Share your story on camera.

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.

CATAAlliance is looking for companies that have successfully taken their products from a university into the marketplace—to inspire others on the journey of commercialization.

To submit your story, send a one-to-two page account of your voyage from the lab to life to CATA President, John Reid, at jreid@cata.ca with “commercialization” in the subject line.

For more details, visit CATA’s website at www.cata.ca.

Are you ready to lead this city to change?

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?

DiverseCity Fellows is part of DiverseCity: The Greater Toronto Leadership Project, an initiative of the Toronto City Summit Alliance and Maytree , funded in part by the Government of Ontario.

DiverseCity Fellows  is a one-year action-oriented leadership program for rising city-builders who are deeply committed to enhancing their leadership abilities and collectively addressing issues that are critical to the future health and wealth of the Toronto region.

As a Fellow, you will participate in interactive learning sessions, networking events and a mentoring relationship with an experienced city-builder.

Throughout the program, you will connect with influencers and decision-makers across the GTA and form teams to design and implement a city-building action project of your own.

So if you are “willing to push yourself to grow as a leader, eager to connect with experience city-builders and committed to making a positive change in our region,” then apply now to be a DiverseCity Fellow for 2011.  The connections you make will be invaluable. You will really be deeply empowered make a difference. And your new-found ability to lead, inspire and collaborate will be a valuable tool —one that will help you ensure that innovative entrepreneurship is alive and well in a diverse, forward-looking Toronto.

Deadline for submissions is October 8, 2010.

For more information visit: diversecitytoronto.ca/diversecity-fellow.

Do you ladies have a patent for that?

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.

Chart from Nature Magazine

The study looked at 11, 572 professors at institutions across the US.  Of the 1948 respondents who had started a business, two-thirds (1266) had done it without a patent.  Generally, these entrepreneurs started manufacturing, consulting and other service-based businesses. It’s not surprising that many consulting and service businesses were created since they do not require patents, nor that many of these businesses were started by social scientists.  What is surprising is that technical academics such as biomedical and physical scientists started more businesses without patents than with them.  (See graph.)

Universities are generally less involved in supporting companies without patents, for a number of reasons including the expectation that these companies will provide a lower financial return, or the view that they need less help than technology-based inventions need to get off the ground. Interestingly, the survey found that there was no discernible difference in financial returns between the businesses started with and without patents.   That’s great news for those starting businesses without patents.

On the other hand, the study also found that those who started businesses without patents were more likely to fail. This confirms the value of patents – they are clearly a business tool and useful for many businesses.  But getting a patent can be a long process and the technology could change again by the time you get it, so don’t let waiting for a patent or thinking you need one stop you from launching your business.  Even if something isn’t patentable, you can still commercialize it.

Indeed, if we count on just using the numbers of patents emanating from the universities as a measure of their overall innovation, we are underestimating the overall entrepreneurial efforts of academics.  We are also potentially overlooking ways to support the majority of entrepreneurs at universities who might not fit the profile of the traditional patent-based spin-offs which receive support through technology-transfer offices and formal intellectual property systems.  Professors with patents are only the tip of the iceberg of university innovation.

Giving a boost to life sciences in Ontario

We’ve got $7-million for Ontario life sciences firms.

Got your attention? Since joining the Investment Accelerator Fund (IAF) in July, the most common question I’ve had from my contacts in the venture capital and angel investing world is: “Is the IAF going to be making new investments?” The answer I want everyone to hear is: “Yes!”

And now we’re in an even better position to boost Ontario-based private life sciences companies with this newly-announced fund.

It’s been a little over a month since I joined the IAF as Managing Director and it’s great to be back in my old early-stage investing network. I was a member of the IAF investment committee and always viewed the program as very important to early-stage investing in Ontario. Since joining the fund team and the MaRS organization I have come to appreciate the whole ecosystem we’re part of called the ONE. I’ve seen first-hand the energy that the IAF, MaRS and regional innovation centres bring when they work with together with early-stage companies. We’ve accelerated the business of several of our portfolio companies and provided the IAF a strong portfolio of investee companies. It’s my objective to continue to build on that foundation.

Our goal at the IAF is to help Ontario-based information technology, cleantech and life sciences firms bridge the early-stage funding gap. The capital is used to achieve meaningful milestones including market validation and revenue traction in order to attract follow-on financing or even acquisition interest. To date the majority of the IAF’s 34 investee companies have attracted additional capital to continue their growth paths. We hope to continue working with VCs and angels to help grow these exciting companies.

The new $7-million life sciences fund is a welcome addition to our funding capabilities and confirms again that the IAF is open for business.

Program information and eligibility criteria are detailed here and here (or download PDF-formats of the IAF and IAF for life sciences). If your company fits the criteria, fill out an application and let’s start talking!

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.

