MaRS

I’m just back from Italy but not all the way back.

I love walking into MaRS every morning. It’s the light. It’s the sense of space. It’s the living picture, hung on the south wall, of people working in their offices on business development, on conference planning, on making ideas work.

It’s like walking into a piazza in an Italian hill town: the traditional and the modern; storefront and houses clustered around a public space; people working and people relaxing and, more than anything else, people mingling.

In the last few months at MaRS, I’ve been able to drop in on lectures and seminars. I’ve stood on the upper floors and enjoyed singing and music. I’ve watched the interplay between media, ministers and the audience at press conferences. I’ve browsed by technology showcases. I’ve attended receptions. It’s good for the mind and it has sometimes, at moments, been very good for the soul. I’ve been a watcher and participant and I, too, like many who work in this building, have sipped my fair share of wine at the receptions.

But life in MaRS is not all about this planned stuff. It’s not even mostly about the planned stuff. It’s about the accidental meeting in the coffee line up downstairs. Out of these encounters I’ve had follow-up meetings about projects, been involved in input on public policy, learned about business connections that need to be developed.

Does it mean anything in terms of advancing our core business? I don’t know. Does it influence the way I think about our core business? Yes. Do I see value in these unexpected conversations? Yes. Most of the truly worthwhile projects I have been involved in over the years grew out of chance conversations. Vino rosso per favore. Grazie.

Cathy Bogaart, MaRS’ web goddess, generously offered this quote as a subject for my blog this week, taken from a post at “My Own Pirate Radio“.

“..In Toronto, Mars [sic] is an incredibly well-funded tech incubator, but it isn’t yet offering much in the way of educating the broader community of people outside the four walls of the building…”

It is frustrating to see such remarks because we’ve been getting amazing feedback from participants in MaRS programs and clients of the MaRS Venture Group. We’re also busy providing great (and often free) educational opportunities like:

• Entrepreneurship 101
• BioEntrepreneurship
• Market Intelligence Services
• Venture Advisory
• plus many more!

MaRS is also trying to be “educating the broader community” and has had a lot of press in the last 12 months in our efforts to do just that. It’s not everything of course, but it’s a start.

So, what more should we be doing to reach this “broader community”?

Gordon Keller, PhD, stem cell researcher

On the front page of The Star today, there’s an article about a top Canadian stem cell researcher who is returning to Canada from the US. Gordon Keller will be working in the MaRS Centre for UHN’s new McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine, which opens today. Toronto has a strong stem cell research community and history. Canada also has a less-restrictive climate for human embryonic stem cell research than the US at the moment. I wonder if this means we’ll see more researchers moving north?

Toronto International Bach Festival

With what felt like the early arrival of winter this past week, the commencement of the 2006 International Bach Festival in Toronto will surely warm the hearts of many in this city. The festival got off to a phenomenal start here at MaRS on Sunday afternoon with a performance of J.S. Bach’s Canata, Wachet! Betet! Betet! Wachet!, BWV 70.

Stellar performances by

• Laura Albino, soprano
• Mia Lennox-Williams, alto
• Stephen Erickson, tenor
• Benjamin Covey, baritone

With the accompanying Bach Festival Singers and Orchestra, and Helmuth Rilling conducting.

This beautiful piece was a delight to hear and it gives every indication that this year’s festival should not be missed. For more information, please visit their website here.

MaRS is proud to support this culturally significant event. It highlights our desire to bridge the established communities of Science & Technology and Arts & Culture, and further convergence and collaboration between them for mutual benefit. We have much to gain from working with and developing relationships between these traditionally isolated groups. Innovation does not stop at the edge of technology, and creativity does not only live in the Arts. We at MaRS certainly look forward to weaving more interactions with the artistic and cultural communities to stimulate innovation and creativity across our entire community.

Millenium Sholarships

Last Friday, I spoke on a panel about innovation at the “Think Again” conference in Ottawa – an event organized by the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation. The Foundation was set up in 1998 by the Federal Government as an independent entity with two critically important goals:

1. improve access to post-secondary education and;
2. promote and recognize student excellence.

Each year the Foundation’s Excellence Award Program disburses $15 million worth of merit scholarships to over 2000 post-secondary students with high marks, high levels of community engagement, demonstrated leadership and an interest in innovation. More than 270 of these students converged in Ottawa last week, and I was lucky enough to get to speak to them about innovation – along with Tim Broadhead (head of the McConnell Foundation in Montreal), Catherine Lang (whose most recent work has focused on the Innovative Rural Communities Project) and our moderator Tonya Surman ( ED of the Centre for Social Innovation).

The young Canadians that filled our session were an amazing group: dynamic, engaged, articulate leaders who had already demonstrated a willingness to engage in the problems affecting their communities. Reflecting on our session, I was struck by their focus on three points:

• In fostering innovation, space matters. I’ve blogged on this before, but the impact of design, construction, layout and decoration on the collaboration process is one of the biggest surprises I’ve found while working at MaRS – and a core part of our strategy that the CMSFers grasped immediately.
• “Innovation” is far more than another word for “science and technology.” Students at the conference were already aware that they would have multiple careers, in multiple industries and across multiple sectors. And they were equally convinced that innovation was ultimately about both devising new solutions to old problems and focusing on implementation and impact to create sustainable change.
• Cultivating a tolerance for risk is essential to fostering a culture of innovation. We spend considerable time talking about risk: how to identify it and mitigate it, how to use networks and community to insulate against it, and how to welcome risk as an essential ingredient in urgency – the imperative that drives all manner of innovation in any context.

This group of young people are the next generation of MaRtians: I hope to see them at MaRS when their ideas and their passions turn toward commercialization. It was inspiring to be a part of this conversation with such sophisticated, experienced youths with such optimism about their futures.