Usha Srinivasan, Director of Market Intelligence

Moderator James Sbrolla said it best: It figures that a panel of three brilliant women would be participating in a session on market intelligence. Last month’s “Growing Your Business” session hosted by the RIC Centre and OCETA saw Usha Srinivasan, Director of Market Intelligence at MaRS, Christine Konig of Konig & Consultants and Isabel Alexander, founder of Phancorp Inc., discuss the topic of “Using Market Intelligence as your Strategic Weapon”.

These days, entrepreneurs are trying harder than ever to stay on top of their markets. In order to do so, they must do all they can to fully understand the market – including the roles that both their customers and competitors play there. This is where market intelligence comes in.

Srinivasan, Konig and Alexander all stressed the importance of knowing your customer, knowing their pain, figuring out how you will solve their pain and communicating a clear value proposition to them. But market intelligence doesn’t stop with your customers. It is crucial to stay on top of what your competitors are doing, keep up with new and dynamic market trends, and create an innovative and effective business model.

Although this seems like a lot to do, knowing the marketplace that you plan to do business in is a vital part of growing your business. Fortunately, there are numerous resources available to help you. Check out MaRS Discovery District’s Market Intelligence program and for more information, you can download the presentations from the event.

“Growing Your Business” is the RIC Centre’s educational series of monthly breakfast sessions that cover a variety of topics relevant to entrepreneurs and small business owners. Join us on January 20th when we focus on Raising Cash from Angels and VCs.

Networking: The roots of your resilient business

Is our success in business as dependent on networking as we think? The answer is “yes”.

That seemed to be the general consensus at the CIBC Presents Entrepreneurship 101 session on December 17th. An interesting aspect to this is: if you polled 100 people 15 years ago and asked them what had made them successful in their chosen career, perhaps 1-5 people might have said being a part of “the old boy’s network” or meeting the right people at the right time. They would not have said that networking is a strategy — a learned skill that is essential to growing your business or getting a job.

Another interesting “historicism” that came out of the session discussion was the renewed emphasis on resilience as a factor for success in times of economic crisis. In bad times, the need to be both resilient and downright dogged is raised exponentially.

A side bar to the discussion was the interview process and the complexity which now often accompanies it. Personality tests, five to eight interviews with different people, multiple interviews with the key decision maker for the hiring – all these are now in common practice. Some companies are also using a new technique of staging multiple mini interviews with groups of candidates – these interviews test the all-important “softer” skills.

Technology, too, is changing the interview landscape; some companies are now using “Second Life” as an interviewing tool. The candidate picks an avatar and is then interviewed by the company avatar. How does one know how to ace this kind of scenario? This might become another important skill for the job seeker or the entrepreneur seeking partnerships with other companies.

Downloads and resources

Weren’t able to attend the class? Need some notes or want to look something up? Click below for all of the goodies from the lecture. Watch the video and the slide presentation below.

• Class Summary: Managing Your Career: The art of selling yourself
• Video: “Managing Your Career”
• Slideshare presentation: “Managing Your Career“
• Join the Facebook Group: CIBC Presents Entrepreneurship 101
• Register to get the weekly email updates

Winning team at BioCamp 2009

Sixty 25- to 35-year-olds from all over the world traveled to Cambridge, MA, to learn, debate and network with leading biotechnology executives. In my wildest dreams, I never would have thought that I’d be attending camp again at this ripe old age… but that’s exactly what I did. On October 26-30, I participated in the Novartis International Biotechnology Leadership Camp—or , as we participants affectionately called it, “BioCamp”.

BioCamp participants were postgraduate students from 27 countries, only three of whom were selected from Canada. Just getting into BioCamp was a challenge in itself: over 3,000 students applied! Most of the participants at this event had competed at a BioCamp in their home country, then been hand-picked by event organizers to participate in the International BioCamp (for example, the European BioCamp).
BioCamp was an experience like no other. For five full days, participants spent every waking minute with each other. We ate, learned and worked with each other every day (and night☺). We met and schmoozed with some of the world’s finest leaders in biotech, including Dr. Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute and appointed co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, Harvard stem cell expert Dr. George Daley, Novartis Venture Funds managing director Dr. Campbell Murray and founder and principal of Longitude Capital, Dr. David Hirsch, among others. We also heard from experts in intellectual property (IP), venture capital (VC), regulatory affairs, science and human resources. BioCamp was an exceptional event that allowed me to network with the biotech community on a global scale and learn “tricks of the trade” from seasoned professionals (agenda PDF).

