I need a developer!

I want to build a sales team.

We’re looking for a CFO.

Finding, hiring and retaining talent. It’s one of the biggest challenges tech startups face, regardless of where their company is located or what stage it’s at. Startups struggle to find candidates who are a good fit, understand the tech-landscape and are willing to dedicate their time and energy to a budding idea.

But what’s the issue? Is it a shortage of willing and able-bodied folks within the IT and digital industries? Or are there simply too many founders?

Whatever the reason, the fact remains that tech startups need to overcome this hiring hurdle, since investors often place more importance on a startup team than on a product or idea itself.

To help, the MaRS Market Intelligence group interviewed close to a dozen thought leaders – including startup founders, veterans in the tech industry and HR experts – soliciting their advice and insight on how Ontario startups can go about obtaining the best talent.

Click here to read through our report, titled Talent for Tech.

Or, read the advice that’s most relevant for your company, based on the stage it’s at:

• The proverbial ‘guy with an idea’, looking for a co-founder
• Finding developers to build your product
• Hiring A-players, at a minimal salary
• Scaling, and scaling fast
• Bringing experienced hires on board
• Retaining employees

Don’t forget to share with us what worked for your startup when it came to hiring. We’d love to hear from you.

Not only have the number of clients and questions increased for us as a result of expanding our services to include the entire province of Ontario, but the startup landscape has also grown more complex due to more sophisticated competition and niche markets.

To better serve budding entrepreneurs in the IT, communications and entertainment (ICE) sector, we decided that we needed to develop new ways of helping these clients intelligently navigate the information landscape.

We also noticed that entrepreneurs across all sectors asked many of the same questions, and had similar information needs. To address these concerns, extend our services and thus serve our clients better, MaRS Market Intelligence created the Startup Library, an online resource targeted at the ICE sector, but also including general information applicable to all entrepreneurs.

Developed to help entrepreneurs search less and find more, the Startup Library is a curated collection of links to public domain resources from the government, private and non-profit sectors. It empowers clients to quickly and efficiently locate answers to common market research questions, helping them understand the startup ecosystem better.

The MaRS Market Intelligence team designed the Startup Library to be a practical guide to the best of the Web for online and mobile startups. It allows entrepreneurs to focus their market information searches on the most relevant and useful sources. When it officially launched (January 12, 2012), it included the following types of information (with plans to update it further):

• ‘How-do-I?’ guides for commonly asked market research questions, including identifying competitors and finding Canadian and US market data
• Annotated links to quality online content covering a broad range of online and mobile topics, including accelerators and incubators, business models, lean startups and funding
• Feeds from a shared repository of bookmarks selected by MaRS Market Intelligence’s research experts

The Library is itself a startup – we’ve launched lean with plans to add additional content over the next year, so stay tuned.

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, read on!

“Getting bought by Google!” is a line that you come across more often these days. Many startups in the IT, communications and entertainment sector build platforms, software or technology that could be of interest to big players like Google or Microsoft, but competition is fierce as increasing numbers of people vie to produce and patent novel ideas.

If your goal is to be bought by one of the giants, it helps to have a very strategic approach toward filing a strong patent and building a strong valuation.

In our last Best Practices session, Anthony de Fazekas, Partner, Miller Thomson LLP, advised entrepreneurs on building robust patent applications that yield intellectual property of value to a tech major. To ensure high patent application success rate, he highlighted the following key points:

• Build platform patents, not feature patents – Showcase the broader and more general platform that you might have invented or scaled!

• Spell out the importance of your technology – The justification of the innovation you have made should be clearly communicated to show acquirers and investors the value adds!

• Explain how your technology adds value to other patents – Don’t just cover your technology but specify the value your invention provides through other existing platforms!

• Cover areas that tend to yield strong patent protection – Find unique areas of innovations that are not commonly thought about in large companies. These inventions will be easier to patent!

Find the hot tips video below:

The lecture video below covers the things that technology majors seek when purchasing a firm and offers advice on how to build a strong valuation of your company for potential acquisition. Anthony de Fazekas and Dan Servos (COO, Locationary) discuss the important role intellectual property plays in this process.

