research and innovation : Innovation + Job News

On Friday, Research Infosource Inc. released its annual list of Canada's top 100 corporate research and development spenders.

According to the report, Canadian corporate R&D spending increased by 4.1 per cent in 2013 from $12-billion to $12.5 billion.

“4.1 per cent year over year growth is pretty reasonable. Having said that, we’ve seen stronger growth in previous years," says Ron Freedman, the CEO of the company that compiled the report.

Freedman adds that 57 of the list's top 100 companies managed to increase their R&D spending, while 41 companies decided to decrease their R&D spending. Compared to previous years, this represents a slightly worse performance by Canada's corporations.

Indeed, the report's findings will likely reinforce the commonly held opinion that Canadian companies do not spend enough on research. However, Freedman is quick to point out that more, in this case, is not always better.

"Bombardier’s R&D spending went up this year, but the fact is that a large portion of that spending was bad spending. It was spending that was put toward correcting mistakes in the design of their new aircraft. It’s money that they should not have had to spend."

Check out the full list of Canada's top 100 R&D spenders on Research Infosource's website.


Source: Research Infosource Inc. 
 

Ryerson University unveiled a major and exciting new property development last week.

The as-of-yet unnamed building will replace a parking lot that sits on Church Street, north of Dundas. For the time being, however, the university is referring to the project as the Church Street Development�or, CSD.

Once completed, the 166,000 square-foot facility will host the university's Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing, the School of Nutrition and the School of Occupational and Public Health, Communications, Government and Community Engagement. Additionally, it will house a variety of administrative offices, as well as offer space for students and retail ventures.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the building is its Fabrication Zone. This cutting-edge centre will offer a suite of 3D printers, robotic arms and laser cutters aimed at creating a space for rapid prototyping.

Ground has yet to be broken on the development. However, the university expects construction to be completed in the spring of 2018, with the facility to be opened to faculty and students in the following fall semester.

This announcement comes as the university nears completion of its new student centre at Yonge and Gould.

Source: Ryerson University

A major outside player has joined the Toronto startup ecosystem. 

On Friday, Airbnb, the San Francisco-based, peer-to-peer marketplace for rental spaces, officially became a resident at MaRS Discovery District after opening a new office at the Toronto-based Regional Innovation Centre. This new home base will house three of the company's Canadian employees. 

Aaron Zifkin, who was brought on as the company's Canadian manager this past September, said at the time: "Our goal in Canada is to create and support a thriving community for hosts and guests, enabling unique and meaningful travel experiences like never before. The Canadian Airbnb community is already one of the largest and most passionate in the world and we believe there are ample opportunities to help it continue to grow as the favourite option for domestic and international travellers."

Since being founded in August of 2008, Airbnb has raised almost $800-million in venture capital. The company is currently valued at over $13-billion. Representatives from Airbnb say the company is "experiencing hyper growth in Canada," with more than 18,000 Canadian listings on its website at any given time. 

According to its most recently publicly released statistics, Airbnb has more than 800,000 listings in 33,000 cities across 192 counties. 

Source: MaRS

Let's say you've just arrived in Toronto, moved here from abroad. You'll immediately be faced with a host of challenges—everything from navigating the city's streets to finding an apartment and a job.

Among those challenges: managing your health in an entirely new environment. This includes everything from learning how the health care system works to understanding how to cook nutritious food when you can't necessarily find some of the ingredients that you're used to, or see different fruits and vegetables at the market than the ones you are familiar with.

Enter Self Care Catalysts, a health care company, and local charity Community Matters. They have teamed up to launch a new project in St. James Town, a Toronto neighbourhood with one of the highest concentration of newcomers in Canada. The project, called "Healthy Living in St. James Town" will enable residents to participate in their own health care management by allowing them to create customized platforms that can tackle anything from diabetes monitoring to dietary goals. Users will be able to access their personalized platforms either via mobile devices, or through desktop computers at Community Matters.

Because the majority of the population at St. James Town are newcomers, says Grace Soyao, CEO of Self Care Catalysts,  “many of them do not have an understanding of the health care system in Toronto."

What local community workers realized is that these residents "needed a tool to help educate them about things like differences in the types of food you can buy and consume here versus their home countries. Many residents also have different beliefs about health and how to manage their health—culture essentially defines the way that they manage their health," and our health care system works differently than what residents may have been used to in their countries of origin.

Right now the service is provided in English, but given that many newcomers are also new to English, the goal is to add in other languages over time.

As for Self Care Catalyst, their business model doesn't rely on user fees: the service is free for all residents. What they do is gather information from their user base, stripping out all identifiable information about individuals, and create data sets that they can then sell to governments or health care companies, to help them improve health services based on the real behaviours of specific populations.