MaRS is relevant, so take advantage!
These days, I spend a lot of my time at MaRS. Having enrolled in CIBC Presents Entrepreneurship 101, I felt ahead of the game when it came to BioCamp’s discussions focusing on VC, IP and the like. Having access to world-renowned expertise at MaRS can sometimes make all of us Ontarians (actually, I am a Winnipegger—bring back the Jets!) take for granted how fortunate we are, but it’s important to remember that MaRS really is a first-class and all-encompassing hub for Canada’s future in biotechnology.

The business plan competition: MyCells Therapeutics and the iGEN technology
One of our tasks at BioCamp was to apply what we learned throughout the event to a business plan competition. We were challenged to come up with an innovative idea and pitch it to venture capitalists, scientists and Novartis executives. We had 15 minutes to pitch the idea, then five minutes to answer grueling questions from the panel.

My team, MyCells Therapeutics, sought to obtain VC financing to complete phase III clinical trials of iGEN, our stem cell therapeutic platform, to treat sickle cell disease under the orphan drug status, with future applications to all blood-borne genetic diseases. The team was composed of science, business and medical students from China, South Africa, Mexico, Thailand, the US, and of course, Canada.

Teamwork, teamwork, teamwork…
MyCells Therapeutics’ biggest asset was, in my opinion, the diversity of our team. We each came to the competition from different backgrounds, but we worked hard to capitalize on each person’s strengths and skill sets. This was one of the most valuable lessons I learned at BioCamp: the team you surround yourself with is key to success. If you’re going to convince a panel of experts that your team is the right team, you’d better have great group dynamics. After all, VCs receive several hundred requests each month, so you have to show how your team differs from everyone else’s. If you can communicate this, you will distinguish your team from all others.

I acted as CEO of MyCells Therapeutics and as such, most of the presentation fell on my shoulders. I was amazed by the amount of pressure put upon me as CEO, when this really was a team effort. During my presentation, I tried to connect with the audience right from the beginning. After spending an entire week at BioCamp and getting to know each person who was watching my pitch, I tried to reflect upon what I’d learned from them and how I could use this in my presentation. I wanted to woo them from the get go – indeed, this approached worked and our team captured first prize!

What I learned about the biotechnology industry:

• Innovation is key. VCs are looking to fund big ideas with practical applications.
• Your team is very important. The VCs themselves said that they would rather have a great team and a mediocre product than a mediocre team and a great product.
• Intellectual property is a prerequisite to obtain VC financing. VC firms won’t want to talk with you until you’ve at least filed for a patent.
• Developing an effective business plan is a given. Without it, nobody will take you seriously.
• Think big and network! In today’s hyper-competitive world, big ideas must be complemented with a network of colleagues throughout the world – local contacts alone won’t cut it.

Thanks to everyone who attended my session last Wednesday. I tried to provide practical advice for entrepreneurs launching or participating in social enterprises. I talked about the space and my top 10 lessons learned. If you haven’t seen the lecture you can view it here.

I believe we had around 70 people in attendance – which speaks to the momentum building in the social enterprise sector. And it seemed like my messages resonated – the number of questions after the presentation and offers of people volunteering (for Better The World) were overwhelming.

I would like to comment on a few questions that were brought up repeatedly.

1. How do I choose between a for-profit and not-for-profit model?
   If you Google “for-profit versus not-for-profit” you’ll find ample material in support of your decision.  It comes down to a basic philosophy: are you operating to make money and do good or just do good and not make money?  If you need profit to drive innovation and investment in your firm, then you probably fit a for-profit model.  I am not an expert in this field, but you should carefully consider the environment when making this decision.  There are 181K NFP’s in Canada – all drawing the same funds. Is there room for you?
2. What tools and technology did you use to get started?
   We all purchased laptops (Macs), a projector, we use Basecamp (37 Signals) for project management, YouSendIt for big files, Entourage/Exchange for email and Evernote for note taking.  Many of our colleagues have moved everything over to Google and use the Google email, calendar and document sharing services.  For remote presentations we use WebEx – but be careful, the long distance service is very expensive, so it’s best to get an 888 number if you can.
3. How do you manage volunteers?
   We make sure we understand the needs of the organization first and then we try to match volunteers to those needs.  Free help is only good if it adds value to your organization, otherwise it can take a lot of effort to manage people who aren’t getting you closer to your goals.
4. What inspires you to keep going in the face of adversity?
   I think if you ask most entrepreneurs the answer would be similar:
   • A passion for the mission, perseverance toward success
   • Resilience to obstacles (and the ability to overcome them)
   • The feeling of purpose, luck and doing something for future generations.

