Our Story
The Idea for IDS Was Born in the Classroom
Intrepid Data Solutions is a Canadian firm, co-founded by Christian Dippel, the Donald F. Hunter Professor in International Business at the Ivey Business School, Western University (previously at the UCLA Anderson School of Management), together with a team of software and data engineers from Western, one of Canada's leading engineering schools.
Christian's research is on economic and technological disruption: what happens to firms, industries and regions when the terms of competition change underneath them.
Teaching Executive Education and MBA workshops on AI and technology disruption, he began to notice a recurring pattern. The leaders in the room had a keen sense that they needed to engage with AI, and they arrived with ideas (often good ones) about how AI could amplify what they were already doing with their data. But they had no way to get started. Something was missing: a way to set a strategic direction, to decide what was worth building, and to actually go and do it.
Co-founder
Christian Dippel
- Donald F. Hunter Professor in International Business
- Ivey Business School, Western University
- Previously at UCLA Anderson School of Management
- Research on economic and technological disruption
Who We Serve
The Backbone of the Canadian Economy
When Christian and the team analyzed those stories and questions, a clear pattern emerged in which organizations were most underserved. It was not an industry. It was a shape: mid-sized companies with no in-house engineering team and an enormous amount of operational data.
In other words, the backbone of the Canadian economy.
These firms have been left to handle that data with off-the-shelf SaaS alone. That is software built for the average of their industry, which is precisely the part of their business least worth differentiating.
And the asymmetry is rarely named out loud.
- Large enterprises
- build the capability in-house.
- Private-equity portfolio companies
- get it wired in by the sponsor.
- Firms inside a strategic roll-up
- inherit it from the parent.
- The independent mid-market company
- is the one left without it.
That is the gap IDS was built to close, without having to sell your company to get it.
So that is the work: helping these companies develop an AI roadmap that is genuinely their own, and then staying with them from conception through build and deployment to maintenance.
Where a client wants it, IDS goes a step further than a technology partner normally would. IDS helps clients build their own in-house engineering capability, guiding a company with no engineers through its first successful hires, or taking its most technical employees to full AI literacy.
A partner whose ambition is to make itself less necessary is an unusual thing to advertise. It is also the only honest version of a long-term relationship.
How IDS closes that gap, layer by layer, is set out in Our Four-Pillar Philosophy
Not Sure Whether This Applies to You?
That is usually the right time to talk. Thirty minutes, no preparation, no obligation. Enough for both of us to know whether there is something here.