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This week’s forum marked the organization’s first foray into the cleantech sector, said MaRS Venture Group Associate Kevin Downing. Downing said he wanted to connect cleantech-related companies in the MaRS portfolio that were “investment ready” with the forum’s audience. “I don’t have a motive to push any one client over any other because they’re not paying me,” Downing said. Of the 1,300 MaRS portfolio companies, he said the cleantech sector has been its fastest growing segment and an expanding sector in country as well (see Canadian cleantech looks to the future and IPO drought? Cleantech companies flood Canadian markets). Since 2006, cleantech and environmental technology companies have made up 9 percent of MaRS' portfolio. MaRS currently has 350 active clients. The center isn’t government funded, but does receive some government support, he said. It has been funded through donations from the public and private sector, as well as revenue from its mixed-use facility. MaRS has the ability to provide some funding, around $40,000, to startups on a competitive basis. Other companies showcased at the forum through MaRS included NIMtech, Real Tech, Vicicog and Skymeter.

the country's most significant collection of scientific and medical researchers.

This week, a program called MaRS Innovation announced the appointment of its first full-time president, Raphael (Rafi) Hofstein, a Harvard-trained, Israeli biomedical wizard who wants to bring together companies, scientists and funding under one roof to create a special alchemy of science and shekels.

Since its inception, MaRS has focused on turning big ideas into commercial projects. The difference between the two entities is that pretty much anyone with an idea or discovery could come to MaRS for support, regardless of whether they had their “eureka” moment in a state-of-the-art research lab or in their garage. MaRS Innovation, a separate endeavour with its own board of directors, only works with researchers from its 14 partner institutions, which include some of the most prestigious universities and hospitals in Canada. The goal of that project is to do the kind of work those institutions would normally try to do in-house, but on a bigger scale and, the project's backers hope, with better results.

MaRS Innovation is very much in its infancy. Officially launched last June, the project is barely a year old, and the board of directors was only announced this February. It has secured about $25-million in funding over five years to be used for commercialization of projects.

Dr. Hofstein is giving himself two to three years to roll out a success story – be it the creation of a new small company founded on the back of a researcher's drug discovery and funded by a big pharmaceutical firm, or a new discovery that, packaged properly, attracts serious venture-capital money.

The federal government has also taken notice, naming MaRS Innovation as one of 11 new “Centres of Excellence for Commercialization and Research,” a designation that came with almost $15-million in funding.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks at MaRs with Premier Dalton McGuinty after a tour of the building in 2007.

Indeed, the MaRS Innovation model of pushing for commercial applications of research seems to be directly in line with the philosophy of the Conservative government, which clearly favours practical results when it comes to funding for scientific research.

But those tasks involve two separate skill sets, Mr. Tabrizi suggests, and may be much better suited to a place such as MaRS, where academic and industry heavyweights converge.

Many of MaRS's biggest partners are in health care, and Dr. Hofstein is jumping in with a list of priorities that includes focusing on stem-cell research and oncology.

MaRS itself has always been good at bringing people from various sectors together, but there's no guarantee that Dr. Hofstein's plan will work, especially in the two-to-three-year timeline he mentions when talking about a rollout date for the first MaRS Innovation projects.

Indeed, Mr. Tabrizi says some Silicon Valley insiders marvel at what MaRS Innovation is trying to do. “I think there's something innovative there,” he says. “Something different is being done.”

10 nonprofit models that are commonly used by the largest nonprofits in the United States.

Our intent is not to prescribe a single approach for a given nonprofit to pursue. Instead, we hope to help nonprofit leaders articulate more clearly the models that they believe could support the growth of their organizations, and use that insight to examine the potential and constraints associated with those models.