MaRS

Michael McCain: The "Lived-It" lecture

As a child in small town Florenceville, New Brunswick, MaRS Board member Michael McCain sat at the kitchen table listening to two of Canada’s greatest entrepreneurs, Wallace and Harrison McCain, discuss the family business. In last week’s CIBC Presents Entrepreneurship 101 we heard him tell not only their story of the international food giant McCain, but his own story of acquiring the near-demise Maple Leaf Foods in the mid-nineties and turning it around.

The thread linking the two stories was the importance of entrepreneurial professionalism: for a small family business to think big and for a big public company to think small to ensure their future success. In each case, there were challenges to managing these seeming opposites: staying entrepreneurial and innovative while managing professionally.

It's all about management execution

We’ve seen some exciting new technologies in the past couple of months and our work to “accelerate the path to commercial success” is intensifying. Of particular interest are some of my clients with waste to energy, solar, water treatment and smart grid technologies. These organizations will be the backbone of the Ontario economy in the not to distant future.

As we work work with these early stage organizations, some patterns are emerging. Clearly, these technology companies are focusing in exciting and growing sectors. They’re based in science and are well on their way to securing IP protection for their inventions. Business models — although initially a little crude — are being re-worked to demonstrate the ability to successfully turn a profit. Any investor who takes a quick look is quickly impressed on all three fronts.

So why aren’t we reading more about the successful financing of these companies by Angels, VC’s, government grants and larger institutions?

Why do most alliances fail?

This week, John Buckingham drew upon his 30 years of expertise building health care businesses globally in a MaRS Best Practices Series session on effective alliance management, “Partner or Perish: Forging Effective Alliances”.

Alliances are a form of collaboration in which individual organizations retain strategic autonomy while committing resources to a joint activity. The most common types of alliances are formed for operational (e.g. manufacturing) or specific project needs. The right alliance or partnership can help an organization achieve its goals in many different ways: by giving it access to outside expertise, access to flexible resources, reducing its financial risk, and/or increasing its speed of development or of getting to market.

Yet less than 40 per cent of alliances in life sciences meet their objectives.