"We collect [various] kinds of data and correlate it with patient groups and profiles so that way we are almost collecting voices by patients…that can be used to develop better health care solutions," explains Soyao. So, for instance, with enough information about dietary habits, a data set could be used to generate a more culturally diverse food guide (or to create a series of culturally specific food guides, based on the kinds of ingredients different cultures tend to rely on).

It's a way of allowing patients to participate in their own care, the new partners hope, and also a way of allowing health care providers to learn from those very patients about how to serve them better.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Grace Soyao, CEO, Self Care Catalysts

Toronto-based start-up Flybits—with the help of several private sector partners, the MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund, and Ryerson Futures—hopes to revolutionize the way that mobile technology integrates into our daily lives and into the texture of our cities.

They’ve created a platform that helps bring a huge variety of data and apps together into a seamless experience, and they’ve just closed a major round of Series A financing that will enable them to double their 16-staff complement within a year.

When people talk about the kind of apps they wish they had, says Flybits CEO and founder Hossein Rahnama, they often describe tools that are context-sensitive and responsive: in an ideal world, for instance, your alarm clock would not only know your schedule but also know if your boss was running late, and know when to wake you up to accommodate both of those facts. Flybits has created a platform that aims, eventually, to do just that: it’s a context-aware platform that integrates information from a wide variety of sources and apps, and customizes the information it provides to an individual user based on his or her needs.

We’ve heard about apps like these before: the fridge that emails you a grocery list based on what’s left inside, for instance. “If you want to develop these applications,” says Rahnama, “you typically need to go to an app developer…who builds a very monolithic, non-scalable application.”

What distinguishes Flybits is that it aims to build a platform that is flexible and user-driver, rather than developer-driven: one where, he goes on, “rather than enabling engineers to build apps we enable people to build apps for their own experiences; you own that experience, you built it for yourself.”

To make this all more concrete, says Rahnama, imagine a Toronto app for Pan-Am visitors. It would start as your airport assistant (understanding your itinerary), and as you took the Union-Pearson Express it would become your transit assistant; then once you arrived at Union it would serve as your navigator—one continuous experience that eliminates the need to switch from app to app, and which could deliver all the information in whatever language you (as a traveller to Toronto) find most useful.

So far Flybits’ focus has been focusing on serving corporate clients, to allow the start-up to monetize and grow. (Among those clients are the City of Ottawa, GO Transit, and the provincial ministry of transportation.) They plan to open a free, public-facing consumer platform sometime in 2015.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Hossein Rahnama, CEO and founder, Flybits

Developers interested in making their buildings more sustainable typically face a choice: solar panels or a green roof? There isn't, presumably, room for both.

Some University of Toronto researchers are challenging that assumption. This summer, with the help of many government and private sector partners, they're launching a study looking at whether the two can be combined—at the possibility of installing one roof that uses both vegetation and solar panels. The bonus: if the researchers' hypothesis is correct, they won't just be making dual use of the same space; the cumulative effect of combining the technologies will provide greater environmental benefits than using them separately.

"Solar photo voltaics operate best when they are not overheated," explains Liat Margolis, director of UofT's Green Roof Innovation Testing (GRIT) Lab. "Ideally [the panels] would be in a relatively cool climate, but sunny; conversely when they are overheated their energy production drops. The hypothesis is that ...if the vegetation actually cools the air, that could improve the performance of the solar panels."

Basically: because green roofs create a cooling effect through the evaporation they facilitate, they will keep the solar panels above cooler, and thereby—so the theory goes—keep those panels working more efficiently.

The GRIT Lab is running the experiment on the roof of 230 College Street; it includes 40 solar panels installed two and four feet above a layer of vegetation. The study is still in the early stages: Margolis says they anticipate about a year of calibration and testing, and hope to begin collecting data next spring. They'll gather results for three growing seasons, to have a data sample that accounts for variations in the weather. (This summer's cool temperatures would likely yield different results than a much hotter summer might, for instance.)

The basic benefit of solar panels—energy generation—can be appealing over the long term, but since even the best solar panels are only about 18 per cent efficient, it can take eight to 10 years to reap the financial rewards of installing them.

Green roofs, meanwhile, provide other environmental benefits, such as stormwater management, and the reduction of flooding and erosion. This too is a tough sell, though: while these are genuine environmental concerns, they are generally managed by municipal governments rather than building owners. However, Margolis says, "I think water performance will become more and more of a factor as the public becomes more aware of the issue."