Lecture Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/webgoddesscathy/speaker-slides-best-practices-jan-24

As always, there are many great events for startups happening at MaRS. For details, see the MaRS Events calendar. In the list below, I’ve supplemented the MaRS calendar with events occurring in Toronto and beyond—the GTA, Guelph, Kitchener, Waterloo, Niagara, Halton, St. Catharines and Hamilton.

Startup Drinks

Startup Drinks provides an open space for entrepreneurs and small business owners to connect and share ideas. There are no presentations or pitches, just conversation and networking. This is a great event to attend if you’re keen to meet some of the up-and-coming people in the startup community. These events are held in a number of locations, including Toronto, Hamilton and Waterloo.

Innovation Guelph

Innovation Guelph is an organization that provides programs, events and services to help entrepreneurs, community organizations, researchers and business leaders develop their ideas. Their advisors will also help you with business development.

Golden Horseshoe Venture Forum

The main goal of events hosted by GHVF is to help startups connect with potential investors and service providers in the Burlington area. Breakfast events are hosted five times a year in Burlington and feature presentations from three firms, followed by a guest speaker who presents on a chosen topic of interest. The GHVF is a great event for making valuable connections.

DemoCamp

DemoCamp hosts events that cater towards designers, developers and marketers. Attend these events to interact with professionals and gain insight from speakers about your industry. These events are held every couple of months in Toronto, Hamilton and Guelph.

Innovation Factory

Innovation Factory facilitates the discussion of new ideas and discovery between business, science and academia. Their events are beneficial whether you work at a startup or at a multinational corporation. Innovation Factory offers events for both networking and learning, along with the support of their experienced advisors. These events run in the region of Hamilton.

Silicon Halton

Silicon Halton organizes a number of events throughout the year in Burlington, Oakville, and Milton. Their monthly meetups and Peer2Peer events include three main components: a keynote presentation; a get-to-know-a-member presentation; and time for networking. These events cater to anyone at a startup (especially in the tech industry) who is looking to learn more about business practices.

HalTech

Events at HalTech target startup businesses in the technology industry that are looking to develop new ideas, establish their business or continue to grow it. These events are held in the region of Halton and provide training for entrepreneurs as well as a chance to network.

Social Media Week

Social Media Week in Toronto offers a number of engaging events. This event will focus on how to use social media applications like LinkedIn and Twitter to increase sales opportunities and closings. This presentation will encompass both the strategic and tactical side of social media and sales.

Toronto Rails Pub Night

This informal social event in Toronto is perfect for anyone interested in Web development. Industry people gather over a few pints, share ideas and rub shoulders with recruiters in the Web development startup community.

PodCamp Toronto

PodCamp Toronto invites anyone who is in the media or communications sectors, including but not limited to writers; producers; photographers; designers; podcasters; developers; and bloggers to participate in a two-day “unconference.” Events will be driven by participation and will focus on a theme or purpose within the new media industry.

At last week’s Entrepreneurship 101 lecture, Andrew Graham, Senior Director, Corporate Development at George Weston Limited, made sense of what is often seen as a rather complicated subject.

His lecture dissected the basic tools of financial planning:

• Income statements
• Cash flow forecast
• Balance sheet

If you want to get investors’ attention, you have to have a realistic plan that shows how you will spend and make money. You also need to be able to understand the details: revenue, cost of sales, gross margin, operating costs and more.

This lecture used several case studies to show how companies forecast growth both successfully and unsuccessfully.

Key takeaways:

• It’s all about cash
• Forecast from the bottom up
• Get expert advice when you need it

For more on how to build your financial plan, watch this Quick Hits video:

To watch the entire lecture, click here.

Resources:

• Speaker slides: Financial Planning
• Video: Financial Forecasting: What you need to know – Five hot tips for startups
• Workbook: Financing Workbook 1 – Developing a Financing Strategy for Your Company

Want to connect?

• Join the LinkedIn Group
• Follow the conversation on Twitter: #ent101
• Get updates on Vimeo
• Download the course schedule

Watch our live webcasts here.

