Sue Roppel, Principal

Sue  is a creative, thoughtful, and trusted consensus-builder recognized for developing inclusive, consultative, and forward-leaning processes and programming. She is passionate about creating community-impacting as well as youth-benefitting initiatives and is driven by an incomparable commitment to service and excellence.

Starting her career at Simon Fraser University, Sue spent 10 years putting her expertise in program design and impact measurement to work in roles culminating in becoming Director of Academic Programs.  In this position she was responsibible for the review of all academic programs, served as the Vice-President, Academic’s delegate on major academic initiatives of the university such as designing a university curriculum and creating strategic plans for the university. With expertise in program development acquired, Sue challenged herself in a new role as Director of Academic Relations, the HR office for academic professionals (faculty members and librarians) and senior academic administrators (chairs and deans). Here she honed her skills in talent development, innovative skills development, finance and performance evaluation.

Sue left SFU in 2006 and was immediately invited back to serve as the Special Assistant to the Vice President Academic where she undertook a two year project to restructure the academic operations of the university.  Responsible for stakeholder engagement, university buy-in, and idea-generation, Sue learned the power of effective communication, and the centrality of inclusion, open-mindedness, and transparency.  They would become the central tools of all future work.

Sue then seized the opportunity to become Director of Strategic Projects for MITACS, where she was responsible for the creation of Globalink – an international youth-research internship program, and became the in-house grant writer learning to understand the innovation priorities of the Canadian government and working to development relevant, needs-focused programming for the nation.

In 2011, Sue was approached by the Vice President’s, Research and Innovation of three of Canada’s leading universities (The University of British Columbia, University of Toronto and University of Alberta) to help create a vision for the first ever international research centre of excellence between Canada and India. Upon successfully winning the national competition set out by the Networks of Centres of Excellence, Sue was recruited to serve as the Centre’s (IC-IMPACTS) inaugural Chief Operating Officer. A bi-lateral centre focused in the areas of water, infrastructure and health, Sue oversaw the implementation of the Centre‘s strategic plan leading to the growth of the Centre’s activities from start-up to a budget of nearly $30 million with 250 partners, 198 scientists, 38 multi-national research projects, 630 graduate students in training, and with new technology deployments in 16 communities.

In 2017, Sue left IC-IMPACTS to focus on her consulting practice which she had been slowly fermenting since 2011.  Exercising her passion for working with organizations and the talent within them to build strategies and programs that will support the innovation section and build the capacity of future innovators is what makes her days worthwhile.