So to everyone out there who’s jumping in and will become one of Canada’s future social entrepreneurs – good luck and be sure to give back to your fellow entrepreneurs by openly offering your experience and wisdom.

- Steve.

Downloads and resources

Weren’t able to attend the class? Need some notes or want to look something up? Click below for all of the goodies from the lecture. Watch the video and the slide presentation below.

• Class summary: Lived It Lecture – Better the World
• Video: “Lived It Lecture: Steve Croth and Better the World”
• Slideshare presentation: “Steve Croth: Lived It Lecture“
• Join the Facebook Group: CIBC Presents Entrepreneurship 101
• Register to get the weekly email updates

CIBC presents Entrepreneurship 101 2009/10 – Week 8 – Lived it Lecture – Better the World from MaRS Discovery District on Vimeo.

What happens when you bring a room full of successful, dynamic and passionate women together to talk about innovation? They discuss how the workplace has changed in the last 40 years, why women are still dealing with a gender divide at work, and how the future of innovation in science, technology and the arts requires women.

Women Piloting Innovation, a panel discussion held at MaRS in partnership with Nightwood Theatre last week, set out to find out how we can build an innovation economy that harnesses the capacity and creative energy of women.

The five panelists agreed that women do bring something different to the workplace – whether it’s weaving ideas together or navigating assumptions, women have a particular set of skills that allow them to see things differently than men. These skills are crucial to the future of innovation, especially as women continue to spark new ideas.

What do women do differently when it comes to innovation? Here’s what panelists had to say:

• Jo Coombe, VP of strategic accounts at Bullfrog Power, believes that women have a unique ability to create new business models based on new ways of thinking. “Women entrepreneurs are able to do [this] because we have to navigate around the invisible assumptions that are still in place in the workplace. We’re not even aware that these assumptions are constraining innovation,” she says.

• “Women are very, very practical,” says Kerri Golden, entrepreneur and investor, “and able to connect the dots—women can say, ‘what I learned over here can be applied there.’”

• Lib Gibson, former CEO of Bell Globemedia Interactive, says, “Women should be involved in innovation because the future will require skills of discovery.” Women have the discovery skills that allow them to fuel collaboration, and collaboration leads to innovation. “Innovation happens at the intersection of disciplines,” says Gibson.

• Megan Mitchell, former director of leadership development and innovation at Johnson & Johnson, believes that women make time to do more things. By doing more, women are exposed to more and make more connections.

• Women don’t divide business and personal like men, says Rona Maynard, former editor of Chatelaine. “What women learn at home, with our families, affects how we operate in the workplace,” she says.

Women have come a long way since Maynard entered the workforce in the 1970s – she recalls the advice she was given: “Buy a navy blue suit and a blouse with kitty cat bow. Learn to talk about sports, even if you don’t like sports.” – but women still face challenges in entrepreneurship and innovation.

In particular, women are underrepresented in the capital markets. “Men want to know where the money is and where it’s going,” says Golden. At a recent venture capital conference, Golden was one of 20 women in a group of 400 VCs. “There was no line-up for the women’s washroom. But then I realized that all the deals were happening in the men’s room,” she said. On this observation, Gibson chimed in, “I’ve often said that there’s no such thing as the glass ceiling. Just the urinal wall.”

So what can women do to break through this divide and continue the work that these, and other women, have done so far? Panelists offered the following advice to young women who are interested in fueling innovation:

• Determine how you can bring your whole self, and the best of yourself, to work every day.
• Remain optimistic about your abilities to advance your career.
• Set high expectations for yourself.
• Don’t fall into the trap of pulling heroics; don’t burn yourself out.
• Stay connected to your passions – they will be your source of inspiration.
• Remember that leaders are judged on the contributions of their team.
• Support others.