Here’s what some of our clients have been up to:

• Distility released it’s first e-book. Brand Scammed! How to avoid buying the wrong branding solution tackles the challenges of choosing the best way to get the best brand.
• In late July, Geminare announced version 2.0 of its Cloud Storage Assurance and got some great press and analyst coverage: read more here, here and here.
• Geminare, Receptor Therapeutics and MedCurrent each received $500,000 in seed funding from the Investment Accelerator Fund.
• KIOSK Language Centre won an Information and Communication Technology Council tender to expand it’s online training programs and develop a diagnostic assessment tool for ICT professionals who want to immigrate to Canada. The tool will help KIOSK clients evaluate their language skill proficiencies within the context of ICT professions.
• Quantum Dental Technologies won a 2010 Graphical System System Design Achievement Award, in the Medical Device Design and Development category. Quantum’s Canary Dental Caries Detection System is a device for the early detection and monitoring of tooth decay.
• Segasist Technologies recently released its flagship software onto the commercial market, completed a significant internal validation and launched a new release of its software.

Social Venture Exchange: Investing in a better world

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.
The initiative is a partnership between Social Innovation Generation (SiG) at MaRS, the TMX Group and Ontario’s Ministry of Research and Innovation, with founding support from the Ontario Association of Food Banks (OAFB).

It is an ambitious and exciting project that requires a significant amount of foundational work.

Universally, we already know that there is a stable and growing base of existing and emerging innovative ventures with an ability to have demonstrable social and environmental impact, from affordable housing and green energy to sustainable farming and enterprises that hire and/or retrain at-risk youth.  But these ventures often lack sufficient financial capital to realize scale and/or their true potential for impact.  As an ancillary but necessary benefit, many of these ventures can also generate a financial return, which is driving a growing interest from investors.  If 1% of total globally managed assets moved in this direction, $500 billion could flow to these ventures over the next ten years. This is the very real premise of the emerging impact investing sector, which is being driven by global leaders from the Rockefeller Foundation to J.P. Morgan.

The SVX team is currently building an understanding of the demand side of capital by profiling non-profits and for-profit social purpose businesses in Ontario through the Social Finance Census building on the work of the Social Venture Registry.  We are also developing case studies of social ventures and impact investing deals that have already taken place in Canada.  Please encourage your colleagues to complete the survey and feel free to send along any recommendations you may have for interesting case studies. As we move into our pilot phase, you will have an opportunity to list on the exchange if you are an entrepreneur with a double or triple bottom-line venture.

We are also working on building a base of potential investors so we can understand and apply the supply side of capital to investment opportunities when they arise in our pilot phase.  We know that there is a growing interest in impact investing in Ontario and across the country.  If you are an institutional investor and would like to be engaged get more information, please contact us.  You can reach me, Adam Spence, Manager, Special Projects at SiG@MaRS at aspence@marsdd.com or Annie Malhotra, SVX Project Coordinator at amalhotra@marsdd.com.

We will certainly provide an update on this work as it develops over the coming months and years ahead.

If you would like to find out more about the Social Venture Exchange (SVX), please visit our website at www.socialventureexchange.org.  And if you’re really keen, feel free to visit us at the SiG@MaRS office on the main floor.  We’d be happy to chat with you about the project.

Water coolers: Where is all happens in Canadian culture

Canadian office culture may not seem intimidating, but if you’re a new Canadian, your qualifications and global experience may not be enough to move ahead in your career. Understanding the value of small-talk in the office can be paramount to progressing into a management position. That’s where MaRS client KIOSK steps in.

KIOSK offer English as a Second Language (ESL) communications solutions and specialized language camps, helping new Canadians who have  skills to integrate into the workplace.

Statistics Canada reported in March that Toronto’s visible minority population  could more than double from 2.3 million in 2006 to nearly 5.6 million by 2031. This means the work of organizations like KIOSK will only become more important with each passing year — for immigrants and businesses alike.

Recently, KIOSK won an Information and Communication Technology Council (ICTC) tender. This will allow it to expand its self-directed, online training programs and to develop a diagnostic assessment tool for professionals in the IT and Communications (ICT) field who want to immigrate to Canada. This tool will help KIOSK clients evaluate their language skill proficiencies within the context of five specific ICT professions.  Perhaps more importantly, the diagnostic will also assess their understanding of Canadian business culture.

“The water cooler talk example seems to come up quite a lot in discussions with our group,” Jorge Ulloa, Vice-President of KIOSK Language Centre, told me when we spoke. “Newcomers often don’t understand the concept or benefits of networking and socializing in the workplace. In some cases they come from work cultures that expect you to punch in and be productive, while all socializing takes place after work hours. In Canada,  networking often plays an important role in determining the projects that you’ll be chosen for and the people that you will be working with.  Our corporate clients often look to us for intervention in addressing communication breakdowns and challenges surrounding a diverse list of issues such as cross hierarchical informal discussions, receiving/giving feedback, negotiation tactics, leading meetings and presentations, small talk and slang, gender and cultural issues and much more.”

