Monique
Chartrand

Monique Chartrand is, since 2002, the executive director of Communautique, an experimentation Hub and training centre in open innovation. She has positioned Communautique's Living Lab as the forefront of Montreal's open culture and global commons movement. Also, co-initiator of Fab Labs Québec, echoFab QI, the 1st Fab Lab in Canada, echoFab DD, 1st Canadian Fab Lab dedicated to sustainable development, and the Canadian Fab Labs Nation network.

In 2016, After helping to host the Living Labs World Meeting for the first time in America, she leads the application, to successfully win last summer, the Fab Labs International Meeting, # FAB16, and the World Summit of FabCity in Montreal in 2020.

PROJECT

Our company is an Open Innovation Hub dedicated to learning, collaboration, research and experimentation in social innovation. We conduct research and development activities and offer services in open innovation to citizen-users, ministries, public administrations, institutions, organisations and enterprises.

Pioneer of the arrival of Living Labs and the advent of Fab Labs in Quebec, we mentor their developments. We are running the echoFab QI, the first Fab Lab in Canada, located in the Quartier de l'innovation and a second major Fab Lab focused on green entrepreneurship and sustainable development in East Montreal. EchoFab DD, whose mission is to offer business leaders, new and future entrepreneurs, the tools and concepts to design innovative and sustainable projects. These spaces, anchored in an ecosystem, are at the heart of the transition strategy that we propose towards the Fab City. 

We believe that digital manufacturing laboratories which are numerous, diverse and accessible to all, are one of the key factors to from an extractive economy to a restorative economy. We dream of cities, regions and nations that are empowered in the production and recycling of locally-owned, self-sufficient and interconnected consumer goods and services in a global network.

MTL Fab City is the deployment of a new model of resilient and local production (energy, food, objects) that places the city and its citizens at the heart of the creation, distribution and reuse of the vast majority of what they consume. It is an ambitious project, iterative and connected to a global network of cities committed to this and sharing tools and best practices.