As we experience more major storm events, in other words, the incentive to use green roofs to mitigate storm effects will grow. The ultimate hope is that the combination of the two technologies will create a better business case for installing them both, and make it easier for developers to pursue environmentally friendlier projects by allowing them to see the financial impact of doing so more quickly.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Liat Margolis, director, Green Roof Innovation Testing Lab
Photo: Courtesy of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.

Xagenic (pronounced ex-a-GEN-ic) is a medical startup dedicated to making diagnoses faster and easier for both patients and clinicians. Founded by Shana Kelley, a University of Toronto biochemistry professor, the premise is simple: allow medical professionals to diagnose of a range of illnesses on-site, wherever patients are, without needing to wait for a lab to process test results.

The product Xagenic currently has under development—described as a “molecular diagnostic platform”—can provide test results in 20 minutes.

It is promising enough that Xagenic recently announced a second closing of its Series B financing: $25.5 million, to be precise.

Among Xagenic’s investors are the Ontario Emerging Technologies Fund and BDC Capital, a subsidiary of the Business Development Bank of Canada. Clinical and analytic studies of the new platform are planned to start later this year, and the company aims to launch its product in 2015 or 2016.

Consulting firm Frost & Sullivan awarded Xagenic its 2014 award for New Product Innovation Leadership. In its announcement of the award, Forst & Sullivan said that "it is unique as a low-cost, simple, rapid sample-to-answer desktop instrument, requiring no manual sample processing or cold storage… For its portfolio of cartridge-based tests, Xagenic focuses on infectious diseases (HSV 1+2, Flu A+B, CT/NG, strep A, group B strep, trichomoniasis, HCV and upper respiratory infections) that will benefit the most from rapid on-site testing. The company also intends to apply the platform to counter a critical public health threat—antimicrobial resistance.”

In short: it’s the medical equivalent of cutting out the middleman, allowing clinicians to know right away if a patient has a certain illness and begin treatment right away. If the product’s development continues successfully, it has the potentially to significantly streamline the diagnostic process, reducing health care costs, saving clinicians time, and minimizing stress for patients waiting to hear about their test results.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Xagenic

Imagine you’re a company that’s involved in making products that require high-tech components—or that you have an idea for such a product, and would like to build a prototype. As technology continues to improve, especially in the realm of miniaturization, keeping pace by purchasing your own manufacturing equipment can be prohibitive—inefficient for larger companies, and impossible for smaller ones and startups.

Enter Celestica, a technology firm that manufacturers components for other tech-reliant companies, such as IBM, for instance. Last month, they opened a microelectronics lab at their Toronto headquarters to help with precisely these manufacturing challenges.

Clients who sign up to partner with Celestica—which will include both small- and medium-sized businesses, as well as startups and original equipment manufacturers—will gain the benefits of a 1,100 square foot lab in which elements like temperature and airborne particles are controlled in order to enable the manufacturing processes involved in miniaturization.

“There are very few place in Canada where companies can go to access this type of technology,” a spokesperson for Celestica told us, and the goal is to enable those companies to commercialize their products more effectively. It will especially help, the spokesperson went on, those who need to do “low-volume, high-reliability manufacturing”—which can range from companies testing out new products, to niche markets (like the aerospace industry) where there just isn’t a need for a large number of items to be produced.

The lab can facilitate the manufacture of fully-designed products, as well as offer engineering expertise to help with design for products that don’t have all their specs nailed down yet. Among the industries that most rely on the optics and photonics technology available at the lab are aerospace, renewable energy, and health care.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Celestica

The University of Toronto and the University Health Network have announced that they are launching a new institute dedicated to one of the most fraught areas of medicine: how we handle death and dying.

The Global Institute for Psychosocial, Palliative and End-of-Life Care (GIPPEC) will focus on interdisciplinary research, bringing together medical experts along with academics in subjects ranging from religion to law, to work collaboratively on what is not just a medical issue, but a growing subject of public interest and policy.

"What happened in the history of medicine is that as medicine became more specialized and technical, many of the aspects that had to do with control of physical symptoms, psychological symptoms, end of life care, fell off the radar," explains Dr. Gary Rodin, who will serve as the new institute's director. At one point those matters, he says, "would have been part of expertise of generalists, but as doctors became more focused on organ systems and diseases…palliative care emerged to fill that void."

That growing field isn't sufficient, however, to tackle the numerous and complex questions faced by those grappling with end-of-life issues.

"Many of the questions are broader questions than can be answered by medicine alone," Rodin continues, "including withdrawal of care, assisted suicide, and resource distribution—not just medical issues. A whole variety of disciplines…are needed to address these issues."

