Research and Innovation : Innovation + Job News

The best of the job opportunities we've spotted this week:

Free the Children, the children’s rights organization founded by the Kielburger brothers, is looking for a graphic designer with "a passion for digital and social media" to work out of their Toronto office at 233 Carlton. They’re looking for a two-year commitment, with a six-month probationary period, and have advertised the position on ladieslearningcode.com.

If you have a post-secondary education and some experience in fundraising, preferably for an arts or cultural organization, Harbourfront Centre may have a position for you as a business development officer. The application deadline is April 5.

Foodshare, founded in 1985, tries to tackle hunger in local communities. They’re looking for a fundraiser and event co-ordinator, with responsibilities including direct mail campaigns, donor and funder relations, and grant writing. They’re offering $40,000 and a "generous benefits plan," with an application deadline of April 5.

The CBC is looking for three mobile web developers with three years of web development experience and at least one in mobile development.

Osteoporosis Canada seeks a fundraiser to start, with applications being accepted until April 12. They'd like someone with a university degree and a high level of knowledge of donor management tool Raisers Edge.

The Royal Astronomical Society is looking for a marketing co-ordinator to work in their Etobicoke office. You can send your resume in by April 19.

Writer: Bert Archer

Do you know of an innovative job opportunity in Toronto? Let us know!

Recently the federal government announced that it will be supporting two dozen innovation projects in and around Toronto, via the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario.

"This investment will boost business innovation, skills and product development in the Toronto area," said Minister of State for Science and Technology Gary Goodyear when announcing the investment, "creating new full-time jobs and greater economic diversity within the region."

FedDev's contribution to the projects comes via a variety of the agency's funds, and will total approximately $18 million, roughly $13 million of the total investment is in the form of repayable contributions. The recipient projects have leveraged this government money to generate up to $55 million more from private sector investors. According to FedDev estimates, the projects are expected to lead to the creation of more than 800 local jobs.

A sampling of investment recipients: 

• Education software company Top Hat Monocle, which also closed an $8 million round of funding in the summer, and anticipates creating 30 jobs over the next two years.


• Medical diagnostic start-up Xagenic, which is working on a lab-free platform that will enable rapid testing for infectious diseases.


• The Canadian Coalition for Tomorrow's ICT (Information Communication Technology) Skills, which will use the funds to reach out to youth and encourage interest in science and technology careers. This investment will enable them to reach nearly 30,000 more students.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Office of Gary Goodyear, Minister of State for Science and Technology

Ontario's new premier Kathleen Wynne gave residents a sense of her vision for the province via the Speech from the Throne, delivered last week at Queen's Park by Lieutenant Governor David Onley. As is typical for such speeches, it mostly focused on the broad strokes and big picture, but a few specific policies were included. Among them: an announcement that Ontario will be getting a new, $300 million venture capital fund.

The fund will aggregate money from several sources, starting with $50 million that will be coming from the province. The new Liberal minority government, Wynne wrote in her speech, is eager to "work with financial institutions and government agencies to ensure that small- and medium-sized enterprises have access to the capital they need to expand." The federal government will contribute an as-yet unspecified amount of money via its Venture Capital Action Plan (which has a total of $400 million available for dispersement nationally), and the remaining funds will come from private sector partners.

The new fund will be based on an earlier one, the Ontario Venture Capital Fund (OVCF), which dates back to the 2006 provincial budget. It is a "fund of funds" model--that is, a fund that is itself composed of several different venture capital funds. Full details are still being worked out, but the government anticipates that this venture capital fund will in turn attract more than $4 billion in investment.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Ministry of Research and Innovation

"One in three people in their lifetime will develop a brain disorder," says Jordan Antflick, outreach lead for the Ontario Brain Institute. And right now, we don't do nearly a good enough job of helping many of them.

The Liberal government included a funding announcement for the OBI in the Speech from the Throne that was delivered last week, a sign of how important it is that we make progress on this front.

Created in 2010, the OBI is a non-profit, government funded project whose mission is to bring researchers, government, and the private sector together to help make Ontario a centre for commercialization and a leader in patient care when it comes to treating brain disorders. It began with a three-year funding commitment. After spending some time getting organized and off the ground, OBI pursued work in three areas: neurodevelopment, epilepsy, and cerebral palsy.

