Group items tagged

Canada has always had to fight hard to attract talent and investment

MaRS Vital to Toronto's life sciences vision is MaRS (derived from Medical and Related Sciences) a non-profit organisation and business centre located in the heart of the city. Its core function is as a biotech incubator and business park, known as MaRS Discovery District. The venture was first established in 2000 to help foster and accelerate the growth of successful Canadian businesses and, after some uncertain times, it is now gathering momentum. A separate technology transfer office, MaRS Innovation, has also been established that, it is hoped, can be a world beater in its own right (see Turning good ideas into world beaters below). The location of the MaRS building in central Toronto is important, as it is just a stone's throw away from an existing cluster of universities and academic hospitals. MaRS has many links with other research-based organisations, including collaborations with three local universities, 10 academic teaching hospitals and the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research. MaRS occupies the Old Toronto general hospital, where insulin was first discovered by Best and Banting in 1921 and then developed for use in human trials. The 21st Century organisation can build on this heritage in patient-focused discovery and development. Formerly the head of venture capital firm Primaxis, Ilse Treurnicht is chief executive of MaRS Discovery District. She acknowledges the crisis in venture capital funding, and says Canada's sector has always had less access funds through this route than other countries. This is one of the drivers behind the search for a new approach. Treurnicht says the old models of building biotech and life sciences businesses have to be discarded, as they have failed to build companies with critical mass. She says MaRS' new 'Convergence Innovation' strategy of bringing science, capital and business together will pay off.

"We call our strategy 'Convergence Innovation' and what we are trying to do is move away from the old linear model of academics struggling in their spare time to build companies or entrepreneurs doing this in a very incremental way."It takes time and it has many risk points along the way. So using this Convergence centre model to create a much more dynamic organisation which can help accelerate good ideas towards the commercialisation." But she says Canada's geography and demographics are always going to be a challenge. "This is a very large country with a small population. If you think in terms of clusters and hub regions, Canada's business hubs are separated geographically, and there is not much in between in terms of people."That means we can't try to be a little United States, because we just won't show up on the radar. We have to take a different approach. We have to think about collaboration as our potential competitive advantage - that means using networks and associations to solve problems and build businesses."So as new opportunities emerge, we can take them to market faster and hopefully with a higher success rate." The centre currently accommodates numerous start up companies, as well as those providing legal and financial services to them. AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline also have offices on site. In all, MaRS provides mentoring for over 200 different companies across Ontario, and runs courses on entrepreneurship and preparing products for market.

Studio Earth. The youth workshop hosted by Social Innovation Generation -- a working group at the University of Waterloo -- is designed for young people interested in environmental issues.

Cullis-Suzuki said she's looking forward to speaking about social innovation. Innovators are badly needed to build a sustainable economy, she said.

The social technology workshop will be on using the internet for social purposes. It will be led by Joseph Dee of the MaRS Centre, a Toronto centre for scientific research, and Sam Ladner, a York University sociologist.

I attended the Wisdom Exchange today at the Mars Discovery District in Toronto, an annual gathering of leading growth firms sponsored by the Ontario government. Ontario’s ministry of small business recognizes that a tiny minority of SMEs, the export-oriented gazelles, account for a disproportionate share of job creation, and it does a great job of encouraging, motivating and supporting the CEOs of such companies through educational opportunities such as the Wisdom Exchange.

Jayson Myers, the respected economist who now heads up Canada's largest industry association, Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters.

Myers offered a fair bit of bad news to the group – he warned that the recession “will be deeper and last longer than consensus forecasts,” and that total Canadian merchandise exports have actually been falling for six years.