KIOSK’s clients also appreciate getting an early start on solving these challenges. “The process (of immigration) can take anywhere between one to three years before the individual arrives in Canada,” Jorge said. “That’s very valuable time that we can take advantage of and get people up to par in their English skills and cultural awareness.” Back in 2004, Statistics Canada revealed that almost 7% of ICT immigrants who came to Canada in the 1990s re-emigrated. This percentage represented close to 50,000 ICT workers who came and left again.

Jorge says the main reason for this migration pattern is that new Canadians feel they don’t have the same opportunities as their Canadian-born colleagues. In evaluating everything from compensation packages to professional development, these highly-trained ICT professionals feel that there are more appealing opportunities in other markets.

“One of the attractive methods offered to us at MaRS, which KIOSK strongly supports, is the collaborative approach to creating innovative and effective solutions,” said Jorge. “From the private sector perspective, it hasn’t generally been the tradition to collaborate with the public sector, government and other individuals in the community. From our perspective, it’s been great to open up dialogue between ourselves and our community partners, to figure out ways of working together to improve the experience for our clients and the integration of new Canadians into the economy and society as a whole.”

KIOSK values their relationship with MaRS and, indeed, its presence in Canada, but knows the future can still provide challenges.  According to Jorge, Canada does an excellent job of offering bridging programs and an overall support system that helps newcomers integrate and understand the educational and professional job opportunities available. However, newcomers continue to face various barriers and obstacles that needs to be addressed in order for Canada to continue its role as a global leader and competitor.

“It’s no longer about just being functional in English or French,” he cautioned. “It’s about possessing leadership qualities — the communications skills and cultural component that are key to the long-term success of your professional career. That shouldn’t be overlooked. After investing so much time in your education, after being exposed to so much great international experience, why not complement that with the communication skills and business culture awareness that will help overcome future workplace barriers and obstacles?”

In the end, KIOSK clients feel the main benefit provided by their training is confidence. Jorge describes it as the moment the light turns on, giving somebody the inside-track view. “The impact that it has on our clients is life-changing, at least from a professional development perspective. And having the opportunity to play a role in such an important moment in our clients’ lives gives us a high level of satisfaction.”

KIOSK has a current project under review with Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) for the Online Communication Skills for Professionals training of new Canadians in Ontario.  If the bid is successful, this project will be the first of its kind — leveraging cutting-edge, online distance education technologies for the benefit of newcomers across the province.

To lean more about KIOSK, their current ICTC project, and more, please visit their website.

Want to buy unique goods? Subvert the traditional corporate distribution channels and go online

Yesterday I wrote about the flourishing Maker community in Detroit–engineers and artists tinkering in their garages re-inventing the rust-belt economy. In addition to innovations in the technical sphere, the Maker community is responsible for some fundamental changes in how inventors are handling product distribution.

Jules Pieri, CEO of Daily Grommet, calls it Community Commerce. Daily Grommet is an online marketplace where inventors and designers can sell products directly to customers without the intermediary of a physical store. Daily Grommet features “wonderful product still waiting in the wings, just ripe for discovery.”

Pieri sees this as more than just a convenient way to buy goods. “There’s been an innovation explosion in recent years,” she says, “spurred by the bad economy and people’s access to technology.” The public’s erosion of confidence in corporate culture has meant that people prefer to do business with individuals, and that in turn has led to citizen financing platforms such as eBay, Kickstarter, or Nimbit.

Etsy is a peer-to-peer marketplace for handmade goods that has become a multi-million portal

She points to online craft store Etsy as another successful example. “Etsy raised $45 million in venture capital,” she says. “There’s a new normal in consumption patterns.” (The term “new normal” was first used in this way in a recent article in the Harvard Business Review by Nancy Koehn. The article analyzed the changing purchasing climate in the post-recession US.)

Koehn argues that consumers are now looking to give their hard-earned dollars to companies they trust, not just to the company with the cheapest offering. Consumers are also using their social networks to evaluate possible purchases. Networks will quickly ferret out a better product or more socially responsible company–online, the barriers between corporate messaging and consumer knowledge are starting to fall.

For entrepreneurs with good ideas, the start-up costs for businesses have never been lower. “That creates a real opportunity,” says Pieri. She adds, “People are not doing business in the same old ways. Each purchase is an act of citizenship.” In other words, it seems inventors would prefer to bypass the traditional distribution methods of corporate culture.

If you’re a self-described entrepreneur or inventor, you might want to explore these channels as a low-cost mode of distribution.