Next week’s lecture: Meet the Entrepreneurs – Social Innovation.
Don’t miss this great networking opportunity!

Without help, the idea can get lost in the shuffle, competing with everything else at play in the human mind. However, if you can gather together some other brains and make good use of their knowledge, experience and opinion, you stand a better chance of propelling the idea to its full potential.

Andrea Hamilton, a senior associate at MaRS, is a brain herder.

In November 2011 she, along with a few friends, created #Hatch – a casual forum where people and their brains come together to share thoughts and help ideas move forward. Think social networking meets crowdsourcing, but face-to-face.

“Hatch is the first stop on our journey to connect people, leverage ideas and, ultimately, make the world a better place,” says Andrea. “It’s a new way to meet people interested in solving problems both BIG and small. By bringing people with diverse talents and backgrounds together, we think we can accomplish a lot.

The Ideas

What kinds of ideas are #Hatch-able? The sky’s the limit. “We firmly believe that sharing practices and approaches from a variety of different sectors or backgrounds helps ideas grow and evolve in a way that would be impossible if the focus were on a single discipline or industry, and only drew people in from that sector,” says Andrea.

About 35 people attended the first session last November. Here are some of their ideas:

• Setting up a mentor-based volunteer organization for at-risk youth
• Turning a successful pilot project in Africa into a sustainable organization
• Taking a style blog that is gaining momentum to the next level
• Exploring the intersection of philanthropy and design in Toronto
• Building a tool to rank the “truth” of news media articles for readers

How it Works

Have an idea? #Hatch provides a comfortable, casual environment where you can receive early-stage guidance and constructive feedback on it.

You get two minutes to share your idea with the crowd – it’s not like a speech, but you should be able to clearly communicate your idea with the group and explain what you’re looking for help on. And yes, you’ll have to stand on a small stage, but it’s not too scary!

After the first batch of ideas has been shared, people break off into groups to discuss them, regrouping after a while to present their feedback. Following a short break, the whole thing starts again with the next batch of ideas.

Attend the Next #Hatch

The next session is on January 31 at Supermarket in Kensington Market (Toronto). Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and the session will get going by 7:00. The best way to stay informed is through the #Hatch Facebook event page or the #Hatch blog.

While traditional evidence-based methods were still used, getting the kids to develop and act in skits together led to a far greater level of engagement than the organization he worked for had ever achieved in 25 years, as they developed the relationships and trust that helped them discuss their problems with others.

This insight came back to him five years later, in 2009, when he started reading about social entrepreneurship and the Ashoka framework of identifying effective approaches to addressing pressing social problems. With his interest suitably piqued, he began thinking about applying the social enterprise framework to the problem of mental health equity.

It struck him that while there are a number of wonderful organizations doing great work in mental health, it’s difficult to find them and identify the factors that enable them to succeed. So he turned to the Ashoka model, using search criteria and social networks to find innovators and learn from them.

The idea flips the traditional learning model on its head – rather than have clinicians and academics identify approaches based on theory, one must go to the communities and learn from practitioners. This bottom-up approach also provides access to a number of diverse perspectives and helps people understand the specific methods that work for marginalized communities.

Anyone who’s interested in social innovation will immediately recognize the value of this approach. The area of mental health inequities is influenced by a number of social determinants. As such, there is benefit to be had in using the insights of the complexity theory, one of which holds that formulas have limited applicability in complex systems. To figure out ‘what works’ in the context of mental health, therefore, Dr. Kidd’s approach described above is more robust than the traditional means of using slide decks and training sessions.

In 2010, Dr. Kidd and his colleague, Dr. Kwame McKenzie (both at CAMH and the University of Toronto’s Department of Psychiatry), established a research project called Social Entrepreneurism in Mental Health to identify service providers in Toronto that are using social entrepreneurship models to drive innovation and transformation in addressing mental health disparities.