This advice is relevant to anyone who is interested in fueling innovation, not just women. To succeed, as any person in any field, one needs to be innovative and support innovation in others.

What other advice can you share with budding young innovators?

To learn more about Nightwood Theatre, Canada’s oldest professional women’s theatre company, visit www.nightwoodtheatre.net.

Get the blow-by-blow report on this event on Twitter from Geraldine Cahill and Allyson Hewitt.

What's happening in the Valley?

Last year I was a Biodesign Fellow at Stanford University. I wrote, every six weeks, about the latest portion of the fellowship. I posted on my experience with innovation from the hospital room through PubMed research, through white board brainstorms and engineering design, into prototyping, market research, and back to design. Now I am posting something else; I am repositioning, if you will, to provide answers to what you most want to hear about, from the Valley.

The fellowship I undertook gave me an incredible experience and a phenomenal network. And, what seems to separate this place from others is, in part, more capital, but in a large part, more experience. As a window into this world, I would love to hear your questions and then provide answers, from the best and the brightest people here in the Valley. So, if you are an innovator in medicine or engineering, or any other field where device expertise could be valuable, please email away (joelleabra@gmail.com) or post comments here and I will post answers to them.

A few that I have answered for myself recently are: do incubators work? What is this economy looking like here and how will that affect the future? Will the FDA every be friendly again? Does Canada have a chance at competitive innovation and what separates it from the Valley? What are innovative marketing strategies? What is the value of a business person in the early stages of a company? How can you structure a start-up for success? How should partners “try before they buy”? What is critical for the startup team to know? What can we learn from pharma companies and corporate social responsibility? … the questions are endless, so if you send yours, I will start there.

I look forward to providing the insight and connections that I can from this part of the world.

Find out what happened and where we're headed

The recently-concluded Social Capital Markets conference (SoCap09) in San Francisco clearly illustrated the tremendous interest we’re seeing internationally around how “money and meaning” can come together. This year, we had a large Canadian contingent present that collaborated around a pre-conference “Canadian Day”, at which we strengthened links between practitioners across the country, as well as defined policy outcomes and objectives we’d like to see in the near future.

SoCap brought out a number of key themes and questions that are relevant to Canada:

The Role of Government

Over the last few months and in the lead-up to the conference, Sonal Shah’s keynote was eagerly anticipated. For many of us engaged in this space, the move to create an Office of Social Innovation was just another sign of why – despite the financial crisis and subsequent fallout – we can find hope from the Obama administration. Expectations are high, perhaps unrealistically so, especially when we realized that the huge task of moving the social innovation agenda forward was to be implemented by a team of four!

Despite this, Sonal’s keynote indicated that there is much already being done, even as there remains much more to do. Several times, she noted that government can’t solve problems by itself – it is imperative that it partner with citizens, corporations, nonprofits and others to address social issues. This role of government as an enabler must be defined by key principles:

• a defined and limited government role that does not duplicate efforts or replace existing good work
• acting to fill gaps and build bridges
• remaining flexible in the way it formulates and implements policy tools.

What is the role of government in Canada? At the federal level, there is not yet, I believe, a clear sense of how to engage – which is disappointing. At the provincial level, however, we’re seeing some real movement. Quebec is the first place that comes to mind, though “Canadian Day” illustrated the number of initiatives taking place in British Columbia. Ontario is also up there and other provinces to a lesser extent (Nova Scotia and Manitoba). Despite gaps in representation across the country, provincial and municipal government may continue to be the driver of progress in building the social capital marketplace at the present time.

The Importance of Metrics

Metrics was a word that came up often, and the Metasizing Metrics session in particular was eagerly anticipated – and delivered! Whether we’re describing metrics from the investor perspective (choosing alternative investment opportunities, for example) or the entrepreneur’s perspective (successfully articulating impact to your key constituents, as another example), we need to quickly find ways to develop a shared understanding of what we are measuring, why, and how we propose to do so.

