The area around Ottawa, Ontario—Canada's national capital region—is known as "Silicon Valley North". The area is home to several major high-tech companies, as well as numerous smaller companies founded by people leaving the "corporate nest" to follow their dreams.
Many skills are represented among these smaller companies, and many of us making up a virtual corporation subcontract to each other on an as-needed basis, a way of working that we have enjoyed for 9 years. This arrangement helps us contain our administrative costs while ensuring that we have the human bandwidth and range of skills required to bid on, and to complete successfully, the wide range of projects brought to us.
Although many of our "virtual partners" are in the Ottawa area, we also enjoy linkages with partners elsewhere in North America and in Europe.
The skills represented in this virtual corporation include:
- research design (qualitative and quantitative)
- user needs assessment / customer research / job profiling
- usability verification
- graphic design
- user interface design
- hardware ergonomics
- mechanical packaging
- project management