There are investigators in a variety of disciplines working on various aspects of these questions, and one of the institute's main goals is to bring them together so they can share their insights and work collaboratively.

Given than many of the laws, regulations, and procedures which shape end-of-life decisions are made by politicians and courts, rather than decided by physicians, another of the institute's major goals will be to "provide at least scholarly opinion to inform the public debate we think that's been lacking. There's a lot of emotion around [these issues] but not a lot of research."

This is also why Rodin is planning a significant programming element: there will be a series of talks, as well as a large annual conference that includes both professional and public components.

The institute will have its formal inauguration in October, and will be up and running within the next year. It will include a core staff of about half a dozen, and will have numerous Canadian and international researchers contributing part-time.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Dr. Gary Rodin, Director, Global Institute for Psychosocial, Palliative and End-of-Life Care
Photo: The Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and the University Health Network

Explaining breakthroughs in medical technology can be difficult. The tools are precise and specialized, and the difference new innovations can make can be hard to grasp.

But here's one that's relatively easy to wrap your head around: researchers at Ryerson University and Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre are piloting a new imaging technology for use during surgery.

The goal is simple: give surgeons a clear and near-instant ability to see exactly what they are doing and where they are going within a person's body during the course of an operation.

"Everyone knows how to use a GPS when they're driving," says Victor Yang, the researcher leading the project.  "This is a GPS for surgeons."

The system, 7D Surgical Navigation, is now a spin-off company, and has started pilot testing in a number of patients.

Essentially the problem until now is that surgeons have had to choose, Yang explains, between operating largely blind, learning about a patient's precise anatomical condition as they go, or ordering images such as x-rays, but having to wait up to 30 minutes during surgery for those images to be developed.

Practice tends to vary from doctor to doctor, with some preferring to wait for x-rays while patient is on the table, and others working much more quickly, but free hand, and thus with less accuracy. 7D allows surgeons to benefit from the accuracy imaging provides, without sacrificing time with patients open on the table—both a cost savings in terms of reducing operating times, and a health benefit since it's generally preferable to keep surgical times to a minimum.

The trials of the new device began in March. So far, 13 patients have been enrolled, with a variety of medical problems: some have tumours in the middle of their brains, some were in car accidents and had broken their spines. The ultimate goal is to have 60 participants in this pilot phase.

"The technology is broadly applicable," Yang says, "but the engineering team that I have is very focused on spine and brain surgeries [at the moment]—these are the surgeries that require highest precision. Afterwords we will go on to ear nose and throat, and then orthopaedic surgeries."

As with all new medical devices 7D will need to clear several regulatory hurdles, including  licensing from Health Canada and the FDA. Yang says his team is aiming to hit those targets within 12-18 months.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Victor Yang, lead researcher, 7D Surgical

When Meric Gertler was announced as the new president of the University of Toronto a few months ago, it generated a fair bit of buzz: not just because UofT is a major local institution, but because of Gertler's profile in particular.

He came out of the humanities—the first UofT president to do so in decades—and his area of academic expertise is the geography and economy of cities. The buzz was generated in large part out of curiosity about whether Gertler would take a more active role in involving UofT in the broader life of the city.

A few days ago, Gertler began to address some of those issues in a major speech delivered to the Toronto Region Board of Trade.

"My starting point," he said, "is that the relationship between universities and their host regions is fundamentally symbiotic. It is mutually enriching, along multiple dimensions. Simply put, a strong university helps build a strong city, and a strong city helps build a strong university. We need to leverage this relationship to mutual advantage if we are going to advance our shared prosperity."

Gertler then moved on to lay out three central points: universities help keep their home cities dynamic and contribute vitally to economic development and flexibility; universities in general are large institutions and thus by nature "stabilizing forces on urban economies, and on the local neighbourhoods they inhabit"; and universities serve as conduits, connecting their home cities, via relationships with other universities, to cities around the world.

Most crucially, Gertler concluded by focusing on what can be improved. "We have an obligation to do more, and it is in our own best interest to do more," he said, inviting civic leadership across Toronto "to help us find imaginative ways to deepen our relationships and work with one another."

Gertler said he had recently begun talks with the presidents of OCAD, Ryerson, and York, "to explore potential collaborations aimed at addressing the region’s most pressing challenges."

Separately, the Unversity of Toronto is deep into planning with the universities of Western and Waterloo, "to establish a joint entrepreneurship accelerator in the new MaRS tower."

Gertler also hopes to work more closely with the municipal government—though he steered clear of political issues in his remarks—"to find new ways to inform debates, provide analysis, and bring our evidence and expertise to bear on the most important urban issues of the day."