How can existing impact initiatives be aligned? On the international level, IRIS, Pulse, and GIIN are attempting to develop and implement standards. We must recognize that these will likely become influential, and represent opportunities for Canadian institutions to develop and refine them. On the other hand, existing Canadian initiatives such as the Demonstrating Value Initiative and the RISQ framework from Quebec have much merit and have been field-tested on specific regional organizations. Where we need more effort is around a deliberate attempt to align standards, avoid duplication of data collection and actually use the data we’re already collecting meaningfully.

Facilitating Collaboration

There was much talk about the importance of collaboration, as well as amazing examples from several panel sessions. Despite all the optimism, a number of key questions remain. What, really, is true collaboration and what are the parameters that ensure that collaboration works for each party? We all know it is important, but when the rubber hits the road, will this collaboration be of the kind that will actually build a marketplace? Or will there be incentives for the marketplace to remain fragmented as each organization seeks to narrowly satisfy its own interests or that of its constituents?

I am hopeful that, as we begin to build an ecosystem, we will build the right incentives to satisfy the needs of the various actors. This won’t be easy and will involve trial and error. However, I believe that there is an increasing appetite for innovative approaches that recognize and reward collaboration.

Growth of Impact Investing

We know that impact investing is on the rise – both in terms of interest, as well as actual numbers and deal flow. We know that the socially responsible investing (SRI) industry is also growing. What is unclear, however, is how these two worlds can begin to find more common ground and leverage the relative strengths of each other. For example, one of the themes from SoCap last year was around finance (supply) as a driver to build a social capital marketplace. This year, there was a similar message but a number of other factors were also emphasized:

• the need to build intermediaries and help them mature as the size of, and demand for, deals increases;
• the importance of building the absorptive capacity of social enterprises for different types of finance;
• building innovative financial structures such as “first loss capital” to engage investors with different risk/reward/impact expectations

As the SRI industry continues to grow, we must find ways to leverage the infrastructure and networks that are being built, as well as ensure that the social finance community is represented. In Canada, for example, we don’t tend to elevate community investment as a pillar of SRI in the way we do for screening and proxy voting. Foundations who may want to engage in mission-related investing face a dearth of opportunities that meet their legal and fiduciary responsibilities. However, many groups are actively examining options to bridge these worlds: the Social Investment Organization (SIO), Community Foundations of Canada, Shareholder Association for Research and Education (SHARE) and the Carleton Centre for Community Innovation.

Concluding Thoughts

There’s much more to say and there will be more on this after the SoCap debrief at MaRS. All in all, SoCap09 was every bit as exciting as we expected. So many more people to meet (800+ attended, up from 600 last year), with so many exciting sessions happening in parallel. It’s clear that SoCap is the premier conference for those interested in social finance, as the range of sessions and calibre of panelists demonstrates.  There’s a ton of information to sift through over the next few weeks and months and I expect many of the conversations from the conference will converge around various blogs, Twitter and the SoCap09 LinkedIn group as well as offline.

I’d emphasize that we need to “keep it real”. If we don’t truly listen to and address the needs of the social enterprises, nonprofits and entrepreneurs, then all the exciting conversations over the three days of the conference will amount to very little. There are many individuals and organizations that have to face hard realities around finding grants, the right legal structures, appropriate service providers and much more. Those conversations are not necessarily as “sexy” as the panel sessions at SoCap, but they are very important – and they will define where the social capital market will go today, tomorrow and next week. This is the world that we’re all returning to, and these are the issues we need to be inspired to tackle. SoCap’s given plenty of food for thought around where we need to go in the next five to 10 years, but we need to start building towards this vision today.

Read More

The blogosphere and Twitter continue to broadcast content from the conference, including excellent summaries of the plenary and panel sessions. Here’s a couple of notable posts:

