Corporate Social Responsibility : Innovation + Job News

Plastics! Plastics! Plastics! It turns out they don't have to be environment destroyers. 

On November 28, the University of Toronto, University of British Columbia and Concordia University announced the formation of the Industrial Biocatalysis Network (IBN). Funded through a $5-million grant by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the partnership will see some of Canada's leading bio-chemical engineers try to find enzymes that produce byproducts that enable the creation of environmentally-friendly chemicals and plastics.

The team is being lead by Professor Elizabeth Edwards, a member of UofT's Faculty of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry. The study is excepted to take five years and will involve several partners from Canada's manufacturing industry.

 Professor Edwards and her colleagues decided to embark on this project after completing a study that saw them sequence thousands of different enzymes. “Rather than doing more sequencing, we decided we wanted to focus on what these enzymes actually do,” she says. “We want to find out what their jobs are and how we can put them to use.”

Part of the reason several universities have partnered on this project is to avoid potential overlap and to increase the speed at which the research team is able to zero in on promising leads. “There are thousands of reactions we could potentially look at... and the goal of this network is to help prioritize what we look at. That’s the value of a network: communication and exchange of information and knowledge,” says Professor Edwards.

With even more evidence that the world is going through a period of significant climate change as a result of human activity, Edwards and her team are all too aware of the importance of their research. “There are more people than twice as many people on the planet than when I was born. The pressures on us to adapt are immense, so much so that I don’t like to think where we’ll be if we don’t,” she says. “Everyone feels this pressure and everyone aspires—and deserves—a great standard of living, so we need to come up with solutions that are different from the ones we've used in the past.”

Source: University of Toronto

Photo courtesy of Sara Collaton.

Women have made significant strides in the workplace in recent decades, of course; just how far we still have to go as a culture in closing the gender gap isn't always as clear. A new study out of non-profit Catalyst sheds light on one aspect of that gender gap: what happens to Canada's MBA graduates. The news is concerning.

"Across job settings, women in Canada fare worse than men from the start. Women working in Canada each made $8,167 less than men in their first post-MBA job," the report finds. Moreover, "at 72 per cent, the majority of women started out in an entry level position, compared to just 58 per cent of men."

That gap persists among MBA graduates who are assessed to have high potential. Catalyst research also examined the drivers that lead to post-MBA success—who advances rapidly, and attains the most senior positions. Among the factors that lead to this success are being given critical work early on (generally understood as work with direct profit and loss impacts) or international travel opportunities. On both counts, male MBA graduates are given more opportunities than their female counterparts. For instance, of this so-called "high potential" cohort, 29 per cent of men and 19 per cent of women were given an international assignment.

One consequence of this: "women in Canada were more than twice as likely as men to choose a non-corporate employer following completion of their MBA." The report finds that "corporate Canada is experiencing a talent drain, especially among women, into non-corporate firms at rates higher than in other regions around the world."

Which is why, also, the report concludes with this: "These findings profile a wake-up call for Canadian organizations: the time to act is now."

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: High Potential Employees in the Pipeline: Maximing the Talent Pool in Canadian Organizations

With the emergence of social enterprise, and the increasing visibility of many social, and especially environmental, issues, many more investors are becoming interested in using private capital to not only generate revenue, but also tackle some of our greatest problems. Helping to match investors with the enterprises that might achieve these goals: Social Venture Connection (SVX), an online platform that's just been launched by MaRS with the help of the Province and several private partners.

Billed by the Ontario government as the first such system in North America, SVX is a registered dealer with the Ontario Securities Commission. At launch, 12 ventures (including both non-profit and for-profit enterprises) were registered, ranging from an organic farm supply company to ZooShare, which is piloting a biogas plant at the Toronto Zoo. Their goal is to attract what are dubbed "impact investors," ones who have "a focus on achieving positive social and/or environmental outcomes and modest to market-rate financial returns," according to SVX's website. 

It's the first step towards a larger goal of creating a full-fledged regulated market, one that functions much like any mainstream exchange but with an explicit focus on social impacts.

Because SVX vets the enterprises that apply to be listed, and also provides some support services to the ones that make the cut, the idea—or at least the hope—is that those enterprises that do get selected will have an easier time attracting investors. SVX is also actively working to identity potential investors, ones who are known to have an interest in the social implications of the ventures they support.

