education

• Investors want strong teams – get your HR right “Finding people has never been easier; finding talent has never been harder.” Margo Crawford, Business Sherpa Startups across the province are finding it increasingly difficult to find and keep talent. And in the eyes of investors, a strong team can be equally as important as the idea itself.

• Mark your calendars: Events this month for startups and small businesses Our team at Venture Accelerator Partners believes the following list of events to be the most useful for startups and small businesses this month. 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 [...]

• Sword or shield – Which will you use to protect your fortress? Intellectual property is a fortress for protecting your assets; you can guard these assets by attacking (sword) and defending against (shield) your competitors. At last week’s Entrepreneurship 101 lecture,  Arshia Tabrizi, Founding and Managing Partner of Tabrizi Law Office PC, introduced the basics of identifying and managing intellectual property. Different types of IP exist for [...]

• How well do you know your target market? You’ve probably made certain assumptions about your target market. How do you validate them?

• Willpower: Ian Telfer's secret to entrepreneurial success “Ian Telfer was a screw-up. The Canadian mining industry luminary didn’t exactly excel during his undergraduate days in university. He was too busy having fun.” – Andy Hoffman, The Globe and Mail Are you interested yet?

• The education entrepreneur flywheel Entrepreneurs are a special breed. Visionary, tenacious, passionate – they set forth on a path and remain focused on achieving their objectives. Perhaps none more so than the entrepreneurs showcased at this week’s MaRS Education Cluster Venture Pitch Day.

• Entrepreneurs transform student learning in Ontario Download the latest MaRS Report: K–12 Education: Opportunities and Strategies for Ontario Entrepreneurs The education stream at the Canada 3.0 digital media forum was packed this year, demonstrating the increasing interest in the impact that technology and start-up companies can have on education. In the U.S., prominent start-up founders Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel are [...]

• Empathy in Education “If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird The above quote [...]

• ArtsSmarts: Engaging children and youth in the creative process by Joseph Wilson and Jason van Eyk It’s a bold move in an education system focused on STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) to insist that learning through the arts is critical to young people’s academic and personal development. Yet that’s exactly what the J. W. McConnell Foundation set out to do in 1998 [...]

• How Does the Brain Learn? Last year in a Boston Globe article, Bill Gates claimed that providing vaccines to developing countries was easy compared to changing the education system.  Those who have taken on the Sisyphean task of education reform know that that’s true. The education system is a complex, multi-faceted system that has an enormous amount of inertia.