Maker Fair: Reinventing the Detroit economy

When your iPhone screen cracks, what do you do? Apple wants you to send them your broken phone, pay $150 and wait a few weeks while they repair it and send it back. Another option is to tap into the community of DIY enthusiasts online and repair your own screen in an afternoon for around $15 through instructions found on YouTube.

Welcome to the Maker community, a collection of engineers, sewers, tinkerers and inventors eager to spread the gospel of DIY. Their name comes from the eponymous Make Magazine, a magazine of blueprints, instructions and photo essays on everything from home-made amplifiers to fire-breathing robots.

A couple of weeks ago  I traveled to Detroit to check out Maker Faire, a yearly county fair-meets-science centre, where participants share machines and designs.  Appropriately, it’s held at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn Michigan, ground zero for the most significant feat of engineering and invention in American history, the automobile.

Many of the inventors at the fair used to be employed by the auto industry as engineers or parts manufacturers. Since the auto industry collapse, they’ve reinvented themselves as garage entrepreneurs.  With so much intellectual and technical skill in one area, Detroit has become a hotbed of DIY culture.

Maker Faire Director Sherry Huss decided to hold the San Francisco-based Maker Faire in Detroit this year for that reason. “A lot of [the economic collapse] was auto-driven,” she says. “Whether it was the factories, or glass, or materials or tires, you name it, that whole system was definitely affected.”

The Makers are reinventing the economy in Detroit as a breeding ground of skilled worker innovation and are reinventing themselves in the process. Makers are devoted to the ideals of repurposing old scraps, fixing broken appliances and using available resources in a competition of creativity and innovation.

The Maker community is decidedly open-source and collaborative. Designs are freely shared, improved and passed on. In this way, the motivation for the Makers is an internal drive to create and tinker. “When the economy goes where it’s gone,” says Huss, “these values become even more important… being proprietary and closed doesn’t really benefit anyone.”

Huss draws a comparison to the early days in Silicon Valley where early tech entrepreneurs laid the foundations for the personal computer in their garages. “The currency here is ideas, it’s not money,” says Huss. “Nobody’s making any money out here… yet.” As in Silicon Valley, some of the tinkering being done could lay the groundwork for the next big technological revolution, whether in materials manufacturing or green technology.

One of the hottest booths at the fair, Bre Pettis’s MakerBot, is a home-made desktop printer, made from a kit costing around $950.  It doesn’t print with ink, but a super-heated stream of plastic: the MakerBot can turn blueprints into 3D prototypes made of latex. “It’s like having a factory in your living room,” says Pettis.  “The knob on my air conditioner broke the other day.” says Pettis. “So I printed up a new one.”

Watching MakerBot. (Photo Shanghai Cowgirl)

The MakerBot community uploads blueprints onto the online database called Thingiverse. The kids are absolutely transfixed by the MakerBot. “I’d make chess pieces!” says one. “Okay,” says Pettis. “Come back in a couple of hours and I’ll have a piece for you.”

Later that afternoon, Pettis has downloaded a design for an awesome-looking rook, printed it up and given it to the kid. “Our whole goal is to make Makers,” says Huss. “There’s going to be a host of little kids here today whose worlds are going to be changed.”

The Makers have other names: hackerpreneurs, hobbypreneurs, basement inventors. Whatever you call them, market analysts should look to Detroit and the rest of the so-called “rust belt” states for the next wave of technology entrepreneurship. With so much intellectual and skilled labour out of work, workers are taking it upon themselves to innovate just because they love making cool stuff.

What are the questions you need to ask?

Are you faced with a business decision and not sure what to do?  Do you need deeper insight into specific customer segments? More comprehensive information on competitors? Are you uncertain about your pricing strategy?  Market intelligence can help.

Market intelligence is crucial to a start-up’s strategy by providing the information needed to help you make the right strategic decisions to ensure your start-up’s success.

To make sure you have all your bases covered, it’s important to know the key questions that market intelligence can help you answer.

Check out our video interview with our Director of Market Intelligence, Usha Srinivasan. She discusses five market intelligence questions that every start-up should consider. And she’s got tips on how to find the answers to those questions to achieve and maintain your competitive advantage.

Essential Market Intelligence Questions: Five Hot Tips for Start-ups from MaRS Discovery District on Vimeo.

To learn more about how market intelligence can help you make sound business decisions, check out the full Best Practices event video Using Market Intelligence as Your Strategic Weapon.

Need market intelligence? MaRS’ market intelligence team has provided market research services for hundreds of clients. We have access to key vendors such as Gartner, IDC, Frost & Sullivan, Forrester, Business Insights, Lux Research and the University of Toronto library collection. And a small but dedicated team of sector-specific analysts and information science specialists.  Talk to your MaRS advisor (or apply to get one) to see if your company is eligible to receive this service.