About ISM
As a creative consultancy, ISM houses a creative agency for developing products and services, a business incubator for startups including a government designation to bring foreign-owned startups to Canada, and strategic partnerships for supporting mutual clients at any stage. In-house ISM platforms include global markets, alternative investments, a venture studio, and an early childhood academy.
ISM is a BC Canada corporation operating in strategic partnership, collaboration, joint venture, subsidiary, commission, revenue share, and client models across projects. Alongside launching proprietary passion projects, we take a holistic systems approach to working with people and organizations to explore projects that are driven by passion and defined by creativity and impact.
ISM is this era's first company for creativity -- to unlock its power to impact business and society. As creatives, we have an intrinsic, unbending drive and fascination for forging meaningful innovations that may never have existed before -- projects that are extraordinary, imaginative, thoughtful, ambitious, risky, that could be groundbreaking, could be multi-generational, and that contribute to positive societal evolution.
Our Values
Work Ethic
We are serial founders and high-volume creatives on journeys to discover.
Alignment
We find what we have in common, act on what connects us, and leave our differences aside.
Ambition
We acknowledge that anything is possible, and take risks without being risk-seeking.
Passion
We believe the unbending desire to make something happen, makes it happen.
Empathy
We design initiatives to be not only for, but by who they serve.
Critical Thinking
We access multiple categories of theory, practice, and context to formulate new ones.
Our Story
The ISM brand was created by Scott Mallory in 2006, building a decade-wide body of multimedia creative work including a music collective, his personal brand as an artist, and an audiovisual production studio. As the scope of production gradually involved more people, teams, groups and organizations, a collaboration formed in 2019 that ultimately required a new corporate structure and called for a new brand altogether (ISM Arts & Culture). This marked a shift towards focusing on more cross-stakeholder initiatives, harnessing the unique power of Arts and Culture to drive innovation across sectors by using creativity at the intersection of business and society. To better capture the breadth and depth of our involvement in the world of innovation, ISM Arts & Culture rebranded to ISM Creative in 2024.
Meaning Behind ISM
The platform represents a suffix that may denote a state or quality, principle, practice, system, philosophy, ideology, movement, an action or its result.
It takes on the intrinsic nature of the suffix in itself, leaving its denotation open to multiplicity. It shapeshifts, responds, expands, contracts, explores and indulges in possibility, finds its way into the unexpected, tries to see in every direction, creates dimension, and never does just one thing, but always does things that are necessary. It is a "way," of navigating complex constellations of things we did not know were there.
This is how it first emerged out of one intriguing collaboration, how it multiplied into a variety of imminent calls to action, and is the lifeblood of how it continues to create opportunity.