Laurie Paquet Advisory Board Member

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Biography

Laurie Paquet has played a significant role in the creation of Assistive Technologies throughout her decade-long role at Kinova. Being Kinova’s third employee, Laurie has been a key player in the development of Kinova’s Assistive Division.

Born and raised in Quebec City, Laurie studied business at Laval University, knowing that her path would lead her to a company whose mission was to make a positive impact on the world. In school, Laurie studied ways in which communities could build centres for families taking care of individuals with limited mobility. A few years into her career, Laurie was introduced to Charles Deguire. Once she learned about Kinova’s mission, Laurie moved closer to Montreal, and joined the team as a Business Development Executive. Eventually, her role at Kinova evolved to become entirely focused on the Assistive Division.

Today, Laurie’s day-to-day revolves around strategizing ways to increase the accessibility rates and ease of adoption for end-users. Through engaging with end-users and collaborating with therapists and medical professionals, Laurie is able to refine our product to meet varying needs: combining feedback from users and therapists to constantly iterate our product and improve the experience for users.

Laurie plays a key role in the direction of the company, devising plans with the entire executive team, prioritizing Assistive Technology development to match market accessibility. As one of the key collaborators with end-users and therapists, Laurie is a collaborator both inside the walls of Kinova and outside in the community. Breaking down barriers is a key function of her day-to-day at Kinova.

When looking back on her decade at Kinova, Laurie reflects on the most impactful moments of her career, which always come back to end-users and seeing their reaction to the product. Laurie’s current objectives include changing the paradigm of Assistive Technologies to ensure human mobility is viewed from the framework of one’s entire body, and to increase the long-term adoption rates among end-users.

What does it mean to achieve the extraordinary? Achieving the extraordinary is stripping down barriers to bring technologies to people, effectively giving them autonomy and independence to express themselves as individuals.