More money for clients
Receptor Therapeutics Inc. – a MaRS client and tenant – has raised $500,000 from the OICR’s IPDC Program via its OncoTek Drug Delivery Inc. subsidiary.
The funds will be used to drive the preclinical development of the company’s PoLi-PTX technology – a drug delivery system for intraperitoneal ovarian cancer. PoLi-PTX is intended to permit effective localized cancer therapy without the associated side-effects of traditional chemotherapy.
Read the news release here (PDF).
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Spark some innovation
Recently I attended an informal discussion with David Bornstein (author of How To Change The World), after also having listened to him present the night before at the ASHOKA Induction ceremony held at MaRS. In David’s discussion, I was struck by the relationship between his mantra of storytelling as an effective way of promoting and inspiring social change, and the book, Exploiting Chaos: 150 Ways to Spark Innovation during Times of Change,
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Last week, the province announced the first approved contracts under the Green Energy Act’s (GEA) feed-in-tariff (FIT). More than 500 mostly small, mostly solar projects were approved in this first round, with many more (and many larger) projects expected to follow in early April. While this first wave of projects, coming less than a year after the GEA was passed into law, has total potential generating capacity of 112MW, the surprise headline-grabber was a major grocery store chain. (See The Star, The Globe, The Sun, The Ottawa Business Journal.)
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Which comes first for a startup: marketing, advertising, or branding?
If you didn’t answer branding, read on.
Branding is an often misunderstood concept and, being misunderstood, the value it can bring to a company when it’s done right can be overlooked. Your brand is more than your logo or your name, more than the product or service you sell. It’s the promise or personality of your company and the value of the products or services you sell as viewed by your customers. It what clearly distinguishes you from your competition in the minds of your customers.
Don't drink the Kool-Aid
Last week’s CIBC Presents Entrepreneurship 101 featured a funny, often brutally honest panel of VCs discussing how entrepreneurs can get money from VCs. Peter Tolnai (Founder and President of the Orchard Capital Group) moderated a panel with two entrepreneurs-turned-VCs including Bryan Kerdman (Partner at EdgeStone Capital Partners) and Rick Segal (who was formerly a VC with JL Albright and the BlackBerry Partners Fund but has since returned to being an entrepreneur with his start-up Fixmo). I loved hearing from those who have lived both sides of the VC-entrepreneur coin.
