As more and more of us live in cities, the challenges of maintaining urban environments multiply. The
Centre for Urban Energy at Ryerson University is dedicated to studying some of these issues, ranging from renewable energy sources that are scaled for cities to building techniques which reduce our need for energy in the first place. To help develop the community of people working to address these challenges, the CUE has just launched a new accelerator program: i-CUE.
The Innovation Centre for Urban Energy is a business incubator—essentially an innovation lab within the centre—that will provide support for up to 10 projects at a time. Ryerson students and faculty, and members of the community at large, are all able to apply. The goal is to provide those with a "mature business idea" some tools to help get it off the ground, says executive director Dan McGillvray, which can mean anything from guidance for writing government grant applications to help overcoming technical challenges.
If a proposed project fits within the centre's scope and makes a convincing case, i-CUE will offer three months of free lab support to develop a business plan. If things are moving well, you might get another three months, McGillvray says (albeit with a bit of "pain" in the form of paying to offset some of the lab's costs). On the other hand, "you might be asked to go." It is, he says, "a fail fast model... It's not a lab where you will live forever; it's a lab where you will graduate out... into another location—[because] now you're business."
Four companies are currently being incubated at i-CUE. Among them is one project led by Ryerson students aimed at educating the public about energy conversation, and another developing public charging stations for mobile devices.
Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Souce: Dan McGillivray, Executive Director, Innovation Centre for Urban Energy