running the experiment properly and holding realistic expectations about what a first pass will and won't prove.

That's a distinction worth sitting with. Plenty of organizations kill promising pilots by demanding they behave like finished products before they've earned the right to. Ingenium is doing the opposite, giving the pilot room to be a pilot.

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Technology as a Supplement, not a Replacement

"Technology is a supplement, not a replacement," Kimberlee said, and the security robots are the clearest example of what that means in practice. The robots make patrolling more efficient. They don't replace the people doing the patrolling.  The program is creating new roles around technology, not eliminating the ones already there.

The robots themselves have personalities. Their spinning nose houses a detector, and the design leans friendly rather than imposing, closer to a curious puppy greeting visitors than a piece of security hardware. That isn't an accident. A robot people are comfortable walking past is one that can do its job in shared public spaces.

Ingenium is developing two-way voices, so the robots can respond to and communicate with people on-site, along with gas detection sensors that add a real safety layer to the patrol function. Further out, the ambition is AI-driven navigational mapping and, within the next five years, full autonomy. None of them replace the protection team. All of it makes the team's job easier and the sites safer.

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Partnerships Extend the Reach

The same innovation muscle behind the robot pilot also gets put to work for other organizations. Ingenium doesn't just experiment for itself; it partners with outside groups to help them work through the technology side of their own projects. One example the team pointed to: partnering with CHEO to build a 3D model of an MRI machine.  

That's the pattern across everything Ingenium described: innovation isn't a capability you hoard once you've built it. It's one worth lending out. Test the new approach internally, get comfortable with it, then bring that experience to partners working through their own problems.

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The Takeaway

Ingenium isn't racing toward a finish line where every site runs itself. It's building the discipline to keep testing, keep learning, and keep treating technology as something that serves people rather than replaces them, one pilot, one partnership, and one very friendly robot at a time.

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