• Social finance 101: Canada Day at SOCAP09 (Michael Shapcott from the Wellesley Institute)
• The Government and Social Entrepreneurship: What Works? (Nathaniel Whittemore from Change.org)
• Investing at the Intersection of Public Good & Market Discipline (Shital Shah at Nextbillion.net)
• Funding High Impact Ventures (Cindy Chen at Nextbillion.net)
• The Social Capital Spectrum (Susie Lee at Nextbillion.net)
• Metastasizing Metrics (Jake Samuelson at Nextbillion.net)
• Metastasizing Metrics: Panel summary from SoCap09 (Lucy Bernholtz at Philanthropy 2173)
• Making Money on Mobile in the Developing World (Abhay Nihalani at Nextbillion.net)
• Forecasting a Marketplace (Jake Samuelson at Nextbillion.net)
• A View from the Social Capital Markets Conference (Dan Crisafulli at the Skoll Foundation blog)
• Social Capital Markets Roundup (Lucy Bernholtz at Philanthropy 2173)
• After SoCap09: The Five Issues Holding Social Entrepreneurship Back (Nathaniel Whittemore from Change.org)

Doctors for innovation

Few physicians here in the Discovery District would disagree with the assessment that their involvement in the commercialization of health technologies remains sparse, if not non-existent. Most physicians are likely happy with this arrangement. They would argue that commercialization presents too many conflicts of interest, especially in light of recent reports of ghost-writing peer-reviewed articles by pharmaceutical companies and fraudulent research funded by medical device companies (see this article). Some would go as far as to suggest that physicians should not be involved at all in the medical innovation process.

However, as I recently argued in commentaries published in Nature and Science it is important to recognize why physician involvement that leads to the need to manage conflict of interest is so critical to advancing medical innovation.

Physician involvement can accelerate the development and uptake of high-impact technologies, especially for niche areas such as pediatric surgery or global health diagnostics that are typically neglected by the medical device industry. Stanford Medical School has a long history of such “physician-driven medical innovation” and, through its BioDesign innovation program, brings together graduate students from medicine, engineering and business to systematically generate novel biomedical innovations. The program has served not just as a training exercise for would-be innovators, but has generated about a dozen start-up companies that have treated over 10,000 patients. In 2008, Stanford University partnered with the Indian Institute of Medicine in Delhi to create a BioDesign India, which leverages the large number of Indian diaspora in the Silicon Valley area for growing the local Indian biomedical device industry. Stanford also has a textbook forthcoming in late 2009 on the BioDesign innovation method.

The process centres on deploying interdisciplinary teams of residents, engineers and entrepreneurs into clinical settings to identify needs, develop potential solutions to those needs and eventually prototype and create business plans, research strategies or project plans. A specialty is chosen outside the area of the residents’ expertise to avoid preconceptions of how to do things.

As one of Stanford’s eminent innovators, Thomas Fogarty, inventor of the embolectomy balloon catheter says: “Innovators tend to go out and ask doctors what they want, rather than observe what they need.” Who better to observe than physicians themselves? Philosophically, the programs are grounded in the idea that entrepreneurship can be taught and innovation itself is not the exclusive domain of rare talents or serendipity. In the last two years, several medical schools in the United States and abroad have begun to adopt such “physician-driven innovation” programs. Most notably, our neighbors at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, created a program in 2008. As a state university of comparable size, Michigan’s adoption shows that physician-driven innovation programs are likely not merely an artifact of $12 billion dollar endowment coupled with Silicon Valley.

In the next three years, almost $60 million in medical device-related or prototyping facilities at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, University Health Network and Toronto Rehabilitation Institute will be created. Combined with several proof-of-concept funds that have been launched by the Ontario government and other organizations, this creates a tremendous opportunity for Toronto to seize leadership in the biomedical device industry through the creation of a physician-driven innovation program. A physician-driven innovation program would serve as a unifying platform that through its “halo effect” of trained innovators and would infuse the Toronto region with new entrepreneurial activity in the biomedical device space, and bring attention to the industry.

With the upcoming creation of a Centre for Global Health Innovation at the Faculty of Engineering similar to MIT’s D-Lab and Northwestern’s CIGHT to train “global engineers” and existing world-class expertise for commercialization in low-resource settings at the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health (a MaRS tenant), Toronto could easily leverage these strengths for high-profile partnerships in emerging markets similar to BioDesign India. Imagine sending teams with students from the University of Toronto and University of Stellenbosch in South Africa along with frontline physicians at Medicins sans Frontieres to create new HIV/AIDS diagnostics. Over the past few months, high-level administrative talks have been underway, primarily led by Dr. Kieran Murphy, the Faculty of Medicine’s recently hired Director of Medical Imaging, formerly Director of Interventional Neuroradiology at John Hopkins University.