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: "The University and The City," delivered by Dr. Meric Gertler, president, University of Toronto, on May 29, 2014.

Back in the fall, five North American companies were selected to participate in a three-month bootcamp to develop new apps for wearable technologies (like Google Glass).

One was Toronto-based software design firm Normative, and the app they came up with is now available. It's called "A to B" and the idea is simple: record your route during an activity (running, biking, skateboarding), and then race against your own recorded routes.

It's one example of the kind of work the 25-person company has been working on over the past six years—work that, says Normative CEO Matthew Milan, is essentially driven by the same goal: "using software technology to help people do the things they want to do…to give them better capabilities, make it easier for people to do stuff."

One example we've all been hearing more about lately: the Internet of Things. That, explains Milan, "is what happens when you start assigning network addresses—just like you have on your cellphone or computer—to a much wider range of things like, like your car, or your dishwasher, or your alarm clock."

And while that might seem to needlessly complicate things, the goal, at least, is to make them simpler, "to use data you get from the network to optimize experiences people are already having." (For instance, having your dishwasher remind you to get detergent.) Normative's latest foray into this realm is called Peak, an app that uses sensors in specially designed skis to collect data about your performance.

But this kind of integrated software design isn't just about the fun toys and gadgets, fancy new gizmos that few people will ever buy or use.

Another Normative project: developing an intranet for the Hospital for Sick Children.

"Five or ten years ago people would build an intranet, and it would help make it easier to find documents, for example," Milan says. Their goal at Sick Kids was to "help people find people rather than people find documents…make a system that makes it really easy for people to find each other, develop relationships with each other, collaborate with each other." It allows people with expertise who may work only a few doors or floors away, but never have met in person to easily find each other, and work together on research and patient care.

As for the future of technology in Toronto, and Canada more broadly, Milan says that "one of the challenges we have is that there is a real dearth of real literacy in terms of technology… We really need strong leadership that understands how technology is going to make things better at all levels of society."

He compares it to the U.S. New Deal: President Franklin D. Roosevelt's slate of laws and social programs that established the social safety net Americans grow up with today. Milan believes that technology now offers the same kind of promise and potential—the ability to fundamentally change our expectations, establish baselines for what daily life looks like, or as he puts it redefine "what 21st century society should give its citizens."

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Matthew Milan, CEO, Normative

Startups can be inherently rewarding. They can also be extraordinarily financially rewarding. But they can also be a slog, and they’ll fail more often than they’ll succeed. It can make for some pretty dark nights of the soul.

So Startup Canada has decided a little wining and winning might be just the thing for the Canadian startup community.

The Toronto-based organization, founded in 2012, has just announced the inaugural Startup Canada Awards to be given to individuals, organizations, communities, and institutions in recognition of the various sorts of excellence these kinds of projects can evince.

There will be 17 awards in all, ranging from the Entrepreneurial Effect Award through Incubator of the Year and a Lifetime Achievement award.

"Starting a company is a difficult task; entrepreneurs need a variety of elements to be successful including mentorship, encouragement, talented people, funding, and a network of contacts," said Victoria Lennox, Startup Canada’s CEO.

"It is important to recognize and celebrate those working to advance entrepreneurship in Canada; increase awareness of the importance of strengthening Canada’s entrepreneurship ecosystem and culture; and elevate the ambitions of the Canadian entrepreneurial community.”

Semifinalists will be selected regionally and announced at various fetes held in Halifax, Montreal, London, Calgary and Vancouver throughout May. The final awards will be handed out at a Wolf Blass-sponsored gala at the CN Tower on June 12.

Nominations are open until April 12 at the awards website.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Victoria Lennox

Calgary tech startup Slyce has had a busy couple of months.

It started in December, when they acquired hovr.it, a young Toronto company that developed coding to enable people to search for products visually.

In February, it acquired a piece of tech from York University Ph.D. student Ehsan Fazi-Ersi that aggregates similar images. The tech was developed in conjunction with MaRS Innovation and Innovation York. The researchers also beneifted from a phase 1 Ontario Centres of Excellence grant. Slyce then hired Fazi-Ersi to head up its research and development department.

Then, last week, they announced they had completed their second round of financing, amounting to $10.75 million, for a total of $14.5 million in financing since startup, which may end up sounding like peanuts if things go their way.

The idea behind Slyce is a potential monster: Helping people take pictures of things they like (a cute bag they see someone with on the street, for example) or things they need (a broken window that needs replacing), and get matched up instantly with retailers’ offerings so they can buy it on the spot with their phones.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Mark Elfenbein