This new announcement, says Antflick, covers five years of funding, and will allow OBI to "move out of start-up mode." OBI will continue its work in those initial three research areas, and also be expanding to cover two new ones. Details of the precise funding amount or the brain disorders involved aren't public yet, but Antflick told us those two new areas will have to do with treating the elderly. The first tranche of funding was for $5 million a year.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Jordan Antflick, Outreach Lead, Ontario Brain Institute

In the years since compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) and light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs started appearing on hardware store shelves, we've all gotten used to the idea of switching to more energy efficient lightbulbs in our homes. Now, in several jurisdictions around the world, the old incandescent bulbs are being phased out by law. In Canada this process will culminate during 2014, as bulbs become subject to new energy efficiency regulations.

Hoping to help consumers become even more efficient, three University of Toronto alumni are preparing to launch a new bulb called NanoLight. It's a new form of LED bulb devised by applied science and engineering grads Gimmy Chu, Christian Yan, and Tom Rodinger.

It took the three entrepreneurs "probably about two or three years" to settle on the NanoLight's design, Chu told us over the phone from California. It uses 12 watts of energy to create the same light as a traditional 100 watt light bulb. A NanoLight will, he says, provide 30,000 hours of illumination. (You can learn a bit more about the technical details in this video.)

The three founders are in the last days of a Kickstarter fundraising campaign to help them launch the product--a campaign which has already raised more than 10 times the $20,000 they were aiming for. "The last thing you want to do is give up equity," Chu says when asked about choosing to crowdsource their start-up funding rather than pursue more established investment routes. With investors potentially calling the shots, Chu and his co-founders were worried, the entrepreneurs might "end up doing work you don't believe in."

The first NanoLights are expected to ship in May, and the trio's next goal is to build up momentum and generate orders. After that, Chu says, they hope to expand the product line to include dimmable bulbs, as well as bulbs in a range of colours and to fit different sockets. There is also "a solar product" already in the works, though Chu is saving the details of that for now.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Gimmy Chu, co-founder, NanoLight

The federal government is investing nearly $800,000 in Toronto-based Engineering Services Inc. to help it develop "a next-generation mobile robotics platform." The robotics and automation company develops technologies that can be applied in a variety of sectors, ranging from the medical to the military.

The robotics platform's main task is to develop ways to use automation to perform certain tasks in high risk environments, such as ones where the military or law enforcement are operating. The more robots can be used in such environments to perform key functions such as exploration and information-gathering, the safer those environments, and the people who work in them, may become. The repayable investment comes via the governments Strategic Aerospace and Defence Initiative (SADI), which supports research projects in defence, security, and aerospace.

"Canada is a world leader in robotics, and through targeted and repayable investments such as this one, we are helping cement that reputation," said industry minister Christian Paradis, upon announcing the investment. "Advanced economies have to become leaders in the high-value-added stages of production." The research and development will be done with help from University of Toronto faculty and students.

ESI was founded in 1982 by Dr. Andrew Goldenberg who joined the University of Toronto as a professor of mechanical and industrial engineering that same year. A researcher with a long history of work in robotics, Goldenberg spent the years just prior to that working on the development of the first Shuttle Remote Manipulator System (SRMS), which most of us know more colloquially as the Canadarm--the jointed, robotic, arm-like mechanism that was used for decades to move shuttle payloads during missions in space.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Office of Christian Paradis

There's some good news coming out of the federal government: the University of Toronto has been awarded a total of $7.3 million over the next five years to support eight separate research projects. The money comes via the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), which is the federal government's primary agency for issuing scientific research funds.

The largest grant comes via the Strategic Network Grants (SNG) program, which focuses on supporting research that is likely to have an economic impact on Canada within a decade, and specifically on large-scale collaborative projects that span organizations and disciplines. This $4.4 million grant will go to the Canadian Network for Aquatic Ecosytems, which includes researchers from 11 universities and several government departments, and whose lead researcher is the University of Toronto's Donald Jackson. The network will use the money to investigate how the loss of aquatic biodiversity will affect Canadians—how our services, economy, and industry are changing as a result of environmental stress in aquatic ecosystems. That, said the network in a statement announcing the grant, "will help inform policies on the development of Canada’s natural resources in regions where rapid economic development is underway."

Another $2.9 million will be distributed among seven other projects at the university via a separate grants program. Among the scientists awarded research funds: a chemical engineer studying innovative ways to process pulp and paper mill waste; a materials science researcher exploring efficient light harvesting; and an ecologist examining how to optimize marine protection areas.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada

Last year, after concluding that "Canada is weak at business innovation," the Conference Board of Canada announced that it was establishing a Centre for Business Innovation (CBI). The new centre's goal: "To learn why Canada is not a leader in business innovation…and to formulate public policies that will successfully stimulate business innovation." The CBI is hosting an innovation summit in Toronto later this month, at which they'll unveil the results of their first major study examining how Canada fares when it comes to financing innovation.

