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MaRS has launched a series of white papers related to promoting social entrepreneurship in Ontario and enabling solutions to complex social problems.
The first white paper was focused on Social Venture Finance and the latest one is on Legislative Innovations. This blog details the content of the Legislative Innovations white paper.
Celebrate good times, c'mon!
To shed further light on Kerri Golden’s excellent recent post, the stumbling block that has been removed in this case is the Section 116 – a series of tax requirements that imposed onerous restrictions on foreign investors in Canadian firms.
Faced with an undercapitalized Canadian VC sector and the Section 116 restrictions, our emerging companies were either forced into premature public listings (often via a CPC mechanism) or had to concede that it made no sense to develop a knowledge economy-oriented enterprise here.
Canadian investment borders become friendlier
In yesterday’s federal budget, the Harper government announced significant changes in tax legislation that will make it much easier for US and other international venture capital investors to fund Canada’s most promising start-up companies.
These changes come at a most opportune time as the CVCA, Canada’s Venture Capital and Private Equity Industry Association, and their research partner Thomson Reuters recently reported that venture capital investment in 2009 reached its lowest level in thirteen years.
On the horizon: new capital structures
There have recently been significant inroads made in creating new sources of financing for non-profits and social ventures in Canada. Causeway hosted two discussions over the past month to flesh out the development of potential investment vehicles.
Below, I provide context for these conversations and offer resources for further understanding. I’ll continue to use this blog to chronicle the main developments of these funds in an attempt to keep you and the mounting number of social financiers up-to-date.
Incentives matter: Find the right carrot to encourage innovation
How can we create more major breakthroughs: with more scientists and research projects or better incentives?
Fears that we could lose our competitive edge have pushed innovation to the forefront of economic strategies nowadays. The holy grail of innovation is how to encourage game-changing innovation in addition to innovation that achieves incremental improvements. Questions about how we can ensure future innovation usually call for increasing the number of innovators (i.e. promote science in schools! Increase visa quotas!) or projects (i.e. more funding!).
But what if finding the right incentives for scientists, not just increasing the number of scientists or funded projects, was the answer to increasing innovation? Could you study research incentives themselves to see which ones produced the most breakthrough innovations?