Using a case study process, the team of researchers selected five successful service providers and identified the five components that contributed to their effectiveness:

1. The right group of people working to address the right problem, brought together by an initial, all-important catalyst
2. A clearly articulated mission, careful needs assessment, finding partners and establishing a structure
3. Adopting unique approaches on multiple levels
4. Staying focused, remaining current and consistently exceeding expectations
5. Acting as vital communities unto themselves, not just service providers for communities

This year, the organizers decided to launch a competition to identify social purpose enterprises that foster mental health equity and social inclusion. The goal was, as before, to increase the awareness of innovative models and conduct systematic research so that the team could understand, share, package and propagate effective models.

A senior selection committee chose three winners and four runners-up. The winners, examined for impact, potential for growth and innovation, were announced at a ceremony on January 18, 2012:

First: Good Foot Delivery, a personalized, environmentally-friendly courier service that employs people with developmental disabilities such as Asperger’s syndrome and autism.

Second: Clean Works, which provides competitive community-based cleaning opportunities to individuals living with severe and persistent mental illness.

Third: Rise Asset Development, which provides microfinance and mentorship to entrepreneurs who have mental health and/or addiction challenges. (Read more about Rise Asset Development.)

The other shortlisted enterprises were:

• FABARNAK Restaurant and Catering
• Gateway Linens
• Out of This World Cafe and Espresso Bar
• Parkdale Green Thumb Enterprises

According to Melissa McNeil, the Executive Director of Good Foot, this recognition means a lot to their fledgling organization. “Since we’re so new, we see this as a vote of confidence – it acknowledges that we’re helping people and creating jobs. It puts us on the map.”

SiG@MaRS played a strong role in supporting the tremendous success of this initiative (it was standing-room only), both as a mentor for the organizers, and in providing advisory support to two of the three competition winners: Good Foot and Rise Asset Development. “Allyson [Hewitt] really helped us understand what a social enterprise is, and what this field is about from the bigger picture,” said Dr. Kidd. “She also helped make crucial connections with people in the space.”

The Social Entrepreneurism in Mental Health project serves as a wonderful testament to the application of social innovation to real-world problems, and effectively applies the framework of social entrepreneurship to health care. As the enterprises flourish, they will foster social inclusion and address disparities in mental health. The research, in turn, will enable caregivers and service providers to deliver better services to marginalized communities.

The following infographic from Techvibes highlights the industry’s rapid growth in Canada. If you’re contemplating pursuing your childhood dreams of making video games, now’s the time – game on!

Source: Techvibes

Can you think of a solution that provides an alternative to aging infrastructure and the huge investments it requires, something that reduces carbon emissions, deals with forecasted increases in energy demands, while at the same time, supports the integration of distributed and intermittent sources of alternative energy?

Okay, you got me. Truth is, the challenges faced by the electricity sector are extremely complex, but before you lose hope, let me tell you about a growing industry that believes it has the answer to this question: the smart grid.

Why is this important?

For Canada, the investment requirements between 2010 and 2030 will amount to $293.8 billion in electricity infrastructure!

According to a report prepared by the Edison Foundation, by 2030 the electric utility industry in the US will need to make a total infrastructure investment of $1.5 trillion to $2.0 trillion. The conference board of Canada reports that in this country, the investment requirements between 2010 and 2030 will amount to $293.8 billion in electricity infrastructure.

Yes, that’s right! As the population keeps increasing and we keep adding more and more appliances to our homes (not to mention the requirements of large businesses), the electricity sector must ensure that our needs for reliable, inexpensive, clean and plentiful electricity are satisfied.

So how can the smart grid help? At the end of the day, it represents an investment itself.  To succeed, the smart grid will need to demonstrate that its solutions—whether on the generation, transmission, distribution or consumer levels—are an effective substitute for the huge investments that we discussed above.

To understand the various proposed smart grid solutions for each of the electricity levels and demonstrate some of the innovations developed by our very own MaRS clients, I invite you to take a look at the interactive infographic that we have created.

But that’s not all. For entrepreneurs who would like to learn more about the “who’s who” in the smart grid and the opportunities that exist in the generation and distribution levels, we’ve also prepared a white paper titled “Ontario Utilities and the Smart Grid: Is there room for innovation?”

