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Ryan Merkley, a senior adviser to Mayor David Miller, was working an easel in the basement of the MaRS building at College and University. Attendees of an un-conference called ChangeCamp — a collection of programmers, activists, politicians and media types — were shouting out suggestions for what municipal information they'd like to see the city put online.

W. Geoffrey Beattie – Deputy Chairman & President, Woodbridge Company Limited, Thomson Reuters Corporation, Toronto Christopher C. Capelli – Vice President, Technology Based Ventures, Office of Technology Commercialization, University of Texas, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX Ron Close – Information technology entrepreneur, Entrepreneur-in-Residence, MaRS, and Executive Entrepreneur-in-Residence, The Richard Ivey School of Business, The University of Western Ontario, London, ON Nicholas Darby – Formerly Director of Physical Sciences, Corporate Venture Capital, Dow Chemical Company, President, Darby & Associates Consulting LLC, Midland, MI  Mary Jo Haddad – President & CEO, The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto Jacqueline H.R. Le Saux – Former General Counsel, North America and Corporate Secretary, Patheon, Inc., Toronto David A. Leslie - Chair, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, and Former Chairman & CEO, Ernst & Young, Toronto Michael H. May – President & CEO, Rimon Therapeutics, Toronto Chandra J. Panchal – Founder, President & CEO, Axcelon Biopolymers Corp., Dollard-des-Ormeaux, QC Ilse Treurnicht – CEO, MaRS Discovery District, Toronto Donald A. Wright – President & CEO, The Winnington Capital Group Inc., Toronto

MaRS Innovation serves as a business accelerator platform with a single point of entry for industry partners and investors.  It will increase the scale, scope and viability of IP offerings, and the quantity and quality of deal flow from partner institutions.  MaRS Innovation will also facilitate strategic research collaborations with industry partners, strengthen the innovation capacity of Canadian industry through adoption of new technologies from its member institutions, and launch a new generation of robust, high-growth Canadian companies that will become global market leaders.   The quality of the combined discovery pipeline will catalyze and attract sources of risk capital for translational research, market validation, company formation and growth.  “MaRS Innovation represents a unique and timely platform to contribute in a meaningful way to Canada’s knowledge economy, leveraging Toronto’s remarkable research excellence.  The vision and serious commitment of its members to work together to transform our commercialization results, and the support of the Federal Government, made this possible.  The announcement of this outstanding group of leaders to the Board of Directors for MaRS Innovation is an exciting step forward,” said Ilse Treurnicht, MaRS CEO and interim Managing Director of MaRS Innovation.

We’re very excited to be working closer with the MobileMonday community,” said MaRS CEO Ilse Treurnicht. “As MobileMonday Toronto moves to MaRS, it helps us connect with additional intellectual capital in one of the most significant high-growth sectors of the new economy.”

The Premier’s Catalyst Awards help build a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship in Ontario by recognizing excellence and leadership in innovation. The Premier’s Discovery Awards celebrates the research excellence of Ontario’s most accomplished researchers. The third category, the Premier’s Summit Award is administered by MaRS.

But this year the money has stopped flowing after investment losses reached $1.5-billion for 2008 and the university was forced to cancel a planned $62-million endowment payout, representing about 5 per cent of its operating budget.

Canada's most innovative investment funds is in question by the university that is bearing the brunt of its losses.

Settling into a boardroom chair in the restored heritage building of Toronto's MaRS research centre, Mr. Moriarty remains unshaken by the crisis. He stands committed to UTAM's sophisticated investing approach, reciting phrases like "portable alpha" and "risk budgets" to explain portfolio decisions.

"To make failure a learning experience, first you have to celebrate it by acknowledging in a very positive way, the person who tried something and failed. You can't hide it under a table," says Plant. "You've got to develop a system that both rewards for the attempt as well as the success. Frequently, we don't do that and that sends a bad message. The act of punishing people makes them want to stop innovating."

We also need to build more accountability into failure, according to Plant who says that when failures are detrimental to the economy, we can't pretend that nothing happened. "Right now, some people are being rewarded for absolutely hideous failures, such as in the banking system," says Plant, who is also a Chartered Management Accountant. "Part of the problem is accounting which does a very poor job of measuring risk. Never leave anything up to the accountants!"

"You have to allow people to fail in this economy," says Plant. "It's failure that leads to productivity gain and innovation."

According to Plant, there's a different risk tolerance in smaller companies versus big ones, although he doesn't see a real difference by industry. Whether a company tolerates or accepts risk depends largely on the nature of the company. "The more established companies probably don't tolerate failure as well so they don't actually incubate a culture of risk," says Plant. "Larger companies do a lot of things to make sure they don't fail. Smaller ones tend to favour risk because it's the only way they can get ahead. And if you're doing things that haven't been done before, then you're going to fail again and again."

"You need a culture that allows failure for success because without it, people become anti-failure," says Charles Plant. "Trying different things is the act of innovation. If you fail 14 times, hopefully you're going to succeed on the 15th try. Without failure, we're not going to be driving and growing the economy."

Innovation is the result of taking big leaps,

Innovation is the result of taking big leaps, but failure is often the downside of taking those leaps.