MaRS

Interesting research on the difference between twitter and other online social media. Men and women act differently here. Bottom line: (online) relationships are complicated!?

Tomorrow, MaRS hosts our 2nd extended citizenship ceremony. Sixty New Canadians along with their family and friends will take their oath right here in the MaRS Auditorium. Interesting to hear from one of our own community, Dr. Rosalind Silverman, a postdoctoral fellow with TGH and UofT Medicine, who won first-ever Top 25 Canadian Immigrants awards. Read her (and her sister, a a postdoc at UofT Medicine) story. This is why MaRS is involved in stuff like this: culturally diverse cities are also the most innovative (or so says Richard Florida). If we want to excel in the knowledge economy, we should all celebrate our cultural diversity!

The groundswell of geothermal interest among builders, developers and individual homeowners all over the GTA is mainly because it's what "green" venture capitalist and MaRS Advisor Tom Rand calls "low hanging fruit" on the energy tree - easy to pluck and very cheap in the long run. Tom talks about the opportunities available to enterprising, innovative businesses.

BiomedExperts is a literature-based scientific social network. It brings the right researchers together and allows them to collaborate online. Collexis and Dell provide the BiomedExperts network of +1.5 Million pre-calculated profiles free of charge to researchers worldwide. There are maps of which scientists have worked with whom as well as a listing of their papers.

Canada ranks #1 in global access to capital index from Milken Institute, apparently thanks to our stable equity market and sound economic policy framework. That means entrepreneurs here have more support than elsewhere in the world. And we're STILL complaining about lack of start-up money? Think about how hard it must be to be everyone else.

Stanford Social Innovation Review

Shares insights and practical experiences that will help those who do the important work of improving society do it even better. Strategies, tools, ideas for non-profits, foundations, socially responsible businesses.

A former MaRS tenant is now at an innovation lab in Seoul, Korea. He wrote to us and said that "Being around the great minds [at MaRS] while my poorly planned and funded venture fizzled was a great education for me." He's working on this, a site for bloggers to do interviews online in video.  The meetings are recorded, and the blogger can embed the meeting into a website instantly.

The Economist shows how different entrepreneurs around the world are creating businesses with the goal of improving the world, while still making money: social entreprenuership

Canadian (Montreal) start-up! Web based software that helps you schedule meetings with people on different calendaring systems.

MaRS Client, Axela, talks about moving from human protein testing into the agricultural markets -- the challenges and the opportunities.

RenegadeCEOs.com - all for youth entrepreneurs (under the age of 19). Complete with cool, down-to-earth words, videos, blogs, communities (invite-only, for the top-quality entrepreneurs!?) and other goodies. Love that this is for youth, but has GREAT stuff for ALL entrepreneurs and I love the no-BS straight talk.

The Martin Prosperity institute believes that an innovation strategy has to be tied to creativity and place and the ecosystem ("city"). Here they critique a blog by David Crane which critiques the recent MPI report.

Women in technology a list of bloggers.

Blog on biofuels

The Top 50 Social Entrepreneur Blogs To Watch In 2009 from Evan Carmichael. Includes Treehugger and Gristmill in the "News" section as well as the School for Social Entrepreneurship in the "Organization" section.

Discussing the Creation of Revenue Streams from Innovation and Technology - the unofficial blog of GrowthRoute Ventures, the independent consulting company founded by Greg Boutin to serve innovation-based ventures. Includes info on entrepreneurship, government programs, commercialization and funding for ventures.

Canadian Biotechnology

New Biology Ventures is a life-sciences focused venture capital incubator. They invest in early stage opportunities through the creation and maturation of start-up companies that focus on the development and commercialization of therapeutic biopharmaceuticals. They change the economics of drug development through their unique combination of expertise in finance and structuring companies along with the capability to efficiently and effectively commercialize drugs.

Richard Florida, urban theorist and lead of the Martin Prosperity Institute housed at MaRS, wrote an article for The Atlantic and this his interview follow-up (web exclusive). He says that it's always been the economic upheavals that have caused the most innovation. Stop artificially supporting dead industries and let the innovative ones organically replace them.

Newcomer Magazine writes about MaRS as a business incubator -- a place for newcomers to make connections, find a job, or start a business. They highlight tenants Kanata Chemical Technologies, AXS Biomedical Animations Studio and Clera Inc.