If you’ve ever dreamed of sharing the story of your commercialization success with YouTube viewers across Canada, this could be your chance: CATAAlliance wants to showcase successful commercialization stories on its CATAnet TV Channel.
Read More »
If you’ve ever dreamed of sharing the story of your commercialization success with YouTube viewers across Canada, this could be your chance: CATAAlliance wants to showcase successful commercialization stories on its CATAnet TV Channel.
Great companies need a team of dedicated individuals to make it fly. How will you inspire that teamwork? How will you persuade your team to follow your lead? My suggestion: sign up for the DiverseCity Leadership Program.
A few weeks ago I addressed the current group of DiverseCity Fellows on the issue of social impact metrics. They are part-way through their projects and they wanted to determine how best to evaluate their impact—they knew counting “bums in seats” just was not good enough. It was an incredible group: engaged, committed and keen to use their “lived experience” to make our communities better.
So what exactly is a DiverseCity Fellow and how can you—emerging leader that you are—become one?
No patent? No problem.
The results of a recent study challenge the standard notion that most businesses started by academics are based on patents (“Start-up model patently flawed” in Nature magazine, July 2010).
The study found that the majority of companies started by US academics are started without patents. This is contrary to the generally accepted wisdom about how entrepreneurship occurs in a university, which usually goes something like this: academics disclose their invention to universities, get it patented and then spin-out their company from the university. This is actually only part of the entrepreneurial picture in universities — and a smaller part of the picture at that.

The latest from MaRS clients
Want to know what’s going on with some of the most interesting start-ups in the province?
At MaRS, we work with hundreds of early-stage companies to help them grow their businesses. Sometimes, some of those companies do great things: they win awards, secure financing, enter into partnerships or get great media coverage. Entrepreneurs in Action is a regular round-up of our clients’ successes.
A new initiative has just moved into the building under the SiG@MaRS banner: the Social Venture Exchange (SVX), which hopes to drive good investments for a better world.
Over the next few years, we’ll develop and pilot an exchange that will assess and attract sustainable financing for ventures with a social mission, from enterprising non-profits to social purpose businesses. We want to drive financial capital towards improved social and environmental outcomes. In short, we are trying to attract more money to drive a more just society.