The paper summarizes where the utilities’ smart grid policies and technologies now stand and where they are heading. It highlights the global frontrunners in the race toward the smart grid, and outlines how industry stakeholders (regulators, policy-makers, utilities, vendors, academics and customers) can assess which utilities and technologies are considered the “smartest.” The role of the Ontario regulator is discussed in view of smart grid implementation, as are the policy-setting objectives and challenges it currently faces.

In case you missed the opportunity to register and attend today’s event, Ontario Smart Grid Opportunities in the Electrical Utility Sector, be sure to check our website over the next few days for a summary of the event’s proceedings, including videos and presentations. You’ll learn from Canadian and American experts about global opportunities, key technologies, best practices and policy mechanisms.

Finally, as promised, a simple explanation of the smart grid, courtesy of cartoonist Andy Lubershane.

Now you don’t have any excuses for not getting involved in—or at least being aware of—the smart grid movement.

Today RBC, the largest of Canada’s Big Five (banks), has joined the growing ranks of major global institutions like Deutsche Bank, and national leaders like Vancity and le Chantier de l’économie sociale in demonstrating real leadership in impact investing.

The bank has just announced a $20 million commitment in an impact investing strategy that will include the creation of a new $10 million RBC Impact Fund and the allocation of $10 million from RBC Foundation’s assets into socially responsible investment (SRI) funds. It is the first initiative of its kind announced by a major financial institution in Canada.

When combined with the tremendous contributions of talent and financial resources from the TMX Group Inc., we have now fully engaged Canada’s largest financial institution and Canada’s largest exchange group to help drive the growth of impact investing in Canada.

What does this mean?

1. There has been a seismic shift of interest in impact investing in Canada.

Even two years ago, the work of impact investing or social finance in Canada was limited to trailblazers in the wilderness trying to do good work while convincing others of the potential of this approach.

After years of effort from a dedicated team at RBC, and many more years of field-building by the team at Social Innovation Generation (SiG), SiG@MaRS, the Canadian Task Force on Social Finance, the MaRS Centre for Impact Investing and others, we have taken impact investing from an interesting cocktail conversation to the top of the business agenda in the main boardroom of RBC Centre.

This move reflects a significant seismic shift, with major players clearly speaking the language of this emerging sector. Today, Gordon Nixon, President and CEO of RBC, made the announcement:

“We have been waiting for the right moment to launch a program of this nature, and the moment is now. We are confident that our initial investment of $10 million in the RBC Impact Fund will not only spark entrepreneurship and innovation in Canada, but also catalyze similar investments from others in the business community. We are also proud to put our money where our values are by investing an additional $10 million of our own funds through the RBC Foundation in socially and environmentally screened funds.”

Gordon Nixon has just taken Gordon Gekko out to the woodshed.

We expect the tremor of the announcement to be felt all along Wellington, King and Bay Streets in Toronto. Look for others to follow suit in the months and year ahead.

2. There is an increase in the number of real investment dollars dedicated toward local, impact ventures in Canada.

Today’s $20 million investment gets 2012 off to a great start. Local entrepreneurs should be very excited about a new source of impact capital.

We are now seeing real money flow into impact investing in Canada. In 2011, $284 million in debt and equity financing was raised for impact investing. Today’s $20 million investment gets 2012 off to a great start. Local entrepreneurs should be very excited about a new source of impact capital. The fund will finance impact ventures, including those that promote environmental sustainability, advance water resource management or provide opportunities for youth and newcomers to Canada.

3. Canada is getting ready for its leapfrog moment.

Antony Bugg-Levine, CEO of the US-based Nonprofit Finance Fund (NFF), and Jonathan Jenkins, CEO of the UK-based The Social Investment Business, have both spoken about Canada’s potential to leapfrog other countries in impact investing with a concerted effort. We can be global leaders in the movement to mobilize private capital towards solving our most pressing social and environmental problems.

Canada has seen leadership from the community sector, and through major foundations and respected institutions. Today, RBC is leading the way for mainstream finance to participate. Over the coming months, we will look to various levels of government and other corporate leaders to help lead this agenda.

It is going to be a big year. Kudos to RBC for their commitment to driving change.