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The recent Agri-Innovation Forum, hosted in Toronto by a few Guelph-based organizations like MaRS Landing and Ontario Agri-Food Technologies who are dedicated to building linkages between agriculture and other sectors such as health, highlighted some of these developments.

The University of Guelph's leadership in the development of food products that enhance health was showcased at the Agri-Food Innovation Forum in downtown Toronto yesterday.The forum's focus is on agriculture, food and human health, and is examining ways to generate business enterprises in the nutraceutical and functional food field.

John Kelly, executive director of the MaRS Landing and chair of the Agri-Food Innovation Forum, said there is a growing global market for nutraceutical products and good product ideas are coming from young minds.

The recent Agri-Innovation Forum, hosted in Toronto by a few Guelph-based organizations like MaRS Landing and Ontario Agri-Food Technologies who are dedicated to building linkages between agriculture and other sectors such as health, highlighted some of these developments.

Manufacturers of human IVD technologies have been contributing their skills and knowledge more and more to the nonclinical and agricultural diagnostic markets.

To learn more about why IVD manufacturers are making the switch from human diagnostics and testing to agricultural and other nonclinical diagnostics, IVD Technology editor Richard Park spoke with Rocky Ganske, president and CEO of Axela Inc. (Toronto)

Our technology allows us to work directly in a variety of sample types that are difficult for other technologies to detect pathogens in without some additional sample preparation. So that led to people who were doing BSE (mad cow)–type testing asking if we could do tests for protein directly in matrices like milk or brain homogenate, and people asking for testing in plant extracts and things like that because other technologies don’t have that capacity.

It is clear humans will live much longer in the future, Worzel says. And innovative agricultural products, like those being developed by University of Guelph research scientists, will play a vital role in maintaining the health of this future population of senior citizens.

Worzel was a keynote speaker at last week's Agri-Food Innovation Forum in Toronto, which brought leading scientists, medical professionals, government and industry officials together to explore the future of so-called functional foods and nutraceuticals -- foods or food extracts that have physiological benefits or reduce the risk of chronic disease.

Guelph scientists are among the world leaders in the field, with a host of University of Guelph researchers advancing the science, and a number of local enterprises -- Soy 20/20, BioEnterprise, Ontario Agri-Food Technologies, and MaRS Landing -- working to commercialize that science.

How do we create the climate for innovation that will lead to new industries and jobs based on new goods and services we can sell the rest of the world?

We are not just calling for more creative class jobs, but for increasing the creativity content of all jobs - service as well as manufacturing and agriculture too

3Ts of economic development. Technology is the first T

commercialize our vast services potential

in university social sciences, humanities, art and design

Strengthen our areas of traditional comparative advantage: agriculture, forestry, mining, mineral processing, energy production

What is this creative economy? It is an economic system that relies most on ideas to serve as its major capital, instead of services or physical capital. Take Google for example. In an economy based on ideas, the potentialfor breakaway successes like Google is far greater.

According to Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class: And How it’s Transforming Work, Leisure,Community and Everyday Life, members of the creative class are very different from those who are employed in the manufacturing, service or agriculture industries. They contribute to our economy primarily by producing the new forms and ideas exploited by our various industries and decision-makers.   What Florida terms the “super creative core” of this new class includes “scientists and engineers, university professors, poets and novelists, artists, entertainers, actors, designersand architects, as well as the ‘thought leadership’ of modern society: non-fiction writers, editors, cultural figures, think-tank researchers, analysts and other opinion-makers.”

What sets a creative city apart from a non-creative city? Florida proposes that it is the “three Ts of economic development”: technology, talent and tolerance.