MaRS

Time for a change? Time to plan

Thinking about joining a new start-up this year? A friend of mine recently contacted me for some assistance. She’d been promoted to the top of her company and would be President and CEO in a couple of weeks. “Do you have any advice?”

“You bet! You’ll need to build that 99 Day Plan for your first quarter on the job. It’s one of the most valuable things  you can do to maximize the start of your new role.” 99-Day Plans are based on the theory that, in the first ninety-nine days of a new assignment, an individual will be consuming more value from the organization then they are able to contribute. My two favourite books on the topic “The First 90 Days” (Watkins) and “You’re in Charge, Now What?” (Neff & Citrin). Some of the key principals follow.

3D everywhere at CES 2010

This year I had the good fortune of being able to get out to the 2010 International CES, the world’s largest tradeshow for consumer technology. Set amidst the expansive Las Vegas Convention Center, some 20,000 new products are on show to a global audience of geeks, buyers, analysts and media luminaries. While one gets a little toxic immersing oneself in four days of meetings, conference sessions and tradeshow booths, this year did not disappoint. A lot of “stuff” got launched this year, from 3D technology, mobile DTV, tablets, netbooks, eReaders, health apps, connected TVs, embedded Internet technologies and new green technologies. Here’s some ramblings (and rants) that capture some of the technologies and trends that caught my attention.

What should come out of COP15 ?

As the rhetoric at Copenhagen heats up, all of us in the cleantech space hope for some clear breakthroughs: meaningful and binding targets, funding support for the developing world to adopt clean technologies (which rich countries sell, by the way, so it’s not exactly charity), clear price signals on carbon emissions, an acknowledgment that the political targets should match the scientific reality and so on. Those macroeconomic conditions will pave the way for the third industrial revolution – a low carbon economy (the first two having been based on coal and oil).

But in the meantime, cleantech entrepreneurs around the world are simply getting on with the job – they innovate and try to bring economic value to technologies that help us live in a sustainable manner.  MaRS is home to many of those entrepreneurs:

Minato Mirai, Yokohama, BIO Japan 2009

In October I was in Yokohama to attend BIO Japan 2009 – a major Japanese life sciences partnering event.  This was my second visit to BIO Japan.

The event attracted 15,000 visitors over three days, drawn mostly from major Japanese pharma companies and biotechs and also a sizeable contingent from Western and Asian small-to-medium sized companies and institutions.

Health care: In our own hands

Health care spending has grown faster than the economy in the last decade. While Canada’s 2008 GDP went down 1.2%, our health care expenditures grew about 3.3%. Ontario, as well as other Canadian provinces spends over 45% of the provincial budget on health.

This is not just a Canadian issue as evidenced by the heated debates over health care in the United States and all around the world. As with any complex issues there will be more than one solution but it seems that consumer-directed health care and a focus on wellness will be a part of the solution.