To be eligible for consideration, ventures must have been incorporated in Ontario for at least two years, and have revenues between $50,000 and $25 million a year.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Ministry of Economic Development, Trade and Employment

Founded in 2011, MaRS's Data Catalyst gathers data from partners in several sectors—healthcare, entrepreneurship, and energy—and analyses it to help support the development of the province's innovation economy. This past weekend, Data Catalyst organized the city's first ever Green Energy Hackathon, to give local app and product developers a chance to work with some of that data as well.

Data from many of the province's smart metres—from 2.7 million households, to be more precise—is currently being gathered in what's called the Green Button initiative. It's the Green Button open API that was made available to participants at the Hackathon—data that enables users to better understand how Ontarians are actually using their energy. Using that data, participants at the hackathon came up apps that do everything from help individuals know the best time to use certain appliances to warning small businesses about impending weather disruptions.

"There's a big hairy problem about how to engage people in their use of energy," says Joe Greenwood, program director of Data Catalyst. That problem, he goes on, has a lot to do with behavioural economics: even though we could save money by changing our energy consumption habits, it turns out people aren't entirely rational in how they handle such choices—which leads to the thorny question of how exactly to induce them to alter those choices.

On the bright side, Greenwood explains, Ontario has also made one of the biggest investments in smart metres, which creates a big opportunity for smart developers to give people the capacity to manage their energy use more effectively. Because we're starting to learn more about how we currently consume energy, we can start experimenting with tools that will motivate people to consume it better.

One key theme Greenwood noticed in the apps that were started at the Hackathon—some of which will be getting support for further development—is simplification. Though energy companies and large corporations may look at charts and graphs to help them determine their choices, individuals work differently; many of the developers started looking at giving rewards—badges or air miles, or using humour—as tools to help people change.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Joe Greenwood, program director, MaRS Data Catalyst

When the question of how to ensure workers are compensated reasonably for their work arises, one standard that is often invoked is the minimum wage: the notion that governments should protect workers from exploitation by ensuring they are paid a rate than covers their basic needs. (Whether or not current minimum wages accomplish that goal is a separate question.)

More recently though, a new kind of question has emerged, namely one about equity within a company--not just establishing a minimum threshold for every worker, but assessing the difference between how much the lowest and highest earners within a company make. Especially in the wake of movements like Occupy, the idea that senior executives make twenty or thirty or a hundred times more than their junior employees strikes many as unfair, unhealthy for corporate cultures, and damaging to the well-being of the economy overall.

Enter Wagemark, a new international standard for this metric. The Wagemark Foundation just launched specifically to promote this standard, one which it suggests should be an 8:1 ratio:  that is, in any company, the top earner should make no more than eight times as much as the lowest earner.

Peter MacLeod, executive director of the Wagemark Foundation, is also the co-founder of MASS LBP, a consultation firm that focuses on increasing public engagement. Explaining the relationship he sees between these projects, MacLeod told us that "at MASS, we're really interested and concerned in issues like trust and confidence in public institution and well being of members of society... how people can be better involved in policy-making, and work with institutions that they will then hopefully be more inclined to trust." However, he goes on, "this only gets you so far if the economic picture is concerning. Inequality is just unhealthy...it affects everything from crime rates to maternal health to mental health.'

Though the greatest wage disparities are found in the largest corporations, Wagemark is in its first stages aimed at small- and medium-sized businesses. MacLeod says that it's important to note that it isn't just a company's size that helps determine the disparities among the wages its workers earn--geography and culture matter as well.

In countries with the lowest overall wage disparities, such as Japan or Scandinavian nations, there are cultural influences (such as an emphasis on the values of modesty or the common good) that "have influenced contemporary compensation structures."

Wagemark's goal in beginning with smaller companies is "to begin to create that as a cultural norm in North America and [western] Europe"--to start shifting our expectations, and then have those expectations begin to percolate up into larger corporate structures.

We asked MacLeod whether it was mere coincidence that a new standard like Wagemark would emerge here. "If there is fertile ground in this country," he replied, "it's because we have a huge middle class that hasn't recovered…and has huge anxiety that we're being sorted out into different groups and income brackets...and I think that's out of step with Canadian values. I hope that Wagemark speaks to Canadian values."

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Peter MacLeod, Executive Director, Wagemark Foundation