As these ideas develop, I encourage the local biomedical community here in Toronto to discuss and support these initiatives from the ground up. Physicians do, in fact, have a vital role to play in biomedical innovation. If we can harness their energies and influence here in Toronto, we could surely help to accelerate the commercialization process from lab to market, or the even loftier goal: from lab to village.

How the business of storytelling is changing

24. Star Wars. Harry Potter. Batman. All successful narrative worlds expanding across different media and platforms.

What do these new forms of storytelling, product and service design and branding tell us about future convergence of culture and technology?

These and other questions of importance to media innovators were addressed this week at an sLab Explorations workshop with Dr. Carlos Scolari on transmedia storytelling. It was the first in a two-part workshop.
Dr. Scolari presented the different concepts around the “transmedia storytelling” idea, such as cross-media, multiple platforms, hybrid media, intertextual commodity, transmedial worlds, transmedial interactions, intermedia, multimodality, and media convergence. The dictionary is open and we must learn how to read it. Meanwhile, the stories are blasting and expanding through different screens, surfaces and spaces.

Dr. Scolari’s powerpoint presentation is available on Slideshare at http://tinyurl.com/lr73bs or watch it below. Next week we present part two of this workshop where we invite you to expand a fictional text and reflect on the process of transmedia story telling. Even if you missed the first event, you’ll find the second of value.

If you’re interested in participating and would like the three stories that we’ll work with in our next session, you can email Dr. Scolari at carlos.scolari@gmail.com.

And mark your calendar for this second installation on Transmedia Storytelling, taking place Tuesday July 14, 3–5pm at the Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab), Ontario College of Art & Design (Room 600, 100 McCaul Street). If you can’t make this event there will be other “Exploration” workshops in this series, which will be announced and listed on the MaRS site.

If you read Spanish, you can also check out Dr. Scolari’s blog, “Narrativas transmediáticas en el sLab / OCAD.”

The social tech for social change week

Toronto is abuzz with innovators, social entrepreneurs, digital media developers and leading design thinkers, not to mention a swath of charitable organizations dedicated to social change.

Imagine if these communities were working together. It could be transformational.

Net Change is a week-long event, June 8-12, 2009, designed to explore how social technology can bolster social change. Presented by the Social Innovation Generation team at MaRS (SiG@MaRS), Net Change Week will tap into the potential that exists when new methods of communicating, organizing and mobilizing are brought to bear on chronic social issues.

Why cast a “net” over TO? Toronto is bubbling with activity in this space, but, not uncommonly, there is much overlap in both resources and audiences. Creating a “catch all” for disparate activity achieves a winning combination:

1. Clarity on program overlaps
2. Potential collaborations for program administrators
3. A single entry point for interested parties from all over North America, providing context and a continuum of learning, rather than disconnected one-off events.

Fellow capacity builder and Program Manager at the Centre for Social Innovation, Eli Malinski sounds off on Net Change: “Social technology is revolutionizing social change. At their most basic level, new technologies are enabling new forms of information sharing, movement coordination and citizen participation. But we’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible. Net Change is a critical part of our exploration into how we can better tap into the potential that exists at the intersection of social technology and social change.”

What does it look like? Net Change is the banner under which all sorts of partners are hosting events, discussions and workshops that align with the core mission of exploring the intersection of social change and new media.

Check out the calendar to choose from daytime programming such as:

• Social Tech Training, or My Charity Connects
• Innovation Parkour
• The Skills Exchange

And in the evenings, Net Change brings unique community collaborations like:

• Mobile Monday takes a social change perspective
• CanadaHelps.org teams with Tech Soup Canada for Toronto Net Tuesday
• Wired Wednesday gets a dose of Web of Change
• Refresh Events encourages collaborative partnerships

We believe that more people should feel empowered to connect. That more people should know how to tell their stories of doing good and changing the world. We believe in big shifts.

Mark your calendars and be part of the change!

Net Change’s ticketed and free events are taking place at the MaRS Centre.  For more information on events and how to be involved, check out www.netchangeweek.ca.

We’re looking for media junkies!  Want to cover Net Change events?  Contact info@netchangeweek.com.

Follow us on Twitter:
@netchange
#netchange