That report's key message: Canada has a large and strong public equity market, but unfortunately also "has a serious issue with innovation commercialization." As a nation we aren't particularly strong when it comes to riskier investments, in particular when it comes to financing research and development in a business context: "Canadian-based businesses would need to more than double their annual spending on R&D…to equal the business R&D intensity of the United States," the report finds.

In order to make progress, the report goes on, Canadian innovators "need practice tools to help them explain to investors both their innovative activity (e.g. innovation metrics) and the way it makes money (e.g. the business model and financial projections)." In short, we need to smooth the path to commercialization, and in order to do that we need to both provide new financial tools for innovation and develop a more sophisticated marketing culture around innovation. It's not that we lack the capacity for this--as the report points out, "Canada successfully funds risky ventures in mining and oil and gas development."--But we need a broader culture of business innovation, and Canadian innovators need to improve their capacity to sell innovation to potential investors. The CBI will turn to the practicalities of accomplishing that in future reports.

"Financing Innovation by Established Businesses in Canada" is available online [PDF] (free, but registration required).

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Conference Board of Canada

Toronto is known for its cutting edge academic and medical research facilities, but the path from the lab to the marketplace isn't always short or direct.

In 2008, with the goal of making the most of the findings coming out of those facilities, 16 leading institutions including Ryerson University, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, and OCAD University joined forces to create MaRS Innovation, a collective commercialization agent. (The MaRS Discovery District, the innovation centre for entrepreneurs, is also a member, though they are often confused, MaRS DD and MaRS Innovation are two separate organizations.)

MaRS Innovation was started with the help of a five year, $15 million federal investment, and this month they were glad to announce they've been awarded a new $15 million grant. The new round of funding comes from the federally run Centres of Excellence for Commercialization and Research (CECR) program.

MaRS Innovation was created, says president and CEO Raphael Hofstein, "to address a very interesting challenge for Canada, which is 'how do you turn outstanding research into something that directly helps the economy?'"

The initial five year period of support, he goes on, was to establish a foundation for the organization. "Now in the next three or four years, we will build the tower on top of the foundation." The first five years gave them a good start, he explains, but it's "a bit of a challenge" as far as the timeline for development with still-emerging technologies. By the end of this second five year period, MaRS will have "meaningful operations"--businesses that have emerged from the research innovations coming out of the member institutions. This funding program, he concludes, "is a game-changer."

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Raphael Hofstein, President and CEO, MaRS Innovation

It's the single largest ever private donation to cancer research in Canada: $50 million to Toronto's Princess Margaret Hospital. The gift comes from Canadian philanthropists Emmanuelle Gattuso and Allan Slaight, who will be making their donation over the next ten years.

It's a personal commitment for them: Gattuso was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2002 and treated at Princess Margaret.

Paul Alofs, president and CEO of the Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation, announced the donation earlier this month at a press conference. He was joined by Gattuso and Dr. Bob Bell, president of the University Health Network, who said that, "This donation is going to add significant momentum to Princess Margaret Cancer Centre's global leadership in advancing personalized cancer medicine."

The money will go to creating a "superfund" for recruiting researchers in, and accelerating the development of, personalized cancer medicine. Personalized cancer medicine is based on genetic analysis of individual tumours in order to allow for the development of customized treatment plans that target the specificities of any given patient's disease.

The hospital's work in this area includes precision genomics, advanced tumour biology, immune therapy, and molecular imaging, explained research director Benjamin Neel. "We've probably learned more about the basic biology of cancer in the last year than in all of human history before that," he says. Researchers are now learning how to treat cancer far more precisely. Current therapies like chemotherapy provide only blunt tools by comparison.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Princess Margaret Hospital

It's not the most pressing medical issue, but it's one that affects almost all of us at some point in our lives: post-surgical scarring. It's not just an aesthetic concern -- though in cases like the treatment of burns, the disfiguring effects of scarring can be life-altering -- since scarring can be painful and, depending on its location on the body, also inhibit movement. A local startup called ScarX Therapeutics is working on commercializing a new treatment for post-surgical scarring, and it's just received a $250,000 cash infusion to help things along.

The investment comes courtesy of the Ontario Centres of Excellence, a non-profit research accelerator funded by the provincial government. It's the first award distributed through Ontario's recently expanded market readiness program. It will allow ScarX to begin clinical trials later this year.

The topical treatment, a cream patients would apply themselves, emerged from research done by Hospital for Sick Children scientist Dr. Benjamin Alman. His work (which has also been supported by MaRS Innovation) actually focused on a rare type of tumour originally, until he realized that a pain-relief treatment he'd come across in the course of that research had the effect of diminishing scar formation. He's still hoping that after the scar treatment, which could serve a much wider group of patients, is finished, the molecule in question can be developed into a treatment for that tumour as well.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Ontario Centres of Excellence

The presence and capacity of mobile devices have outstripped the services available on them, according to a new report from OCAD University, but dealing with this problem could provide ample opportunity for Ontario, including job creation. 

The Taking Ontario Mobile report examines, "how to engage mobility in order to better realize the full potential of all of Ontario's residents, bring significant increases in productivity, create and retain jobs in the knowledge industries, allow inclusion and engagement, and build on Ontario's extant leadership in the broadcast of mobile industries."

The goal is to lay out some courses Ontario should be charting in order to become more productive, create more jobs, and and increase engagement with the development of new mobile strategies.

In general terms, the report argues that "public services can be delivered in a more cost-effective and efficient manner" with the help of mobile technology -- important at a time where deficit-fighting is the government's prevailing concern. More specifically, the report considers mobile opportunities in five key sectors (some governmental and some commercial).

1) Education, including applications in primary and secondary classrooms, at the post-secondary level, and in retraining to create a more flexible workforce. 

2) Health, for instance providing more efficient care to seniors with remote monitoring.

3) Government services, where a large range of efficiencies may be found by managing data more effectively and making it available more quickly, and where mobile may be an invaluable tool for offering necessary services to rural and remote populations.

4) Cultural industries, where we already have a strong talent pool, can be made even stronger by using mobile to create larger audiences for the work we produce.

5) Commerce, especially significant given that Ontario is home to most of Canada's banks and financial institutions. "The face of m-commerce is still undeveloped," the report finds, "and the area is ripe for design, creating opportunities for the traditional finance sector and for new players."

"Failing to act now," the report warns, "will disadvantage Ontario in numerous ways."

The full text of the report is available online [PDF].

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: "Taking Ontario Mobile" (OCAD)

The Conference Board of Canada has announced it will host an innovation summit in Toronto in February. The summit is part of the board's plan to support businesses in their efforts to become more innovative. The Innovation for the Corporation summit is a two-day event that will seek to better understand why Canada isn't as strong a leader in innovation as many think we could and should be.

"We've seen the report cards that put us in a declining space...our innovation performance is ranked 21st," explained Bruce Good, executive director of CBC's Centre for Business Innovation, in a video announcing the summit. As several indices all show that same slip in our comparative success in innovation, Good goes on, "the time for change is now."

He believes infrastructure, stable government, sound fiscal management capabilities, and a lot of latent energy and enthusiasm are raw resources ready to be tapped. The summit will focus on four key areas to help the business community make the most of those strengths, and understand specific areas where we're falling behind: funding mechanisms, people and skills, business strategies, and what has to change for us to do better. Speakers range from the presidents of several major corporations -- IBM, Cisco, and GE, for instance --to researchers and the leads at young startups who are finding success in their own innovative smaller businesses.

The Innovation for the Corporation summit takes place on February 19-20 at the Fairmont Royal York. Online registration is now open and early bird fees available until January 18.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Conference Board of Canada

The Ontario government created a non-partisan advisory body called the Jobs and Prosperity Council in early 2012 to help develop strategies for long-term productivity and growth. In December, that 14-member council issued its report [PDF], which included a series of recommendations for supporting and enhancing Ontario's productivity. Of particular interest was recommendation number six: that the government "accelerate the commercialization of new products, ideas and services in Ontario that can compete globally."

To that end, and following a specific action proposed by the council, Ontario recently announed that it will be testing out a Commercialization and Innovation Voucher system. The voucher will, according to a press statement issued by Minister of Economic Development and Innovation Brad Duguid, "provide eligible small and medium-sized enterprises with resources to work with research institutions to address challenges and improve their productivity, performance and competitiveness."

Though details aren't yet available, the pilot project is meant to facilitate collaboration between academics and smaller companies through the creation of a marketplace of sorts, a mechanism by which those smaller companies can "access [the] innovation, productivity and commercialization services" that a growing number of research institutions are developing.

The minister's office was unable to provide us with information about the program's specifics, but existing voucher programs in Nova Scotia and Alberta may provide some insight into what the Ontario government has in mind. In those provinces, vouchers range in value from $15,000 to $50,000 each, and businesses with fewer than 51 employees in Alberta, or 100 in Nova Scotia, are eligible to apply.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Office of Brad Duguid, Minister of Economic Development and Innovation